Typology 

Contributed by Stephen Wickman, St. Thomas Episcopal, McLean

Every time I want to have my education and intellect humbled – humiliated even – I tune into BBC Radio 4, and Good Friday morning was no exception. Melvyn Bragg explored “typology,” a method of biblical interpretation that aims to meaningfully link people, places, and events in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, with the coming of Christ in the New Testament. BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Typology  Old Testament figures like Moses, Jonah, and King David are regarded as being ‘types’ or symbols of Jesus, a way of thinking that became hugely popular in medieval Europe, Renaissance England and Victorian Britain, as Christians sought to make sense of their Jewish inheritance – sometimes rejecting that inheritance with antisemitic fervor if not violence. 

My wife, who is Jewish, felt the full force of this when she sang with my choir that evening. On the way home after a powerful service, she said she felt like apologizing: “John really had it in for the Jews!”  The Passion narrative, of course, is meant to be a history, and the typological elements sometimes emerge only subtly.  At other times the Gospel writers make it explicit in a parenthetical note.  And the other have the same effect. Isaiah (52:13-53:12), where the servant is “despised and rejected…wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” And Psalm 69, where the poet reports “They gave me gall to eat, and when I was thirsty, they gave me vinegar to drink.”   

The stunning Radio 4 discussion between Bragg and his guests, Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London; Harry Spillane, Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge and Research Fellow at Darwin College;  and Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Associate Professor in Patristics at Cambridge is mostly devoted to the positive sides of typology. 

But then there are the nastier bits of historical and contemporary antisemitism, which the authors of the Book of Common Prayer seem to have realized when they add this line the portion of the service devoted to prayers for “all who have not received the Gospel of Christ.” 

“For those who in the name of Christ have persecuted others.” 

If you are interested in further reading, the BBC provides a daunting list: 

A. C. Charity, Events and their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (first published 1966; Cambridge University Press, 2010) 

Margaret Christian, Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis: The Context for ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Manchester University Press, 2016) 

Dagmar Eichberger and Shelley Perlove (eds.), Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion (Brepols, 2018) 

Tibor Fabiny, The Lion and the Lamb: Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992) 

Tibor Fabiny, ‘Typology: Pros and Cons in Biblical Hermeneutics and Literary Criticism’ (Academia, 2018) 

Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (first published 1982; Mariner Books, 2002) 

Leonhard Goppelt (trans. Donald H. Madvig), Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (William B Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1982) 

Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650-1820 (first published in 1983; Princeton University Press, 2014) 

Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (T & T Clark International, 1999) 

Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee (University of California Press, 1999) 

Montague Rhodes James and Kenneth Harrison, A Guide to the Windows of King’s College Chapel (first published in 1899; Cambridge University Press, 2010) 

J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies (Oxford University Press, 2008) 

This blog post is the expressed opinion of its writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Tysons Interfaith or its members.