Typology in Scripture
Typology is sometimes taken for free allegory, in which any detail may stand for anything, and sometimes for a list of Old Testament "predictions" waiting for a matching verse in the New; the Church's own practice, as Paul, Chrysostom, and Augustine describe it, is a more disciplined reading of real history by its ending.
For Inquirers
A story that is well built plants things early that only make full sense at the end. A hand is held out in the first chapter, a door is left unlocked, a song is hummed once and never explained, and the reader who reaches the last page turns back and finds them all in place, laid there by someone who knew how it would come out. Christians read the Old Testament this way. They hold that the long story of Israel, from the first man in the garden to the prophets in exile, really happened to real people, and that God was also the author of it, so that its people, events, and objects could be recognized, once His Son had come, as pictures of Him. The practice is called typology, from an old word for the pattern a seal presses into wax.[^jant-gloss] The earlier thing is called a type, and the thing it points toward is the one that fulfils it.
Jesus reads this way Himself. A man named Nicodemus came to Him at night to talk about His signs (John 3.1-2), and somewhere in the conversation Jesus reached back to the oddest story in the wilderness, where the people were dying of snakebite and Moses set a bronze serpent on a pole so that anyone bitten who looked at it would live (Numbers 21.6-9): "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life." (John 3.14-15) After the resurrection He did the same thing on the road to Emmaus, with two sad travelers who did not yet know Him, explaining to them, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, what the Scriptures said about Himself (Luke 24.27). That same evening, Luke says, He opened the minds of the apostles to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24.45), and the apostles went on to read the Old Testament as He had taught them.
It can sound like a game the first time through. Jonah spent three days in the belly of a fish and Jesus spent three days in a tomb, and a skeptic may fairly ask whether someone clever could line up any two stories that way. The Church answers that the old stories are first of all true accounts of what happened, and that what Christians find in them is a pattern God put there. Jewish scholars who love these same pages read many of the passages differently and say so plainly, and much of the question is what the texts themselves will bear. For a Christian, what the pattern finally traces is a person. Read the old stories once as stories and then again after the Cross, and the garden, the flood, the lamb, and the bronze serpent begin to look like rehearsals.
Overview
- Typology is the Church's way of reading the Old Testament: certain historical events are real in their own day and are also shaped by God to point forward to Christ, His Mother, the Church, the Sacraments, and the Kingdom of Heaven.[^osb-typ] The earlier event is the type and the later one, in which it is fulfilled, the antitype; OrthodoxWiki extends the same pattern to persons, places, and institutions.[^osb-typ][^ow-typ]
- OrthodoxWiki calls typology related to allegory and distinct from it: typology is tied to actual persons, events, places, and institutions and their later fulfilment, allegory to a hidden meaning inherent in the text.[^ow-typ]
- Cassian sets a historical sense beneath three spiritual senses, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical; OrthodoxWiki's own list gives the typological sense a place of its own beside the allegorical.[^cassian-14][^ow-typ]
- The Church reads this way aloud, in fifteen Old Testament lessons at the vesperal liturgy of Holy Saturday and in a troparion on the eve of Theophany.[^oca-hs][^theoph-eve]
- The Jewish Annotated New Testament presses the question on Matthew's use of Hosea and of "Nazarene," and its essayists find the New Testament's handling of texts at home among rabbinic and Qumran readers. The Fathers answer from the text and from Christ as its key, and Augustine and Basil set limits on their own practice.[^summary-jant]
Summary
Typology is the reading of the Old Testament in which a person, event, place, or institution is received as real in its own time and as shaped by God to point toward Christ. The vocabulary belongs to the New Testament itself: Paul calls Adam a foreshadowing of the one who was to come (Romans 5.14), the flood is "a symbol of baptism" (1 Peter 3.21), and what happened to Israel in the wilderness was written for the admonition of those on whom the ends of the ages have come (1 Corinthians 10.11). The Orthodox Study Bible gives the working definition, that the earlier event is the type, the later event in which it is fulfilled the antitype, and what binds them a promise that ends in fulfilment.[^osb-typ] The Lord Himself gives the reading its authority, in the serpent (John 3.14), in Jonah (Matthew 12.40), and in what He told the disciples after the resurrection about all that was written of Him (Luke 24.44).[^luke24-sum]
Irenaeus sees Adam summed up in Christ, Justin finds the Cross in the outstretched hands of Moses, Cyril of Jerusalem walks the newly baptized back through the Red Sea, Chrysostom says that the types contain the figure and not the power, and Augustine holds that the whole contents of these Scriptures concern Christ, directly or indirectly.[^summary-fathers] Basil and Augustine hold that the history in these narratives is real, Origen grants that it stands in most places while arguing that some narrated circumstances never occurred, and John Cassian gathers the practice into four senses, which he shows at work on the single word Jerusalem.[^summary-senses] Syriac hymns for Epiphany, traditionally ascribed to Ephrem, sing that Christ is figured in all things.[^ephrem-ep4] The Church sings the same reading on Holy Saturday and on the eve of Theophany.[^summary-worship]
The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that the context of Hosea 11.1 does not support Matthew's use of it and that the saying about a Nazarene stands in no known prophet in that form, and one of its essayists finds the New Testament's handling of texts at home among rabbinic and Qumran readers.[^summary-jant] The Fathers answered such questions from the text, as Cyril does with Jeremiah and Deuteronomy, and they set limits on their own practice, as Augustine and Basil do. The risen Lord's claim on the road, that Christ is the key to the whole story, is what the Church holds through it all.
What a Type Is
The English word comes from a Greek word that the Jewish Annotated New Testament's glossary describes as the raised design on a seal, the shape that leaves its impression in wax; used of persons and events, it names an earlier figure by which a later reality is understood.[^jant-gloss] The Orthodox Study Bible's sidebar on typology, set at Numbers 21, gives the Church's own definition. A type is an Old Testament event linked to a later event, the antitype, that is fulfilled in the incarnation of the Son of God and in His life and ministry, and the relationship, in the sidebar's words, "begins with a promise and ends with a fulfillment in Christ." Types do in action what prophecy does in words, since through both of them truths about Christ, His Mother, the Church, the Sacraments, and the Kingdom of Heaven are revealed.[^osb-typ]
OrthodoxWiki separates typology from allegory by what each is tied to. Typology holds together actual persons, events, places, and institutions of the Old Testament with the reality in the New that they foreshadowed, so that Aaron the high priest foreshadows Christ the ultimate high priest and the manna in the wilderness the heavenly bread of the Eucharist. Allegory finds a hidden or symbolic meaning that sits inside the text and does not wait on a later historical fulfilment, as when Paul reads the law against muzzling the ox that treads the grain as a provision for those who minister the Gospel (1 Corinthians 9.9-10), or reads Hagar and Sarah as two covenants (Galatians 4.24).[^ow-typ]
The ancient writers did not hold that boundary as sharply as this summary might suggest. Paul introduces his reading of Hagar and Sarah by saying that it contains an allegory, and Chrysostom, commenting on the verse, notices what the apostle has done with the word: "Contrary to usage, he calls a type an allegory; his meaning is as follows; this history not only declares that which appears on the face of it, but announces somewhat farther, whence it is called an allegory." Homilies on Galatians — Chapter 4 0.167[^chrys-gal] For Chrysostom the word Paul chose is a loose name for something he understands as a type: the history is told as history and says what it says, and it says more. The Jewish Annotated New Testament remarks on the same verse that in an allegory the literal meaning is not the real one, and that Paul's phrasing seems to cancel the literal meaning, where for Philo the allegorical meaning supplements it.[^jant-gal] Chrysostom's treatment of the passage keeps the literal meaning standing. He spends his comment on the previous verse on how Isaac came to be born, "the issue of bodies that were dead, and of a womb that was dead," Homilies on Galatians — Chapter 4 0.158[^chrys-gal] and the figure is built on that birth as a fact.
A type remains what it was. OrthodoxWiki puts the rule in one sentence, that a typological or allegorical meaning "did not negate the historical sense of the text,"[^ow-typ] and Chrysostom's Isaac shows it at work.
A type is also less than what it announces. When the scribes and Pharisees ask for a sign, Jesus gives them Jonah and then adds that "someone greater than Jonah is here," and the Queen of the South and Solomon follow in the same turn (Matthew 12.41-42). In each case the older figure is honored and then surpassed. Chrysostom, expounding the claim in Hebrews that the law has only a shadow of the good things to come, states the relation as a rule: "The types therefore contain the figure only, not the power; just as in images, the image has the figure of the man, not the power." Homilies on Hebrews — Homily 17 5.31[^chrys-heb17]
Christ Reading His Own Scriptures
On the day of the resurrection two of the Lord's followers, walking away from Jerusalem, tell a stranger that they had hoped Jesus would redeem Israel (Luke 24.21), and the stranger answers that they are slow of heart to believe what the prophets said and asks whether the Christ did not have to suffer these things and enter into His glory (Luke 24.25-26). Then, Luke says, "Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24.27) The Gospel does not record which passages He chose. It records the scope, all the Scriptures from Moses on, and the effect, that their hearts burned within them as He opened the Scriptures (Luke 24.32).
That evening He tells the eleven and their company that "all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms concerning me must be fulfilled," (Luke 24.44) and then opens their minds to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24.45). The Orthodox Church in America reads the scene as the interpretive key to the Bible: only Christ, the living Word, in the OCA's account, can give the right understanding of the written word, and He does so within His Church.[^oca-interp]
John records the same conviction in the Lord's quarrel with those who read the Scriptures without Him. He tells them, "if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me" (John 5.46), and Philip tells Nathanael that they have found the one of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote (John 1.45). Behr draws attention to a smaller scene in Acts. The Ethiopian eunuch, reading the suffering servant passage in Isaiah, asks of it, as a modern reader would not, whom it is about, "About himself, or about someone else?" (Acts 8.34), and Philip begins from that Scripture and preaches Jesus to him (Acts 8.35). In Behr's account the meaning of Moses' words is located in the person of whom they speak, and is not a meaning to be recovered by reconstructing the past.[^behr-44]
Irenaeus, who in the second century had to say how the Church read the Scriptures to people who read them quite differently, put the discovery in an image from one of the Lord's parables. The Orthodox Study Bible quotes him to say that anyone who reads the Scriptures with attention will find in them an account of Christ and a foreshadowing of the new calling, and gives the sentence that sums it up: "The treasure hidden in the Scriptures is Christ, since He was pointed out by means of types and prophecies."[^irenaeus-iv26] Behr renders the same passage, which he locates at Against Heresies 4.26.1, with "types and parables," and in his rendering these "could not be understood by human beings prior to the consummation of those things which had been predicted, that is, the advent of the Lord."[^behr-47] The treasure is found, he notes, from the perspective of the Cross, which lifts the veil that Paul says remains over the reading of the old covenant until it passes away in Christ (2 Corinthians 3.14).
Chrysostom, preaching on the Lord's command to search the Scriptures, says that Christ said search, and not read, because what concerned Him lay "like some treasure hidden very deep." Homilies on the Gospel of John — Homily 41 1.5[^chrys-jn41]
The Marcionite attempt to break the New Testament away from its Old Testament roots, Florovsky writes, was resisted and condemned by the Church, and showing how the Old Dispensation prepared and anticipated the final Revelation in Jesus Christ he calls the first task of Christian theology.[^flor-unity] Tertullian, answering Marcion, who denied that the sufferings of the cross had been predicted of the Christ of the Creator, answers with a list of the types.[^tert-marc] The Orthodox Study Bible records Maximus's summary that the Old and New Testaments together form a single mystery.[^osb-max]
The Types the Apostles Name
Adam and the One to Come
The disciples whose minds He opened wrote the New Testament, and their letters and Gospels name the types. Paul's longest comparison sets two men side by side in Romans 5. Sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like Adam's disobedience, "who is a foreshadowing of him who was to come" (Romans 5.14). The Orthodox Study Bible's text renders the same phrase "a type of Him who was to come."[^osb-rom5] The comparison runs through the chapter in pairs, condemnation through one trespass and justification through one act of righteousness (Romans 5.18). To the Corinthians he gives it in a sentence, that as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive (1 Corinthians 15.22).
Chrysostom asks how Adam can be a type of Christ, and answers from the shape of Paul's argument. "Why in that, as the former became to those who were sprung from him, although they had not eaten of the tree, the cause of that death which by his eating was introduced; thus also did Christ become to those sprung from Him, even though they had not wrought righteousness, the Provider of that righteousness which through His Cross He graciously bestowed on us all." Homilies on Romans — Homily 10 0.37[^chrys-rom10] The likeness is one of structure. One person's act reaches people who did not perform it, and the type is useful to Paul because the structure of the one case makes the other thinkable. Paul keeps returning to the word one, Chrysostom adds, so that anyone who finds it strange that one man's act could save the world can be asked how one man's disobedience came to condemn it.
Israel in the Wilderness
The longest passage of New Testament typology in the epistles is the tenth chapter of First Corinthians. Paul reminds the Corinthians that their fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, that they were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, that they ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, and then he adds the sentence on which the method turns: "the rock was Christ." (1 Corinthians 10.1-4) The wilderness generation is real, and God was not pleased with most of them, who were overthrown in the wilderness (1 Corinthians 10.5), but their history has a second subject that Paul reads straight through to the sacraments of the Corinthian church.
Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, shows what the second reading does for the first. "For He who set those things before them, says he, the same also has prepared this our Table: and the same Person both brought them through the sea and you through Baptism; and before them set manna, but before you His Body and Blood." Homilies on First Corinthians — Homily 23 3.23[^chrys-1cor23] The sea and the baptismal water, the manna and the Eucharist, are tied together by a common giver as well as by likeness, and Chrysostom's phrase for what Paul is doing is that he brings the Type near the Truth.
Paul says that these things were examples, "to the intent we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted" (1 Corinthians 10.6), so the type carries a warning as well as a promise. Chrysostom, who reads Paul's word for examples as types, draws out what follows: "For as in the benefits the types went before and the substance followed, such shall be the order also in the punishments." Homilies on First Corinthians — Homily 23 4.20[^chrys-1cor23] If the gift is greater than its figure, so is the judgment. The reading that sees the font in the sea also tells the baptized they can still fall in the desert, so the moral sense is already present in the apostle's own use of the type.
The Serpent, Jonah, and the Lamb
In Numbers the people, who had spoken against God and Moses, are bitten by deadly serpents, and Moses is told to make a serpent and put it on a signal-staff, so that everyone bitten who looks at it will live (Numbers 21.5-9). When Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Son of Man must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent (John 3.14-15), He ties the healing in the wilderness to His own death and to the life it brings. Cyril of Jerusalem draws the argument from the lesser to the greater: "Does then the brazen serpent save when crucified, and shall not the Son of God incarnate save when crucified also?" Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 13 20.2[^cyril-13] The entry on The Bronze Serpent follows the figure through the later readings.
Matthew has Jesus answer the scribes' and Pharisees' demand for a sign with the sign of Jonah the prophet: "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the huge fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." (Matthew 12.40) Luke's version is differently pointed, since "as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites," so the Son of Man will be to this generation (Luke 11.30), and the Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that the sign can be taken as Jonah's preaching to the Gentile Ninevites as well as his rescue from the fish, which it calls analogous to resurrection.[^jant-jonah] Cyril of Jerusalem finds the type in Jonah's own prayer, since the prophet in the whale says that he is in Hades: "for he was a type of Christ, who was to descend into Hades." Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 14 20.1[^cyril-14] The entry on Jonah takes the figure further.
Paul tells the Corinthians that "Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place" (1 Corinthians 5.7), and John says that the soldiers did not break Jesus' legs so that the Scripture might be fulfilled, a bone of him will not be broken (John 19.33-36), which matches the Law's rule for the lamb, a bone of it ye shall not break (Exodus 12.46). The Orthodox Study Bible treats the cry of John the Baptist, Behold, the Lamb of God (John 1.29), as the first recorded public link between Jesus and an Old Testament event, the sacrifice of the lamb at the Passover.[^osb-lamb] Irenaeus, who tells the Exodus story in the Demonstration, says that God saved the children of Israel from the destroying angel, "revealing in a mystery the sufferings of Christ by the sacrifice of a lamb without spot." The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 25.2[^irenaeus-25] The entries on Passover and Pascha take the lamb through the Church's feast.
The Tabernacle and the Priesthood
The letter to the Hebrews builds its argument on a single reading of the tabernacle. The earthly priests, it says, serve "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things," as Moses was told when he was about to make the tabernacle (Hebrews 8.5), and the command the author cites, that Moses make everything according to the pattern shown him on the mountain, stands in the Greek Old Testament's book of Exodus in very similar words (Exodus 25.40).[^heb-ex] The pattern on the mountain was a pattern of something. The law has a shadow of the good things to come and not the very image of the things (Hebrews 10.1), and Paul calls the feasts of the Law a shadow of the things to come, adding that the body is Christ's (Colossians 2.16-17). The entries on the Tabernacle and the Book of Exodus follow the tabernacle itself. The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that Hebrews and Colossians share with Philo the view that perceptible reality is a shadow of an ultimate one, while nothing shows that the author of Hebrews knew Philo's writings.[^jant-platonic]
Chrysostom, on the difference between shadow and image, says: "[I]t is a sort of shadow but when one has added the bright paints and laid in the colors, then it becomes an image." Homilies on Hebrews — Homily 17 5.2[^chrys-heb17] The picture he uses is of a painter at work, and what he says of it is that the shadow is a stage on the way to the image. His reading of First Corinthians, quoted above, supplies the author of both, since the same Person who set manna before the old people prepared the Table of the new.
Melchizedek, who met Abraham and blessed him, is described as having no father, mother, or genealogy and as "made like the Son of God" (Hebrews 7.1-3). The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that Hebrews connects Jesus to Melchizedek typologically, since He descended from Judah and not from Aaron, and that some rabbinic traditions make Melchizedek a descendant of Shem, which may be a polemic against Hebrews' claim that he has no human genealogy.[^jant-melch] The entries on Priesthood and the Book of Leviticus take up how the Levitical priesthood and the Church's differ.
The Flood and the Font
Peter says of Noah's ark that "few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water," and goes on: "This is a symbol of baptism, which now saves you" (1 Peter 3.20-21). Justin, writing to a Jewish interlocutor, reads the eight as a symbol of the eighth day, on which Christ rose, and the ark's timber as the Cross: "For Christ, being the first-born of every creature, became again the chief of another race regenerated by Himself through water, and faith, and wood, containing the mystery of the cross; even as Noah was saved by wood when he rode over the waters with his household." Dialogue with Trypho 138.4[^justin-138] Tertullian, writing on baptism, hears the Red Sea in the same pattern and asks "What figure more manifestly fulfilled in the sacrament of baptism?" On Baptism 9.3[^tert-bapt] The apostle's one sentence has become a line of correspondences, the flood, the Red Sea, and the Jordan, each answered by the font.
Isaac on the Altar
Abraham, being tested, offered up Isaac, the letter to the Hebrews says, concluding that God is able to raise up even from the dead, and so, "Figuratively speaking, he also did receive him back from the dead" (Hebrews 11.17-19). In the Greek Old Testament Abraham tells his son on the way up that God will provide himself a sheep for the whole-burnt-offering (Genesis 22.8), and the Orthodox Study Bible reads the offering of Isaac as a foreshadowing of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son of God.[^osb-isaac] Tertullian, listing the types of the Lord's death against Marcion, begins with Isaac: "First, then, Isaac, when he was given up by his father as an offering, himself carried the wood for his own death." Against Marcion — Book Iii 18.6[^tert-marc] The Church reads Genesis 22 aloud at the vesperal liturgy of Holy Saturday.[^passion-week]
How the Fathers Read
The Fathers followed the apostles' pattern in different settings and for different ends: to set the apostolic preaching out in order, to answer Jews and Marcionites, and to teach the newly baptized what had been done to them.
Irenaeus and the Summing Up of Adam
Irenaeus, in the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, tells the story of Adam in the garden as one whose end can already be seen in its beginning. The garden was so fair, he says, that "the Word of God continually resorted thither, and walked and talked with the man, figuring beforehand the things that should be in the future." The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 12.4[^irenaeus-dem] The walking in Eden is, for him, a first sketch of the visit that was coming, when the Word would dwell with man and talk with him, teaching him righteousness.
Irenaeus's name for what the Incarnation does with the first Adam is recapitulation, the summing up. "For it was necessary that Adam should be summed up in Christ, that mortality might be swallowed up and overwhelmed by immortality; and Eve summed up in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin's intercessor, and by a virgin's obedience undo and put away the disobedience of a virgin." The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 33.3[^irenaeus-dem] The entry on Recapitulation takes the idea further. In the next chapter the tree of the fall is answered by another tree: "And the trespass which came by the tree was undone by the tree of obedience, when, hearkening unto God, the Son of man was nailed to the tree." The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 34.1[^irenaeus-dem]
Irenaeus also wrote against readers who handled the Scriptures differently. In the first book of Against Heresies he describes the Valentinians as people who gather their views from elsewhere and then adapt the Lord's parables and the prophets' sayings to them, and in doing so "they disregard the order and the connection of the Scriptures, and so far as in them lies, dismember and destroy the truth." Against Heresies — Chapter 8 1.3[^irenaeus-ah1] He pictures a skilled artist's mosaic of a king, made of precious jewels, which a vandal takes apart and reassembles into the shape of a dog or a fox, and then points to the very jewels as proof that he has the king's portrait. The image is aimed at a particular opponent, Valentinian proof-texting of parables and sayings, and Irenaeus says nothing in it about types. What it shows is the standard he applies to that opponent, that a reading which breaks the order and connection of the Scriptures has made another picture out of the same stones.
Justin and Tertullian
Justin's Dialogue with Trypho sets the argument over the Old Testament as a conversation with a Jew who has the same book. When Trypho says that they cannot bring themselves to think the Christ would die the death the law calls cursed, Justin answers with a premise that Trypho has already granted: "You know that what the prophets said and did they veiled by parables and types, as you admitted to us." Dialogue with Trypho 90.4[^justin-90] From that premise he reads the battle with Amalek. While Joshua led the fight, Moses prayed with both hands stretched out and Aaron and Hur held them up, and Justin says that "it was not because Moses so prayed that the people were stronger, but because, while one who bore the name of Jesus (Joshua) was in the forefront of the battle, he himself made the sign of the cross." Dialogue with Trypho 90.10[^justin-90] In Exodus Israel prevails when Moses lifts his hands and Amalek when he lets them down (Exodus 17.11-12).[^ow-typ]
Justin reads the law's ritual in the same spirit: "The mystery, then, of the lamb which God enjoined to be sacrificed as the passover, was a type of Christ." Dialogue with Trypho 40.1[^justin-40] The lamb roasted on its spit, he adds, takes the form of a cross, and the two goats of the fast announce the two appearances of Christ.
Why the pattern should be veiled at all is a question both men take up. Justin says in chapter 90 that the prophets veiled the truth so that those eager to find it would do so with much labor, and in chapter 92 that understanding is a gift: "Unless, therefore, a man by God's great grace receives the power to understand what has been said and done by the prophets, the appearance of being able to repeat the words or the deeds will not profit him, if he cannot explain the argument of them." Dialogue with Trypho 92.1[^justin-92] Tertullian, in the third book against Marcion, gives a reason that is also an account of why the Cross, above all, was set forth in types: "in proportion to its incredibility would it be a stumbling-block, if it were set forth in bare prophecy; and in proportion too, to its grandeur, was the need of obscuring it in shadow, that the difficulty of understanding it might lead to prayer for the grace of God." Against Marcion — Book Iii 18.5[^tert-marc]
Cyril of Jerusalem and the Newly Baptized
Cyril of Jerusalem, lecturing to people who had just been baptized, takes them back through what they have done and shows them its figure in Exodus. They had faced west and renounced Satan, and Cyril tells them that the gesture has a precedent: Pharaoh oppressed the Hebrews, Moses was sent to bring them out, the doorposts were marked with the blood of a lamb, the enemy pursued them to the sea (Exodus 14.23), and the sea overwhelmed him (Exodus 14.27-28).[^cyril-19] Then comes the turn that gives the whole method its pivot: "Now turn from the old to the new, from the figure to the reality." Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 19 3.1[^cyril-19] There Moses was sent from God to Egypt, he says, and here Christ from His Father into the world; the old tyrant was drowned in the sea, and the present one vanishes in the water of salvation.
In the third lecture on the mysteries he reads the oil of baptism the same way. Moses made Aaron high priest and anointed him after he had been bathed, Cyril says, and Aaron was called Christ, the Anointed, from the typical chrism; Solomon too, he says, was anointed after he bathed in Gihon, and to them these things happened in a figure, and to the baptized in truth.[^cyril-21] The Greek book of Kings records that Zadok led Solomon to Gion and anointed him there with oil from the tabernacle (1 Kings 1.38-39); the bathing is Cyril's own detail.
In his lecture on the words Crucified and Buried, partway through the account of the Passion, Cyril stops over the garden: "In Paradise was the Fall, and in a Garden was our Salvation. From the Tree came sin, and until the Tree sin lasted." Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 13 19.2Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 13 19.3[^cyril-13] He then imagines a listener who objects that he is inventing subtleties and who demands a testimony from a prophet: "show me from some prophet the Wood of the Cross; unless you give me a testimony from a prophet, I will not be persuaded." Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 13 19.5[^cyril-13] Cyril accepts the demand and replies with Jeremiah, "Come and let us put wood into his bread," (Jeremiah 11.19) which he reads together with the lamb led to the slaughter in the same verse and with John the Baptist's Lamb of God, and then with Moses' words in Deuteronomy about the life that hangs before you (Deuteronomy 28.66).[^cyril-13]
Gregory of Nyssa
Gregory of Nyssa's homily On the Baptism of Christ, preached for the festival, begins its work on the types with a claim about the whole of the old Scripture: "even before the Incarnation of our Lord, the ancient Scripture everywhere prefigured the likeness of our regeneration; not clearly manifesting its form, but fore-showing, in dark sayings, the love of God to man." On the Baptism of Christ 0.85[^nyssa-bapt] He recalls the types one by one: Hagar finding water in the desert, Joshua's twelve stones in the Jordan, which Gregory takes as a sign of the twelve disciples who would minister baptism, and Elijah's thrice-soaked altar on Carmel, which prefigures the faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.[^nyssa-bapt]
After the types Gregory turns to his hearers and says: "show me, after the sacramental grace, the change in your ways that should follow it." On the Baptism of Christ 0.141[^nyssa-bapt] He asks that the new man be orderly and sober and generous to the poor, as Zacchaeus changed his life and the evangelist Matthew changed his. The typological reading and the moral reading belong to one sermon, as they do in First Corinthians 10.
Ephrem
The Syriac Hymns for the Feast of Epiphany, which are traditionally ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian, sing the pattern. In the fourth hymn a stanza stands as a short statement of the whole practice: "In Eden and in the world, are parables of our Lord;— and what tongue can gather, the similitudes of His mysteries?— for He is figured all of Him in all things."[^ephrem-ep4] The stanzas that follow find Him figured in kings, prophets, and priests, in the rod of Moses and the hyssops of Aaron. A few stanzas later the relation of the two Testaments becomes a picture of water: "For Christ is the sea, and He can receive— the fountains and brooks, the rivers and streams, that flow from the midst of the Scriptures."[^ephrem-ep4] The hymn before it runs through the people's rod as a mystery of the Cross, their lamb as a type of the Only Begotten, and their circumcision as a sign of the sealing of the baptized.[^ephrem-ep3]
Augustine
The Manichaean Faustus had said that he had read the prophets with the most eager attention and found no prophecies of Christ in them, and Augustine, answering him, says that to list the passages would exceed the limits of a book, and then makes the claim that shapes the rest of his reply: "The whole contents of these Scriptures are either directly or indirectly about Christ." Contra Faustum — Book 12 7.2[^aug-cf] The qualification, directly or indirectly, matters; he does not say that every sentence names Christ.
Often the reference is allegorical or enigmatical, he says, but other passages are plain, "for, without the help of what is clear, we could not understand what is obscure." Contra Faustum — Book 12 7.4[^aug-cf] The figurative passages brought together, Augustine adds, will be so harmonious in their testimony as to shame the skeptic, and anyone who cannot find the passages should lay the blame on his own ignorance and not on the apostles, Christ, or the Scriptures.[^aug-cf]
Philo, a Jew of great learning, tried to explain some of the Old Testament's details without reference to Christ, and Augustine says he showed only "the inferiority of all ingenious speculations, when made without keeping Christ in view." Contra Faustum — Book 12 39.3[^aug-cf] Philo read Noah's ark as a type of the human body, and Augustine replies that something may be a type of the body without being a type of Christ.
Augustine also limits the practice from within. In the sixteenth book of the City of God, interpreting the sons of Noah, he says that the writer of these books is concerned with the future of the city of God as well as with the past, and then adds a limit: "Yet we are not to suppose that all that is recorded has some signification; but those things which have no signification of their own are interwoven for the sake of the things which are significant." The City of God — Book 16 2.33[^aug-cg16] The ploughshare cleaves the soil but cannot do it without the other parts of the plough, and the harp's strings sound though the instrument needs the parts that no one strikes. Of his own reading of Noah's sons he says that not everyone will accept it with equal confidence: "All will not accept our interpretation with equal confidence," The City of God — Book 16 2.29[^aug-cg16] though all hold it certain that these things were neither done nor recorded without some foreshadowing of future events.
The Senses of Scripture
John Cassian preserves, in his fourteenth Conference, the teaching of Abbot Nesteros on spiritual knowledge, which sets the senses of Scripture out in order. Nesteros divides theoretical knowledge into the historical interpretation and the spiritual sense, and the spiritual sense into tropological, allegorical, and anagogical, and he illustrates all four from a single name, Jerusalem:
"And so these four previously mentioned figures coalesce, if we desire, in one subject, so that one and the same Jerusalem can be taken in four senses: historically as the city of the Jews; allegorically as Church of Christ, anagogically as the heavenly city of God which is the mother of us all, tropologically, as the soul of man."[^cassian-14]
The third sense is the Jerusalem above that Paul says is free and is the mother of us all (Galatians 4.26). Cassian's examples of the allegorical sense are the rock that was Christ in First Corinthians 10, which he calls the comparison of the figure of the body and blood of Christ, and the story of Hagar and the free woman in Galatians 4, in which what actually happened is said to have prefigured a mystery.[^cassian-14] Set beside OrthodoxWiki, which keeps typology distinct from allegory, these examples show that Cassian's word allegorical covers cases that OrthodoxWiki's scheme would call typological.[^ow-typ]
Origen reasons the same way. If the usefulness of the law and the beauty of the history were everywhere evident, he says, no one would suppose anything else lay in the Scriptures, and so "the word of God has arranged that certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and offenses, and impossibilities, should be introduced into the midst of the law and the history." De Principiis — Book IV 15.1[^orig-15] The reader who cannot pass an impossibility on the surface is meant to look beyond it, and he distinguishes the simple, the advanced, and the perfect reader by the body, soul, and spirit of Scripture.[^orig-11]
In the same book Origen says things that cut the other way. Of Paradise he says that God's planting trees and walking in the garden figuratively indicate mysteries, "the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally," and of the devil's leading Jesus up a mountain to see the kingdoms of the world that the attentive reader will be convinced "that in the histories that are literally recorded, circumstances that did not occur are inserted."[^orig-16] Then he turns, lest anyone suppose that he denies all history, to what he holds firm: that Abraham was buried in the double cave at Hebron and that Jerusalem is the metropolis of Judea. "For the passages that are true in their historical meaning are much more numerous than those which are interspersed with a purely spiritual signification." De Principiis — Book IV 19.2[^orig-19] The sentence is a concession, made inside a chapter whose business is to show that some recorded events did not happen as written.
Basil, in the ninth homily of the Hexaemeron, is blunter about the creation: "For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense." Hexaemeron — Homily IX 1.9[^basil-hex9] He has just said that he knows the laws of allegory, from the works of others, and speaks of those who do not admit the common sense of the Scriptures, for whom water is not water, and who change the nature of reptiles and wild beasts to suit their fancy, like interpreters of dreams.[^basil-hex9] The rule that Augustine states for the flood narrative covers both ends: "no one ought to suppose either that these things were written for no purpose, or that we should study only the historical truth, apart from any allegorical meanings; or, on the contrary, that they are only allegories, and that there were no such facts at all." The City of God — Book 15 27.1[^aug-cg15]
Alexandria and Antioch
OrthodoxWiki says that the Catechetical School of Alexandria was the focus for the development of the allegorical method of biblical exegesis.[^ow-cat] F. F. Bruce adds that allegorization was the only means by which Origen and his contemporaries could extract an acceptable meaning from large areas of the text.[^bruce-72] Florovsky says that Origen sometimes read too much of his own into the sacred text, and says in the same passage that he was first of all a biblical scholar who taught the Church to go back to the text and always stressed the unity of the two Testaments.[^flor-ot] Origen's statements about the history, set out above, are mixed, so calling Alexandria the school that abandoned history is too crude and saying it simply protected the history would be too generous.
Antioch stood, in Florovsky's phrase, for history, as Alexandria stood for contemplation. Its chief exponent was Theodore of Mopsuestia, called the Interpreter in the East, and Florovsky thinks the school was often in danger of missing the universal meaning of revelation by an overemphasis on the local and national aspects of the Old Testament.[^flor-ot] Bruce adds that some of Theodore's views on the canon were thought dangerously radical.[^bruce-80]
Chrysostom came from Antioch and drew from both. OrthodoxWiki says that he studied under Diodore of Tarsus, that he generally rejected the contemporary trend for emphasis on allegory, and that in some ways he represents a sort of synthesis between the hermeneutic methods of the more allegorical Alexandrian school and the more literal Antiochian one.[^ow-chrys] Florovsky says that Chrysostom combined the best elements of both schools: allegories may be misleading, but the typical meaning of events themselves is not to be overlooked, since Old Testament institutions and personalities were also types or figures of the things to come.[^flor-ot] Theodoret, according to OrthodoxWiki, aimed to avoid a one-sidedness of literalness as well as of allegory, and held that in the Old Testament everything has typological significance, and OrthodoxWiki credits him with rescuing the exegetical heritage of Antioch for the Church as a whole.[^ow-theodoret]
The Second Council of Constantinople names Origen once in its fourteen canons, in the eleventh, among the heretics whom whoever does not anathematize is himself anathema. The acts as printed append two further lists, fifteen anathemas against Origen and nine of the Emperor Justinian, and the fifteen concern the pre-existence of souls, the creation of bodiless intellects, the status of Christ as an intellect among intellects, the nature of the risen body, and the restoration of all things, and none of them concerns how he read the Scriptures.[^cpl2-orig] The council's twelfth canon anathematizes defenders of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the Sentence of the Synod, which sets out its reasons, contains a charge that touches his reading directly: "For the prophecies concerning Christ he rejected and hastened to destroy, so far as he had the power, the great mystery of the dispensation for our salvation." The Sentence of the Synod 12.2[^cpl2-theodore] Its thirteenth canon also anathematizes whoever defends the writings of Theodoret against the faith, against Cyril's Twelve Chapters, and against the Council of Ephesus, so that the Antiochene whom OrthodoxWiki praises for his exegesis stands under the same council's censure for those writings.[^cpl2-theodore]
In the Church's Worship
The Pomazansky booklet The Old Testament in the New Testament Church says that the Old Testament lessons of the services are chosen on the principle that the Old Testament contains the preparation for the coming of Christ, promises, prophecies, and types or antitypes of Him, and that when the Church takes moral edification from it she chooses passages written, as it were, in the light of the Gospel; in the hymns and readings, it adds, Adam is answered by Christ, Eve by the Mother of God, the forbidden tree by the saving Cross, and the crossing of the Red Sea by Holy Baptism.[^pomaz-ot]
At the evening entrance with the Gospel Book at the vesperal liturgy of Holy Saturday, the OCA says, fifteen readings from the Old Testament are read, all of them relating to God's work of creation and salvation, which has been summed up and fulfilled in the coming of the predicted Messiah; and in place of the Thrice-Holy Hymn the Church sings the baptismal verse of Galatians, As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ, followed by the epistle from Romans 6.[^oca-hs] The list in the Passion Week booklet runs from Genesis 1 and Exodus 12 through Jonah, the crossing of the Red Sea, the sacrifice of Isaac, and Jeremiah's promise of a new covenant, to the three young men in the furnace at Babylon, and the booklet adds that in antiquity the catechumens were baptized on Great Saturday, and that the long readings allowed time for the baptizing.[^passion-week] A person who stands through those readings hears the types and then the sacrament they announced, which is the order Cyril followed with his newly baptized hearers, from the figure to the reality.[^cyril-19]
The synaxarion for Holy Saturday quotes the Vesperal Liturgy on the day's name: "The great Moses mystically foreshadowed this day when he said: God blessed the seventh day. This is the blessed Sabbath…"[^synax-hs] The OCA's Holy Saturday text draws the same line from Christ the Word, through whom all things were made, resting as a dead man in the grave, back to the seventh day of Genesis.[^oca-hs] The troparion of the eve of Theophany reads a prophetic story as a figure of the feast: "Of old, the river Jordan / turned back before Elisha's mantle / at Elijah's ascension. / The waters were parted in two / and the waterway became a dry path. / This is truly a symbol of baptism / by which we pass through this mortal life."[^theoph-eve]
OrthodoxWiki says that Vespers is meant to remind the Church of the Old Testament period, the creation, the fall, the expulsion from Paradise, and the hope of mankind in the promise of a Saviour,[^ow-vespers] and on Great Monday the righteous Joseph, innocently sold by his brothers and later restored to great glory, is set before the faithful as the Old Testament exemplar of the Savior's sufferings.[^passion-week] The entries on Book of Genesis and Book of Exodus set out the readings from those books in more detail.
A Christian who knows the old stories hears more of the services than one who does not. The Pomazansky booklet argues that knowledge of biblical history prepares children and adults to take part intelligently in the services, and it gives Saint Andrew of Crete's canon, with its long sequence of Old Testament sinners and righteous people, as a service that cannot be fully heard without the history.[^pomaz-ot] The type needs to be known as a story before it can be heard as a figure.
Questions Put to Typology
Jewish scholars share these texts and know the older habits of reading them, and the Jewish Annotated New Testament records where they find the New Testament's use of the Scriptures strained and where they find it ordinary for its time.
Matthew's Citations
Matthew introduces many citations with a formula, that it might be fulfilled. The Jewish Annotated New Testament gives among its examples 1.22-23, 2.15, 4.14, 8.17, and 27.9-10, and notes that Matthew relies on Israel's Scriptures, in the Septuagint, more than any other early Christian text.[^jant-mt-intro] Matthew's second chapter has three, from Hosea, from Jeremiah, and a saying about a Nazarene.
Matthew says that the flight into Egypt happened "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, 'Out of Egypt I called my son'" (Matthew 2.15). The Greek Old Testament does not read as Matthew does here. It has "for Israel is a child, and I loved him, and out of Egypt have I called his children," (Hosea 11.1) where Matthew's "my son" follows the Hebrew wording of the verse, and the next verse goes on, "As I called them, so they departed from my presence: they sacrificed to Baalim" (Hosea 11.2). The Jewish Annotated New Testament says plainly that the verse originally referred to the people Israel, and that its literary context does not support Matthew's use; it adds that such decontextualizing is typical of biblical interpretation in the postbiblical and rabbinic periods, and it reads Matthew 2.13-23 as presenting Jesus as a new Moses.[^jant-mt2] Aphrahat, the fourth-century Syriac writer, answering Jews who objected to calling Jesus the Son of God, himself quotes the verse as God's testimony about Israel, who went after Baal.[^aphrahat-17] Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, states the Jewish reading in order to answer it, and he begins with a law of prophecy: "This is a law of prophecy, that in many cases much that is spoken of one set of persons is fulfilled in another." Homilies on Matthew — Homily 8 5.1[^chrys-mt8] He gives the examples of Simeon and Levi, whose division in Jacob was fulfilled in their descendants, and of the blessings of Jacob that came to pass in his offspring and not in himself.
Chrysostom then asks which son the words fit, the people who worshipped a calf and sacrificed to demons, or the Son by nature who honors the Father. Then he says: "So that, except this man had come, the prophecy would not have received its due fulfillment." Homilies on Matthew — Homily 8 5.8[^chrys-mt8] He observes that Matthew's phrase that it might be fulfilled implies the same, that the prophecy would not have been fulfilled unless He had come. Chrysostom does not argue that the words were not first spoken of Israel; the Jewish objection he imagines says they were, and his answer asks which son they fit and concludes that they reach their fulfilment in Christ.
David Stern, in the essay on midrash and parables in the same volume, states the Jewish side of the matter more sharply. Matthew's fulfilment narratives, he writes, read the verse as realized in the episode so that its meaning is "completely exemplified or exhausted" there, and the rabbinic midrash on Lamentations does just the same with Lamentations 2.12 in its story of the starving family. What differs is the work the form does: in Matthew it authorizes Jesus as the prophesied Messiah and divine Son, while the midrash, composed when the Temple's destruction lay in the past, is belated and apologetic.[^jant-mt2] Stern's description and Chrysostom's argument agree that the verse is fulfilled in the event, and they differ over whether being fulfilled in Christ exhausts the verse or completes it. Aphrahat, who uses Hosea 11 against Israel, and Chrysostom, who asks which son is the truer, both keep Israel's sonship and Israel's failure in view as what the verse first says, and Chrysostom's word for what Christ does with it is due fulfillment. Whether that is completion or exhaustion is a question about what Hosea's sentence is for, and each side has to answer it from the text.
Matthew writes that after Herod killed the children of Bethlehem, what was spoken through Jeremiah was fulfilled, "A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children" (Matthew 2.17-18). In the Greek Old Testament the lament sits inside a passage that answers it: after "Rachel would not cease weeping for her children, because they are not," (Jeremiah 38.15) the Lord says to cease from weeping, "there is a reward for thy works; and they shall return from the land of thine enemies," (Jeremiah 38.16) and there shall be an abiding home for her children (Jeremiah 38.17). The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that Jeremiah's chapter is the one that promises a new covenant, and that the killing of the children evokes Pharaoh's decree in Exodus.[^jant-mt2] Chrysostom's comment begins with God's foreknowledge: the slaughter did not come from any want of power or knowledge in God, he says, "but when He both knew it, and foretold it, and that loudly by His prophet" Homilies on Matthew — Homily 9 4.3; then, to the question what Rachel has to do with Bethlehem, he answers that her tomb was near and that Rama lay in Benjamin's tribe.[^chrys-mt9]
Matthew says that Joseph settled in Nazareth so that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, that He will be called a Nazarene (Matthew 2.23). Bruce notes that the saying stands in that form in no known prophetic book, and that it has been suggested that Isaiah 11.1, where the son of David is a branch from the root of Jesse, is behind it, if the Hebrew word for branch is read as the word for Nazarene.[^bruce-nazarene] The Jewish Annotated New Testament points to Judges 13.5 and 7, Isaiah 11.1, and Isaiah 60.21.[^jant-mt2] The Greek Old Testament has the child of Judges 13 as a Nazarite to God (Judges 13.5) and Isaiah's blossom from Jesse's root (Isaiah 11.1). Chrysostom tells the questioner not to be curious or overbusy, since many of the prophetic writings have been lost, and he adds that the apostles in many places call Him a Nazarene.[^chrys-mt9] The entries on Nazarene and Book of Matthew take the saying further.
A Reading from the End
A reader's natural worry about all of this is that a method which reads from the end has no check on it. The Jewish Annotated New Testament's treatment of the method is comparative. Marc Zvi Brettler, in the essay on the New Testament between the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, says that rabbinic readings of the biblical text are often fanciful and take the text out of its original historical setting, a feature of the New Testament as well, and he points to Matthew's use of Isaiah 6.9-10, the Dead Sea pesher texts, and Rabbi Akiva's reading of Numbers 24.17 as fulfilled in Bar Kochba as the same kind of thing. He adds that neither the rabbis nor the New Testament authors interpret their texts straightforwardly, and the casual reader of Exodus 23.19 would not guess the rabbinic separation of milk and meat.[^jant-brettler] On Brettler's account the New Testament shares its way of reading with the Judaism of its own period, so that the question about how any community reads its sourcebook is put to both.
The Church's own writers say that the reading comes from the end. Behr notes that Paul's parallel of Adam and Christ in Romans 5 is drawn in the light of Christ, and that the solution comes first and the understanding of the problem afterward.[^behr-76] Irenaeus, in the passage the Orthodox Study Bible quotes and Behr renders, says that the types and parables could not be understood before the advent of the Lord,[^behr-47] and Chrysostom says that the sayings about Christ were concealed from the beginning, for the advantage of the men of that time, and lay like something buried deep.[^chrys-jn41] Justin says that the prophets veiled the truth in parables and types and that understanding it is a gift of God's grace, and Tertullian that the Cross was obscured in shadow so that the difficulty might lead to prayer for grace.[^justin-90][^justin-92][^tert-marc] Brevard Childs, a Protestant canonical critic, observes of Luke-Acts that the argument from prophecy gave the evangelist a means of spanning history from prophecy to fulfilment, and that at times the original context was blurred into an intentional ambiguity in order to bear witness to a new theological reality.[^childs-51] The Church claims a reading made from the Cross and the empty tomb, and Irenaeus and Chrysostom both place the understanding of the types after the Lord's coming.
The demand "show me the prophecy" was put to Cyril in his thirteenth lecture, as seen above, and to Augustine by Faustus, and each answered by pointing to texts. That answers the question whether the prophecies are there. The further question, whether a reading from the end has any limit, the Fathers handle in other places and other ways. Irenaeus's accusation against the Valentinians, that they disregard the order and connection of the Scriptures, is a polemic against a particular opponent and is not a rule he states for typology. Augustine says that plain passages throw light on obscure ones, that not everything recorded in a narrative has a signification of its own, and that what is typical of the human body is not necessarily typical of Christ.[^aug-cf][^aug-cg16] Basil takes grass as grass, and OrthodoxWiki states the rule for the tradition, that the spiritual sense does not negate the historical.[^basil-hex9][^ow-typ] Florovsky, who defends the tradition, admits that there was always some danger of reading too much Christian doctrine into the Old Testament and of obscuring the historical perspective.[^flor-ot]
Augustine's remark about his own reading of Noah's sons shows how the confidence is distributed: not everyone will accept every part of it equally, though all hold it certain that these things were neither done nor recorded without some foreshadowing of future events.[^aug-cg16] What the Church confesses is a claim about the whole of the Scriptures, which the risen Lord states in Luke 24.44 as the fulfilment of everything in the law, the prophets, and the psalms concerning Him. A claim that Christ is the center of the story does not require that every verse be a free-standing prediction, and a single reading shown to be weak leaves the claim standing. Florovsky puts the center in his own words, calling Christ the climax and the knot of the Bible.[^flor-ot]
Where the Church and the Synagogue Part
Brettler writes in the same essay that much in the New Testament is not anticipated in the Tanakh, the core idea of a divine messiah who redeems by dying for Israel's sins above all. Some of the pieces exist separately in the Hebrew Bible, a messiah, an ideal Davidic king, and a suffering servant in Isaiah 53 whose identity is very unclear, but they are brought together in the New Testament in a way the Tanakh does not do. A Jewish reader, he says, might call the New Testament's reading of Isaiah 53 a distortion, since the Tanakh generally stresses personal responsibility over vicarious punishment, and he adds in fairness that rabbinic Judaism too emphasizes marginal passages out of proportion, so that for both traditions the Tanakh functions as a sourcebook from which later communities choose themes.[^jant-brettler] The Church does not deny the newness, and Hebrews itself says that the law has a shadow of the good things to come and not the very image (Hebrews 10.1); whether the Tanakh supports the Church's account of that newness is the point on which Brettler's Jewish reader doubts.
The casual reader of Jeremiah 31.31-33, Brettler says, would not assume that it refers to an entirely new revelation that replaces the old, as Hebrews suggests.[^jant-brettler] The verse in the Greek Old Testament is where the argument begins: the Lord says that He will make "a new covenant with the house of Israel," "not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers," because they "abode not in my covenant," and that He will write His laws on their hearts (Jeremiah 38.31-33). Hebrews quotes these words and draws its conclusion from one of them, that in speaking of a new covenant God has made the first obsolete (Hebrews 8.13). The word new and the phrase not according to are in the verse itself, and the letter builds on them; whether they carry the weight the letter places on them is exactly what Brettler questions. Because Hebrews argues for Jesus' superiority to everything it compares Him with, the Jewish Annotated New Testament says the letter can be read as supersessionist and that such language helped to foster the view that Judaism was an inferior religion and a temporary guide prior to Christ; it adds that recent scholars have tried to offer alternative readings.[^jant-heb]
Pomazansky quotes Hebrews 8.13 and says that without the sunlight of the Gospel the Old Testament remains old and decaying, and that the kingdom of the chosen people of old has come to an end and the Kingdom of Christ has come; he says too that in accepting the Old Testament the Church has shown herself the heir of the Old Testament Church, not of the national aspect of Judaism but of its religious content.[^pomaz-ot] Florovsky, describing Justin, writes that for Justin the Old Testament is no link between Church and Synagogue, that all Jewish claims must be formally rejected, that the Old Testament belongs to the Church alone, that the Church of Christ is the only true Israel of God, and that the Israel of old was but an undeveloped Church.[^flor-unity] These are claims, and a Jewish reader is not obliged to agree with them. Justin states his case as a dialogue with a Jewish interlocutor and builds it from texts he says Trypho has admitted, and Aphrahat's seventeenth Demonstration answers Jewish objections to calling Jesus the Son of God from the same Scriptures.[^justin-90][^aphrahat-17]
Against the charge of replacement the Church has Paul, who says that whatever things were written before were written for our learning (Romans 15.4), Chrysostom's account of the shadow that becomes an image when the colors are laid in, and the Church's condemnation of Marcion's severing of the two Testaments, which Florovsky records and Tertullian argues against.[^chrys-heb17][^flor-unity][^tert-marc] The Orthodox Study Bible gives Maximus's summary that together they form a single mystery.[^osb-max] The disagreement that remains is a real one. Whoever reads Hosea 11 asking what it said to Israel and whoever reads it asking where Israel's sonship is fulfilled are putting different questions to the same words, and each reading has to be heard before the other is judged.
The entries on Recapitulation, Fulfillment of The Law, and Prophecies Fulfilled in Christ follow the center of the story into doctrine and into prophecy. The risen Lord, before He sent the disciples out, opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24.45), and the Church reads the old stories as one story with a center because she believes she was handed that key in that hour.
Sources
[^jant-gloss]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Glossary, s.v. "typology" and "anti-type"; the examples cited there are 1 Corinthians 10.1-6, Luke 11.31, and Luke 11.29-30 (WEB). [^osb-typ]: The Orthodox Study Bible, sidebar "Typology" at Numbers 21, including the sections "The Old Testament, Looking Forward" and "The New Testament, Looking Back." [^luke24-sum]: John 3.14-15; Matthew 12.39-40; Luke 24.44-45 (WEB). [^ow-typ]: OrthodoxWiki, "Typology." [^cassian-14]: John Cassian, Conferences 14 (the first conference of Abbot Nesteros, on spiritual knowledge), ch. 8. [^oca-hs]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Saturday." [^theoph-eve]: Troparion for the Eve of the Theophany of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the synaxarion note for the day, Orthodox Church in America. [^summary-fathers]: Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 33-34 (Robinson translation); Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 90; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 19 (First Lecture on the Mysteries), 2-3; Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews 17.5; Augustine, Against Faustus 12.7. [^summary-senses]: Origen, On First Principles 4 (Greek text), §§16, 19; Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 9.1; Augustine, City of God 15.27; John Cassian, Conferences 14.8. [^summary-worship]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Saturday"; synaxarion for Great and Holy Saturday and troparion for the Eve of Theophany, Orthodox Church in America. [^summary-jant]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, on Matthew 2.15-Matthew 2.23, 5-6; "Midrash and Parables in the New Testament" (David Stern), 565-66; "The New Testament between the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and Rabbinic Literature" (Marc Zvi Brettler), 504-5. [^chrys-gal]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Galatians 4, on Galatians 4.23-24. [^jant-gal]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Letter of Paul to the Galatians" (Shaye J. D. Cohen), notes on Galatians 4.21-31. [^flor-ot]: Georges Florovsky, "The Fathers of the Church and the Old Testament," in Aspects of Church History, Collected Works vol. 4, sections "The Old Testament as Allegory" and "History or Preaching." [^orig-19]: Origen, On First Principles 4 (Greek text), §19. [^orig-16]: Origen, On First Principles 4 (Greek text), §16. [^chrys-heb17]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews 17.5, on Hebrews 10.1. [^oca-interp]: Orthodox Church in America, "Interpretation." [^behr-44]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2006), 44, on Acts 8.34, John 5.39, and John 5.46. [^irenaeus-iv26]: The Orthodox Study Bible, sidebar "Typology" at Numbers 21, quoting Irenaeus. [^behr-47]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2006), 47-48, and n. 7 (citing Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.26.1), on 2 Corinthians 3.7-2 Corinthians 4.6. [^chrys-jn41]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John 41.1, on John 5.39. [^flor-unity]: Georges Florovsky, "The Fathers of the Church and the Old Testament," in Aspects of Church History, Collected Works vol. 4, sections "The Fathers of the Church and the Old Testament" and "The Unity of the Bible." [^tert-marc]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 3.18. [^osb-max]: The Orthodox Study Bible, sidebar "Typology" at Numbers 21 (quoting Maximus the Confessor). [^osb-rom5]: The Orthodox Study Bible, text and notes on Romans 5.14. [^chrys-rom10]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 10, on Romans 5.14. [^chrys-1cor23]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians 23, on 1 Corinthians 10.1-11. [^cyril-13]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 13 (On the words Crucified and Buried), 19-20; Jeremiah 11.19 and Deuteronomy 28.66 (Brenton). [^jant-jonah]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, notes on Luke 11.29-32 and Matthew 12.38-42; Luke 11.30 and Matthew 12.40 (WEB); Jonah 2.1 (Brenton). [^cyril-14]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 14, 20. [^osb-lamb]: The Orthodox Study Bible, sidebar "Typology" at Numbers 21; John 1.29, John 19.33-John 19.36 (WEB); Exodus 12.46 (Brenton). [^irenaeus-25]: Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 25 (Robinson translation). [^heb-ex]: Hebrews 8.5 (WEB); Exodus 25.40 (Brenton). [^jant-melch]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Letter to the Hebrews" (Pamela Eisenbaum), notes on Hebrews 7.1-17; Genesis 14.18 and Psalms 109.4 (Brenton). [^jant-platonic]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Letter to the Hebrews" (Pamela Eisenbaum), introduction; "The Letter of Paul to the Colossians," note on Colossians 2.17. [^justin-138]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 138. [^tert-bapt]: Tertullian, On Baptism 8-9. [^osb-isaac]: The Orthodox Study Bible, sidebar "Typology" at Numbers 21; Genesis 22.8 (Brenton); Hebrews 11.17-19 (WEB). [^passion-week]: "Passion Week," booklet at FatherAlexander.ORG: the Old Testament readings of Great Saturday, and the services of Great Monday and Great Friday. [^irenaeus-dem]: Irenaeus, Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 12, 33, 34 (Robinson translation). [^irenaeus-ah1]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.8.1. [^justin-90]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 90, 92; Exodus 17.11-12 (Brenton). [^justin-40]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 40. [^justin-92]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 92. [^cyril-19]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 19 (First Lecture on the Mysteries), 2-3; Exodus 14.23, Exodus 14.27-Exodus 14.28 (Brenton). [^cyril-21]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 21 (Third Lecture on the Mysteries, on Chrism), 6; 1 Kings 1.38-1 Kings 1.39 (Brenton). [^nyssa-bapt]: Gregory of Nyssa, On the Baptism of Christ. [^ephrem-ep4]: Hymns for the Feast of Epiphany 4.18-25 (Syriac; traditionally ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian). [^ephrem-ep3]: Hymns for the Feast of Epiphany 3.13 (Syriac; traditionally ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian). [^aug-cf]: Augustine, Against Faustus 12.1, 6-7, 39. [^aug-cg16]: Augustine, City of God 16.2. [^orig-11]: Origen, On First Principles 4 (Greek text), §11. [^orig-15]: Origen, On First Principles 4 (Greek text), §15. [^basil-hex9]: Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 9.1. [^aug-cg15]: Augustine, City of God 15.27. [^ow-cat]: OrthodoxWiki, "Catechetical School of Alexandria." [^bruce-72]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 72. [^bruce-80]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 80. [^ow-chrys]: OrthodoxWiki, "John Chrysostom." [^ow-theodoret]: OrthodoxWiki, "Theodoret of Cyrrhus." [^cpl2-orig]: Second Council of Constantinople, canon 11, and the appendices "The Anathemas Against Origen" and "The Anathemas of the Emperor Justinian Against Origen"; the council's date (553) is given in OrthodoxWiki, "Second Council of Constantinople." [^cpl2-theodore]: Second Council of Constantinople, canons 12 and 13, and Session VII, the Sentence of the Synod. [^pomaz-ot]: Michael Pomazansky, The Old Testament in the New Testament Church, booklet at FatherAlexander.ORG, sections "Using the Old Testament" and "Why It Is Necessary to Know the Old Testament"; Hebrews 8.13 (WEB). [^synax-hs]: Synaxarion for Great and Holy Saturday, Orthodox Church in America, quoting the Vesperal Liturgy of Holy Saturday. [^ow-vespers]: OrthodoxWiki, "Great Vespers." [^jant-mt-intro]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Gospel According to Matthew" (introduction by Aaron M. Gale), 1-2. [^jant-mt2]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, on Matthew 2.13-23, 5-6; "Midrash and Parables in the New Testament" (David Stern), 565-66, discussing Lamentations Rabbah on Lamentations 2.12. [^aphrahat-17]: Aphrahat, Demonstrations 17.4; Hosea 11.1 (Brenton). [^chrys-mt8]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 8.5-6; Hosea 11.1-Hosea 11.2 (Brenton). [^chrys-mt9]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 9.4-6. [^bruce-nazarene]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 50-51. [^jant-brettler]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The New Testament between the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and Rabbinic Literature" (Marc Zvi Brettler), 504-6. [^behr-76]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2006), 76. [^childs-51]: Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 51. [^jant-heb]: Levine and Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, "The Letter to the Hebrews" (Pamela Eisenbaum), "Guide to Reading."