“Those mutilators of the flesh”
Watch out for those dogs, those workers of evil, those mutilators of the flesh! (Philippians 3:2 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A harsh, almost crude insult about cutting the body.
The cultural key
The venom is carried by wordplay lost in translation. The party Paul opposes insisted Gentile believers be circumcised, peritome in Greek, literally 'a cutting around.' Paul deliberately swaps one syllable and calls them the katatome, 'a cutting down' or 'mutilation', the same word used for the pagan gashing of the body forbidden in the Law. In effect: 'they think their knife makes them the circumcision; it only makes them the mutilation.' Then he reclaims the real thing in the next breath: 'it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit.' He compounds the reversal with 'dogs,' the contemptuous label Jews commonly applied to unclean Gentiles, now turned back on these Jewish-Christian agitators. Three insults, each an inversion. A modern reader hears only harshness; the first hearer caught the razor-sharp puns skewering a theology of the knife.
Recovered meaning
Paul puns on the Greek: refusing to call the circumcision party the 'circumcision' (peritome), he brands them the 'mutilation' (katatome), and turns their own slur 'dogs' back on them. True circumcision, he says, is worship in the Spirit, not a cut in the flesh.