Lecture 8: Christian Reading
into Latin as ¿ gura or ¿ gure. Typology means ¿ gurative reading, which
sees one person or event as pre¿ guring another. An Old Testament type
was matched with a New Testament “anti-type” or counter-¿ gure as, for
instance, when Moses pre¿ gures Jesus as prophet, or David pre¿ gures Jesus
as Messiah.Typology is an inevitable feature of Christian reading of the Old Testament.
If Jesus is the Christ, he is the ful¿ llment of the Messianic promises made
to David, and David and all the good kings of Israel are types of Christ. If
Jesus is the Christ, he is the greatest of the prophets, and all the prophets of
Israel are types of Christ. If Jesus is the Christ, then his Body, the Church,
is a renewed Israel. If Jesus’s death has power to save, it is because it was
a sacri¿ ce for sin, and his blood made atonement, ful¿ lling the meaning of
the sacri¿ ces of the Law of Moses. If Jesus’s death has power to save, it is
because he is the true Lamb of Passover.Some typologies are less inevitable but are still a deep part of the New
Testament. Christ’s body becomes the true temple, the holy place of divine
presence (John 2:21). Christ’s À esh is the manna of everlasting life, bread
from heaven (John 6:30-58). When he feeds the multitude, he is the Good
Shepherd of Psalm 23. When Moses gets water from a rock, “that rock was
Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). Other typologies developed after the New Testament.
The passage through the Red Sea is a type or ¿ gure of baptism. Interestingly,
Noah’s ark pre¿ gures the wood of the cross.Typology has a complex relation to the literal sense of scripture; it is not
words so much as persons and events that have a ¿ gurative meaning.
Typology is a form of reading used not only by the New Testament writers,
but also within the Old Testament itself, as when Jacob pre¿ gures the people
of Israel.Scholars often make a distinction between allegory and typology.
Allegorical reading originates among pagan philosophers. Making Apollo an
allegory symbolic of the sun was one way to do away with embarrassing
anthropomorphisms in pagan myths. Allegory was practiced on a vast
scale by Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who used it to interpret
the scriptures in philosophical terms. A mark of pure allegory is that it is