Typology

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore 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. Old Testament figures like Moses, Jonah, and King David were regarded by Christians as being ‘types’ or symbols of Jesus. This way of thinking 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 fervour. It was a way of seeing human history as part of a divine plan, with ancient events prefiguring more modern ones, and it influenced debates about the relationship between metaphor and reality in the bible, in literature, and in art. It also influenced attitudes towards reality, time and history. With 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. Producer: Eliane Glaser Reading 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) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In the 5th century AD, Saint Augustine wrote that "the New Testament is hidden in the Old, the Old is made clear by the New". This idea that the Hebrew Bible is a prediction of the New Testament became known as typology. Old Testament figures like Moses, Jonah and King David were regarded by Christians as being types or symbols of Jesus.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  It provided literature and art with a rich tradition of pairings and parallels, and it influenced attitudes towards reality, time and history. And as a way of thinking, typology became hugely influential for good and evil, from medieval Europe to the Renaissance and into the 20th century. With me to discuss typology are Mary Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London, Harris Belane, Mounby Professor in Bibliography at Cambridge and Research Fellow at Darwin College, and Sophie Lund Rockliffe, Assessor Professor in Patristics at Cambridge. Mary, Mary Rubin, what is typology and how did the term emerge?

• 3:52Speaker 07

  So typology comes from the word type, which is a Greek word that arises from the verb of actually to strike, like striking a coin or marking the shape of a cookie, that is to say, producing a whole lot from one original. And thereby already is quite an interesting meaning of the word, that is to say, a type that is endlessly repeatable, as it were, but also in some sense ideal, because the cookie cutter is the ideal from which others will follow. And we see it used already amongst the Greeks, Greek writers, dramatists like Ischylus, historians like Herodotus, that is, identifying in whatever their subject matter was, certain

• 4:34Speaker 07

  recurrent human types or human behaviours that it was interesting to reproduce or to reimagine.

• 4:40Speaker 06

  What's it to do with recurrent types? The key is the recurrent types.

• 4:43Speaker 07

  Exactly, identifiably recurrent, and in some sense also an ideal type. So in literature, this is exploited mightily, but also in art, in terms of reproductions of types, yes.

• 4:54Speaker 06

  Thank you. When was it first practised?

• 4:58Speaker 07

  The practice of typology, you might even say, is already there in the Hebrew Bible. When you think the Hebrew Bible is about 300,000 words and many different books, written over a long period of time. So later prophets, for example, will refer back to Moses as the archetype of a national leader, for example, or to David as the God's chosen king, and speak about them even in later periods. So even within the Hebrew Bible, there is this sense of a rich typology. And then, of course, when Christianity emerges out of Judaism, there is that added meaning of actually seeking not just types, but types that foretell and therefore speak the truth

• 5:41Speaker 07

  of the new emergent religion of Christianity.

• 5:45Speaker 06

  Can we talk about the connection with the Hellenism for a moment? It was first practised in the Hellenistic Jewish community centred in Alexandria, and foreshadowing a Greek literary device also linked to Platonism. Can you follow that through a little more?

• 6:02Speaker 07

  Of course, yes, it's really interesting. So Platonism is a type of philosophy that believes that in the world there are some forms that are God-made, that are ideal, that are eternal, and that can be perceived by reason. But in fact, in our own lives, we just practise certain versions of them. So a very important first century before the Common Era commentator, Jewish commentator, Philo of Alexandria, applied that sort of philosophy in his own reading of his own, that is, his own, as a Jew, his own Bible, as it were, was reading it in Greek.

• 6:40Speaker 07

  And he tried to identify in the Hebrew Bible, not so much the events and the occurrences, but to try and identify in it, as it were, those very Platonic forms and ideals for moral improvement, and thus to marry the Hellenistic philosophy with his own scriptural heritage as a Jew. So he was, he belongs to a certain type of Jewish intellectual at the time that are Hellenized Jews, Jews who really were as immersed in their Jewish tradition as they were in this Greek, and in his case, Platonic philosophy.

• 7:18Speaker 06

  It's a dynamic combination, isn't it, really?

• 7:20Speaker 07

  Really dynamic. So he will take, for example, Cain and Abel, not to say Cain was bad and rejected by God, Abel was the victim, he was loved by God, but rather to say, in each human, there is a combination of good and bad. Let us reflect upon them in order to try and improve ourselves towards a greater closeness to God. It is that sort of philosophical, moral desire from the scripture that he had in front of him.

• 7:48Speaker 06

  Can we continue with examples, Harry? How does biblical typology relate to earlier repetition of stories and characters such as, say, the flood of Noah and the flood of Gilgamesh?

• 7:59Speaker 08

  Well, I think that's one of the most obvious examples, in that the flood we're all familiar with, with Noah and the ark and animals parading on two by two, maps very closely on to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian story, in which the protagonist there, Udnepishtim, mirrors Noah very nicely. He too is instructed that a flood will be coming and that animals should be gathered. And the story parallels in all sorts of ways. In each case, birds are sent off to test for land, and specifically in each, at least one dove. And yet, there are major differences. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is less than a week, whereas we know that Noah is the forty days and forty nights, and that in itself

• 8:40Speaker 08

  sort of foreshadows the forty years of exile of the Jewish people, or the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spends in the wilderness.

• 8:48Speaker 06

  So it's as specific as that, is it?

• 8:50Speaker 08

  In that case it is, and in that case we can have a sense that actually the epic of Gilgamesh is likely to have fed into those sorts of Noah narratives. In other cases, there are recurrences that are less obviously linked. I mean, one obvious one perhaps might be Cain and Abel and fratricide, and that throughout the Bible, there are lots of examples of brothers turning on each other. Think of Joseph and his brothers turning against him. And those sorts of narratives are evident in the traditions of many cultures. I suppose, think of Romulus and Remus in the Roman tradition. But there, it's much harder to see a link. But with Gilgamesh and Noah, we can see kind of geographic and temporal links.

• 9:27Speaker 06

  Paul to the Romans calls Adam, quote, "a type of the one who was to come," i.e. Christ. Can you develop that?

• 9:35Speaker 08

  Well, Paul is very clearly saying that right from the start of the biblical narrative, Christ is there, and...

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Sorry, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Testament or the New Testament?

• 9:46Speaker 08

  Well, the Hebrew Bible, right at the start of Genesis, by that definition. And I suppose what's so important about that is that in the New Testament, in John, we're told that "in the beginning was the Word," and therefore, we're being told in multiple ways throughout both the Old Testament and the New Testament, that Jesus is, in a sense, there from the beginning.

• 10:05Speaker 06

  In what way are we being told he's there by that phrase "in the beginning was the Word"?

• 10:09Speaker 08

  So the Word represents the Son, so in this case, the Son of God being Jesus.

• 10:13Speaker 06

  Right. In the Book of Hebrews, a description of Mosaic Law is, quote, "but a shadow of good things to come," instead of the true form of these realities. What would you say about that?

• 10:26Speaker 08

  Well, we've spoken about types, but actually typology takes on lots of different names over the centuries, and the idea of shadows and foreshadowing is a really lovely one.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  That's platonic as well, isn't it?

• 10:37Speaker 08

  Yes, yes. And the idea that, you know, in the Old Testament, there are things dimly lit that come to be fulfilled, and Paul also talks of figures, and so we also talk about figuralism.

• 10:47Speaker 06

  Why does that... Where did you get them to? What were they seeking by employing this method, let's call it, of typology?

• 10:53Speaker 08

  Well, I think we have to see that when in the New Testament, when in the Gospels, people, Jesus and others, are talking of the Scriptures, by definition, they're talking of what we would now call the Old Testament, but at the time, it's just Scripture. And so, these are people who have to make sense of the fact that a tradition they have grown up in... Paul, you know, is a Jew, and has to make sense of the changing world and of this new news that has been brought to them.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  How did Christians use typology to respond to the Hebrew Bible of the Old Testament? What do we ought to call it?

• 11:26Speaker 09

  Well, partly to respond to criticisms by non-Christians and non-Jews that the stories that they had adopted in the Old Testament were somehow ridiculous, fantastical, mythologically implausible. So, one way of making sense of the scriptures that they had incorporated into their own was to say, talking snakes in Eden, or an erotic poem about the love of Song Song's lover for his bride, are not necessary to be read on the page literally, but to be read allegorically as indicating some kind of hidden truth.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  Who decides that that, that they should be read like that?

• 12:05Speaker 09

  Well, there's a great deal of debate in the church, first of all, about what should constitute scripture. So, not all Christians agree that the Hebrew Bible should in fact be part of the canon of scripture. Someone like Marcian in the second century argues very strongly that it should be ditched altogether. There are also debates about how to read the particular types that Christians agree are types of something in the Hebrew Bible, but how to make sense of them. So, debates in North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries about how to read Noah's ark as a type of the church. Rigorous donatists who want to argue for a very narrow definition of the church, only containing the pure, emphasise there were only eight people inside the ark. It was caked with pitch on the inside and the outside, no one gets in, no one gets out.

• 12:48Speaker 09

  Whereas someone like Augustine, who wants to argue for a very broad idea of the church, emphasises that the ark contained clean animals and unclean animals, so it can have the sinners and the pure, and interprets the eight humans in a, in a rather different way. So, it's not a straightforward case of every type that's identified in the Hebrew Bible being read out in one way. There's actually a great deal of debate about it.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  What does typology reveal about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism at that time?

• 13:17Speaker 09

  I mean, my colleagues have already sort of alluded to the fact that this is, in fact, a very close relationship from the beginning. So Jesus is a Jew, his first followers are Jews, Christianity is Jewish in its origins. And there is, again, I would say, a great deal of anxiety among certainly Gentile Christians from really, well, you can see this expressed quite strongly in Christian texts written in the second century, arguing that-

• 13:46Speaker 06

  Where are these texts?

• 13:47Speaker 09

  Oh, someone like Melito, writing in Sardis in Asia Minor, who preaches an entire homily on the coincidence of Passover and Easter, where he starts by saying that the type of Passover has acted like an artist's model for Easter, but now that the type has been fulfilled in Christ, the type can be abolished. So he uses the kind of the metaphor of the artist's model, like a sketch or a kind of little wax.

• 14:17Speaker 07

  That's so tricky, isn't it?

• 14:18Speaker 09

  It's very tricky. And there's a long tradition of Christians from the second century, third, fourth century, like John Christus, saying that the Jews don't really deserve to have and own and use and read their own scriptures because their failure to worship Christ. And indeed, some writers' accusations of deicide, that they killed Jesus, mean that they forfeited the right to their own scriptures. I would say that despite a lot of the hostility, there is probably a much closer on-the-ground relationship between Jewish and Christian communities. And it helps to explain why there is so much anxiety by preachers to draw the lines very firmly about whose scripture is whose.

• 14:58Speaker 06

  Mary.

• 14:59Speaker 07

  Proximity is just the right word, because literally, when the all-important Christian biblical commentator originated in the third century-

• 15:09Speaker 07

  He's working from Caesarea, which is on the coast of then Roman Palestine, in a city that has Jews, that has pagans, that has obviously some Christians. And he is absolutely aware, not just of the Hebrew Bible, of course, but of the comments that are being made on the commentaries written by the rabbis themselves. He's actually in interlocution with them in order better to sharpen the difference, the uniqueness and the deep truth of Christianity. So there is this real closeness.

• 15:40Speaker 09

  I would say that there's a lot of evidence that Christians are making heavy use of not just holistic Jewish exegesis like Philo, but also rabbinic exegesis. The problem is because we have so little evidence from the Jewish point of view beyond the rabbis, and the rabbis don't tend to say very much explicit about Christianity, but show some awareness of typological exegesis. And we have a very one-sided picture of Jewish-Christian relations in this period.

• 16:04Speaker 06

  Can I just follow up with what you were saying, Mary? How is typology applied to festivals and events and customs?

• 16:11Speaker 07

  Oh, this is so interesting. So if we were to talk about liturgy, the liturgy of the church as it emerges, the liturgy is always a combination of readings from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible, and reading from the Gospels in really interesting correspondences. Now, the festival, a festival is of course the Passover already mentioned. The Passover, which is the Jewish festival, Jesus was a Jew, so he was celebrating Passover. And as he celebrated it, he also turned it into something new in a token and a ritual for remembrance, as he took the bread, the Passover bread, and he presented it to the apostles to be the vehicle of remembrance of him.

• 16:56Speaker 07

  And the church then creates another layer, which is of course the ritual of the Eucharist itself, which means that here and now, in medieval Europe, in Renaissance Europe, wherever, you can actually be one with Christ's body. So you have the Hebrew past and Passover, the emergent Christian Christ's lifetime moment, which is the institution of the Eucharist. And then you have every time a Christian celebrates it, yet another time.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  Harry, could you come in on this?

• 17:25Speaker 08

  Yes, and I mean, I think the relationship between the Old and New Testament is cemented in liturgy. I mean, when Protestants are coming up with new types of liturgy, one of the first things they tend to do, in the case of the Church of England anyway, is to come up with an article that says you must not put the Old Testament to one side, that the two must be seen together. And I think a really nice ritual example of this is the ashing of foreheads on Ash Wednesday, in which many Christians will have a cross made of ash, burnt palm leaves, put on to their forehead in the shape of a cross, and they'll be told, "You are dust, and to dust you shall return." And throughout the Old Testament, there are many, many examples of people putting ashes, dust, mud even, upon their face as a sign of repentance. But now, that is happening in the sign of a cross.

• 18:08Speaker 08

  It's a very visual performative example of how Christians are latching on to and adapting and sort of reperforming many of these rituals in a Christian way.

• 18:17Speaker 06

  Can you give us some examples here, Harry, from how it applies to particular figures, Jonah, Joseph, Isaac, for instance?

• 18:24Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, Jonah's a great example of perhaps, I suppose, the most famous story of spending three days in the belly of a fish or whale. And this is seen in all sorts of ways as prefiguring as a type for Christ in the tomb, spending three days there before resurrection.

• 18:41Speaker 06

  What does it matter that they correspond? Couldn't people say, "Well, that's the way it is"? But you, what is the significance you're drawing for that?

• 18:48Speaker 08

  The significance is that Jesus is there, and that people are being told throughout the Old Testament that these things are pointing to you towards something which is to come. So they are read variously as prophecies or as signs.

• 19:00Speaker 07

  All these scriptures are God's word and God's plan, and God is above it all and within it all. And the fact that there are all these fantastic correspondences that thousands of brilliant men studied over centuries to recover is just a sign of God's presence within them, and thus their utter truth.

• 19:20Speaker 08

  And the correspondences of numbers is something that is so evident, but also, of course, from a critical point of view, very easy to say, "Oh, well, is this just coincidence"? So we have, you know, 12 apostles, but we also have 12 sons of Abraham, 12 tribes, 12 gates of the new Israel in the vision of Revelation. Well, is this coincidence, or is this pointing us to something?

• 19:40Speaker 06

  What do you think?

• 19:41Speaker 08

  Well, I think we only have to look to figures in scripture themselves to see that they are talking about them in that way and making purposeful remarks that circle back on to those things.

• 19:50Speaker 06

  What is the significance?

• 19:52Speaker 08

  Well, I suppose the significance, for instance, in the twelve gates of the New Jerusalem is that there are beneath them the twelve tribes of Israel named, so this is the vision that that redemption has now come.

• 20:03Speaker 06

  Sophie, how does typology influence visual imagery and art?

• 20:07Speaker 09

  It's absolutely essential to the development of early Christian art. So the earliest art that survives from the catacombs before the Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity, which sort of marks the explosion, I suppose, of popularity of Christianity as a religion, we actually have quite a lot of imagery, mostly funery imagery, both from frescoes on the walls of catacombs, but also carvings on sarcophagi, graffiti, where you will frequently find juxtaposed images of really key scenes of salvation, sacrifice, piety, from Jonah being vomited out the whale's mouth, to Noah in his ark, to Daniel in the lion's den, Job sitting on his dung hill, and then obviously

• 20:50Speaker 09

  Christological scenes of mostly healing, miracles of healing, interestingly no crucifixions. And one of the things that is absolutely fascinating about this is that it provides, particularly the pre-Constantinian art, provides us with a key to thinking-

• 21:03Speaker 06

  Can you just remind me, what-

• 21:05Speaker 09

  So Constantine's the first Roman emperor to convert, we think, to Christianity in the early 4th century, in about 312, and his toleration of Christianity is one of the things that allows for it to grow and spread throughout the Roman Empire. But art is a really good example that shows us something about the kinds of sense-making that Christian preachers and teachers must have been making of Scripture through the juxtaposition of these scenes of sacrifice and salvation. Another interesting sort of problem, I suppose, for modern art historians is that quite a lot of the iconography of these earliest images is actually drawn from a classical

• 21:46Speaker 09

  repertoire, and so you have a really interesting infusion of images that actually have very odd associations in a Christian context. So a good example of that would be the depiction of Jonah at rest under the gourd tree- After he's been vomited up by the whale. And this is often presented with him naked, sort of languorously asleep in the pose of Endymion, who was a shepherd who was much lusted after by Selene, goddess, moon goddess. And Selene condemned Endymion to be asleep forever and to be visited in his sleep by her for an erotic encounter.

• 22:28Speaker 09

  So you get the depiction of Jonah in the guise of a classical figure, the associations of which were perhaps rather remote from this important figure, a prophet and someone whose piety and faith were the key messages of the book of Jonah.

• 22:45Speaker 07

  Well, of course, typology is at the very heart of medieval art and we see it in all our museums. So, so many different ways of presenting it. There develops in the early 13th century, a particularly interesting way of connecting the old and the new. It's called the Bible Moralisée, the moralised Bible, as it were, where on a page, in these luxury books, you would get depicted in a medallion, the Old Testament scene, and its explanation for Christians, as it were, its typological interpretation, but often also a lesson to the Christians in the here and the now. And what's important about the typology that develops in the Middle Ages

• 23:28Speaker 07

  is that it also develops a polemical edge. That is to say, it's not just saying, oh, King David prefigures Jesus, great, for all the reasons we've already discussed. But it's also to say, for example, there was Sarah and Hagar. Hagar is the slave wife of Abraham. She's like the Jews who are lowly and not beloved by Abraham. And Sarah is the church who is beloved of God. So a lot of this work of typology is not simply saying, there were prophecies, they are fulfilled. There were types and we decode them and see them happening in the Gospels.

• 24:10Speaker 07

  It is also a sort of polemical edge to say that Judaism is over. Jews are not beloved. Jews are rejected. And one example that I think many listeners will know, either from visiting or from seeing on their screens, is of course King's College Chapel, which was started in the 15th century, finished off by Henry VIII. Henry VIII, Cambridge, King's College, Cambridge, yes, indeed. Henry VIII in the 1530s brought over the best glaziers in Europe from the Low Countries, and they created these two strips, one above the other. The lower one, the New Testament. The upper one, the corresponding scenes.

• 24:54Speaker 07

  Twenty-five pairs of that type. How much people could see and identify is difficult to say, but that was a statement, a Protestant statement of that enduring correspondence.

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• 27:59Speaker 06

  Do you want to take this up, Harry?

• 28:01Speaker 08

  I guess for Protestants, imagery, for many Protestants at least, is problematic. And typology allows a way of avoiding some of the problems of idolatry. And so, you know, these people find in typology a way of sort of pointing towards all the things they want to depict but feel uncomfortable with. And so, by the 16th century, rather than huge displays of multiple imageries in comparison, we just have the Old Testament figure. And that is almost enough for people to see what they want to see and to understand the broader message. And many of these end up being absorbed into printed images within the period. So the Lutheran tradition has this very rich law and gospel set of images. So you divide the page in two and you contrast an Old Testament and a New Testament scene, again,

• 28:46Speaker 08

  as you say, to say that actually Judaism and that understanding has passed.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  What's the thinking behind this? Why is this being done?

• 28:55Speaker 08

  This is being done in the Reformation period throughout the early modern period in order to teach people a new way of thinking about the Bible, which is that it's something that they should interpret. So Miri said that you have these wonderful stained glass windows, but how many people can actually see and read them? And now suddenly these things are put before you and they're being explained to you on the printed page.

• 29:16Speaker 06

  Miri, how does typology rise to the new occasion of the Reformation?

• 29:21Speaker 07

  Think of the Puritans who went to North America and who settled there. For them, building a new society, what will be their model but the Bible? But the Old Testament with all that it tells about how a society should be organised. Just think in America of all the communities called Salem or Paradise or Goshen or Bethel. They literally, they also named themselves in Old Testament names. So while the Gospels and the Acts tell of certain types of, obviously, the life of Christ and his followers, the Hebrew Bible tells you in various genres how societies lived. Kingdoms, families, tribes, communities, there is everything there.

• 30:05Speaker 07

  There are all the narratives you need to imagine a new society. So obviously, it's in the light of Christ and yet practically, it's just so, so useful to have that Old Testament there, that Hebrew Bible as a model for the New Jerusalem, the city on the hill that they want to build.

• 30:26Speaker 08

  And Miri has said that they're modelling based on the Bible. And the copies of the Bible they tend to have on the front cover, the image is very often Moses crossing the Red Sea. They see themselves as a people going into exile, as new Israelites destined to build something new again.

• 30:42Speaker 06

  How far are they using the King James Version of the Bible in this context?

• 30:46Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 30:47Speaker 08

  Yes, and the title page to the King James Bible in its first edition is a wealth of typology. Moses and Aaron representing the new priesthood.

• 30:56Speaker 08

  The twelve tribes of Israel, paralysed with the disciples, and a very lovely image of the sacrificial lamb contrasted to the pelican feeding its young from its own blood, a very old way, a very Catholic way of showing the Eucharist.

• 31:10Speaker 06

  Sophie, can I come back to you again? How would you say typology was used in the Christian liturgy?

• 31:15Speaker 09

  We've already talked a little bit about the Eucharist, which is obviously very important. In the early Church, I'd say one of the places where typology is most insistently hammered home is actually at baptism, and that's partly because in the New Testament, Peter, the baptism is related to Noah's ark. It's also something that's related to, obviously, the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea. It's something that informs both word and ritual action. So we see it in the words of the prayers at baptism, we see it in the readings that take place as part of the liturgy, mirroring just then, so also now. But you also see it working in interesting ways when thinking about explanations that are offered for particular bits of the liturgical action. So there's an amazing passage in Ambrose of Milan, who's a bishop in the fourth century,

• 32:00Speaker 09

  where he talks about the fact that because in Eden, when Adam was bitten by the serpent, venom spilled on his feet. So today, as part of baptism, we wash the feet of those who are going to be baptized as a way of cleansing the venom of the serpent, who is Satan, off them. So there are ways in which typology is not just used to explain a, as in the Hebrew Bible, as Mary explained, also fulfilled in Christ, but also now, the liturgy is being repeated on at least an annual basis. So the kind of hammer blows or the cuttings of the cookie cutter are kind of infinitely replicable.

• 32:37Speaker 07

  But also, it's the issue of the Jewish and Christian relations what's really important, that baptism is, replaces, as it were, circumcision as a ritual of entering into life.

• 32:48Speaker 07

  And it's a sort of spiritual circumcision.

• 32:50Speaker 06

  Why did they want to replace that?

• 32:52Speaker 07

  Because circumcision is so identified with the old law, with the Jews and their ways. And this is one of the ways in which that separation occurs over the first centuries.

• 33:03Speaker 06

  Do you want to apologize to Harry?

• 33:05Speaker 08

  I suppose that in many liturgies you see the the sort of pairing up of the Ten Commandments with the Lord's Prayer, and that that happens across liturgies in many Christian denominations. And again, it's the way in which there are profound links between the two, but also differences. And liturgy is enhancing and showing those to people who partake in it.

• 33:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's actually really important, I think, that the idea that liturgy makes visible what can't be seen. So it's not just a preaching event, it's something which makes something really important happen in terms of cleansing of sin and establishing a new covenant between the believer and God. But these are things that are very difficult to see. So the ritual actions as underpinned by prayer and and preaching, which explains the significance of what has just happened, is a kind of allegorical unveiling. And actually, it's funny, because before we went on air, Mary and I were talking about making sense of things allegorically as being a process of getting at veiled truth. And actually, early Christian exegets are very interested in undressing as being a way of talking about

• 34:06Speaker 09

  reading scripture allegorically. So getting at hidden meaning is a form of stripping away the outer clothes. And of course, that's what people do before baptism in the early church anyway, certainly strip off.

• 34:17Speaker 07

  And the Jews, of course, are understood as just not seeing what's in front of them. They read stuff so literally is the claim, so lacking in spirit, not touched by grace, that they cannot see what's in front of them. They can see only the word, and therefore they circumcise. They cannot see the elevated meaning, which is the Christian meaning that is now upon them. And some of them see, and they they become followers of Christ. And a lot don't. And those are the ones that are, as it were, the remnant.

• 34:45Speaker 06

  Can I come to you again now, Harry? Let's stick with the 17th century with Milton and the Civil War and Protestants who went to America. You've touched on that. It became the conversation, didn't it?

• 34:56Speaker 08

  Typology in the seventeenth century becomes at both a scholarly and a popular level of enormous interest and significance. The seventeenth century is a period of flux and chaos. I mean, historians will say that about many periods, but in England it really is. You know, killings of kings, religious persecution, rise and fall of republics, great fires and plagues and so on. And people believe, as Christians have in generations before, that this is heralding the end of times. And therefore, this literature is aimed at trying to work out what types are listed by the Bible and what types have been interpreted in generations thereafter. And for Protestants, that's an important distinction. There are types that the Bible says, this is a type, and then there are things that have come into tradition over time.

• 35:39Speaker 08

  And Protestants are keen to tell people that difference. And I suppose one way in which it becomes very obvious is that these kinds of texts are telling people how to integrate typology into their prayer and their own reflection as they go about their spiritual lives. The seventeenth century is an enormous period of Hebrew scholarship. Milton learns Hebrew, is translating Psalms himself, and his Paradise Lost is full of typology, typology which tries to make sense of this impending doom, this world around which seems to be ending.

• 36:13Speaker 06

  Is there any sense in which the ideas are being taken forward by the Protestants, or are they going back to irrigate and amplify the past?

• 36:22Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, pilgrim's progress is a sort of creative way of thinking of a symbol that's already there, of the sojourner and the traveller, and taking it into an extremely intense spiritual exploration, very much of its time, I suppose.

• 36:37Speaker 08

  And I think the seventeenth century is a reminder that typology is about the relationship between the Old and the New Testament, but it's also about the relationship of both of those things to your own lived experience and making sense of your own life. Why have we killed a king? Why are we being punished? What is going on around us? Might we turn to these texts and find an answer that points us towards our own situation and what is to come?

• 36:59Speaker 06

  So looking for an answer, is Harvey still one of the predominating factors?

• 37:03Speaker 09

  I'm wondering also whether or not there's a link right back to where Mary started us off thinking about Philo and thinking about the kind of personal, moral sort of ethical...

• 37:11Speaker 06

  In Alexander, you mean?

• 37:12Speaker 09

  Yeah, the idea that scripture, I mean, if you think about the way that Thopos is used in the New Testament, it's actually more often used to talk about a kind of moral example, something that was done in the past in order to show us how to live, rather than necessarily always as a pattern for something that was going to be fulfilled in Christ.

• 37:29Speaker 07

  And remember that some of these types that we've identified, like King David, is being used also in totally secular, but sort of more secular settings, like talking about what is the ideal king, what is the ideal ruler, what is the ideal father of a family, looking to the Bible for all of those, for models for all of those.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  The idea of the overriding plan, is that still very uppermost in people's thinking?

• 37:57Speaker 09

  I think typality as providing a kind of mode of thinking about the sweep of not just salvation history, but sort of history of creation, is really one of the things you see from the earliest Christian historians. I mean, when you see B. S. Caesarino writes, you know, the first version of an ecclesiastical history, and his sort of chronological coverage is really from after Christ down to his own day in the early 4th century. But the beginning of the first book, he spends a lot of time doing a whistle-stop tour of the Hebrew Bible, and is absolutely explicit repeatedly that we find in this, in the prophets and kings of the Hebrew Bible, Christ. So what is supposedly a sort of relatively recent bit of, you know,

• 38:39Speaker 09

  300 years of Roman and Christian history, is actually framed by this much bigger story. I mean, a typological kind of history, which is underpinned by the idea that history itself is overseen by and managed and underpinned by God's providence, but also that texts about that history can also indicate other kinds of truths. So there's a kind of negotiation between the event itself and the text that describes it. And it's something that I think is crucial to Christian writing of history, and then that bleeds over into all sorts of other literary genres as well.

• 39:12Speaker 06

  Harvey, does the Oxford tradition figure in this at all?

• 39:16Speaker 08

  Absolutely.

• 39:17Speaker 06

  Hard non-Humean?

• 39:18Speaker 08

  So for the Oxford...

• 39:19Speaker 06

  19th century.

• 39:20Speaker 08

  For the Oxford Movement, typology is incredibly important. Newman talks about the Old Testament as a pregnant text that's waiting to give birth to new meaning, and John Keable talks about it as being veiled. Pusey, Edward Pusey, says that everything is a type, if only we knew how to read it, and gives a whole series of lectures on typology. For these churchmen, it's their understanding that the English Church has done away with too much of its tradition, too much of its ritual and custom. And for them, engaging with the Old Testament, sifting through what is and what is not helpful and usable, is so important to making sense of what should come back. And it trickles out into poetry. Christina Rossetti's Good Friday finishes with such a lovely image of Christ as the

• 40:03Speaker 08

  rock that Moses strikes to bring forth water. And at the same time that this Oxford high church movement is happening, we have the wider Gothic revival, the interest in medieval art and architecture. We mentioned King's College Chapel and its fantastic stained glass earlier. Well, George Hedland, who works restoring that stained glass in the Victorian period, goes about producing typological stained glass windows afresh at Jesus College in Oxford at Norwich Cathedral. These fantastic displays of typology, in a way that really hadn't been seen for decades, if not centuries. So yes, in the Victorian period, there is, within, I suppose, a small church tradition,

• 40:44Speaker 08

  but much more widely in art and architecture, a very much renewed interest in typology.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  Thank you. Can we turn to the impact of typology on literature, particularly right up to Tony Morrison?

• 40:56Speaker 07

  No, I think this is so important. I've been thinking about it, and it's going back to the Hebrew Bible as possessing all these dramas of human life, in families and communities and personal lives as well. Very much like ancient mythology did as well, dealing with weaknesses, with aspirations, with desires. But it really, really struck me, how so many great authors of the 20th century, like East of Eden... John Steinbeck. Now, why call it that? For him, that mattered. He also knew it would resonate immediately with his readers in terms of the very great drama of fratricide. And with Toni Morrison, in particular,

• 41:41Speaker 07

  everything about Toni Morrison is creating a new language to speak about slavery and its legacy and to speak somehow of love within all that pain. And think of her works, Sula, the Shulamite from The Song of Songs, and Beloved. And she actually cites The Song of Songs in there. She also has a book called Paradise, about a utopian community of African Americans. And this is such an extraordinary resource. And at the very same time, the great Marilynne Robinson, again, who sold millions of copies about Calvinist communities in the United States in the 19th and 20th century, but again, speaking about some of the most fundamental issues,

• 42:26Speaker 07

  not only about faith, but about relations with families, in marriage and so on. And I think it works by inspiring, and then the author goes and does what they have to say in their here and the now. But it offers that sort of constant conversation with the riches of the Hebrew Bible and the question, what will happen when the readers out there will not have such access to or knowledge of these resources, of the Hebrew Bible, of the Gospels even, except in certain parts of the world, perhaps? Will that be lost? Will people be able to read these novels in the same way as perhaps it was still possible in the 20th and the early 21st?

• 43:09Speaker 06

  Sophie, what do you think the legacy of typology is now?

• 43:14Speaker 09

  I would say we haven't perhaps talked very much about the negative side of all of this, which is the danger that typology always runs of supersessionism. And I suppose one place to look for that is in the 20th century study of typology. And I did some digging. One of the famous theological works of biblical criticism on typology was published in

• 43:38Speaker 09

  After the war in the 1960s by a German scholar called Leonard Gopelt. But that was actually published first in 1939 as a dissertation in Erlangen. And it was produced in a context where, obviously, there was a huge wave, if you like, of Christian anti-Judaism, which was mobilised by national socialists in Germany. And that one of the effects of this was, to its most extreme, lead to German Christians trying to erase the Old Testament from the biblical canon altogether as a way of removing the Jewish element. Now, Gopelt is not doing that at all. He's very much, there's a very elusive footnote, which suggests that he is interested in restoring typology to its proper place as a way of engaging the Old Testament

• 44:23Speaker 09

  as a valid part of the Christian message. But it seems to me that the whole endeavour of late 19th and indeed 20th century, particularly German theological musings on typology is embedded in a context where Christian anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism is absolutely crucial. And we lose something if we don't think about the danger of talking about fulfilment as, in some sense, replacement.

• 44:48Speaker 07

  Something very interesting happens in the 20th century after the Holocaust and in, of course, in the Vatican II Council, which took place in a way for Catholics to reflect upon and to act in the light of its lessons. And that is because typology so often is not just emphasising the truth value of the Hebrew Bible as prophesying the coming of Christianity, but also this supersession, the way in which Christianity comes to replace, to sit upon the Judaism and to be now the new chosen Israel. Because that is one of the ways in which typology serves a sort of anti-Jewish

• 45:32Speaker 07

  moment in Christianity, it was obviously revisited in Vatican II. How do we talk? How do we think about our art? How do we think about the legacy of interpretation, which is so rich? And so there's a real awareness that these two can come together in powerful ways. But what's really interesting is people are experimenting. I saw a work of art that represents the traditional medieval representation of synagogue and ecclesia. Synagogue as a sad, young woman, veiled, doesn't see the truth and...

• 46:07Speaker 07

  Church ecclesia as a triumphant, beautiful one. And these emerge in the Middle Ages, these figures, and they were usually on the fronts of cathedrals and in all works of art, of impossibilities. I saw one that was done very recently in a Catholic college in Pennsylvania. And there, those two figures are there, denoting there are two traditions. They're equal in size, they're sitting side by side like sisters, each reading her own book. So there are ways in which the typology tinged by anti-Judaism can be rethought by reflective people in new ways. And I think that's the really positive and optimistic direction of where typology is going today.

• 46:48Speaker 06

  Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Miriam Rubin, Harris Spillane and Sophie-Lynn Rockliffe. Next week, we'll be talking about Molière, the great French playwright and actor who thrived at the Gortier Boulevard the fourteenth. Thank you for listening.

• 47:01Speaker 15

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

• 47:08Speaker 06

  What would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say, Mary?

• 47:12Speaker 07

  So many interesting aspects to typology. Yeah, I mean, just to say that there is a moment in the Middle Ages, around the 11th and 12th century, when there's, all of a sudden, typology is not just for theologians. It becomes something that a preacher can pick up a book that tells them how to do it. There is a whole, there's production of reference books of such usefulness and such pervasive use, so that a preacher can have a guide, you know, can't know everything, but they have sort of guides to how to interpret. There are glosses, the ordinary glosses, it's called, from the early 12th century. There is the, in the 13th century, the creation of the Paris Bible, that is in one place

• 47:57Speaker 07

  everything that you need to make your sermons from. So there, there are real aids that promote this in the medieval period. And from then on, it can be much, much more widely recognised and more widely used.

• 48:11Speaker 08

  And that wonderful pictor manuscript that lists every possible type that can be thought of to help an artist, there's no pictures in the book, it's just an extensive list encouraging people to to use a wider array of things. My sense is by the fourteenth century, there is an attempt to to broaden the types being used beyond just Adam and Moses and to engage much more deeply with those more subtle ones.

• 48:32Speaker 07

  It's true, and and also in the Renaissance, when you think of the fascination with books of emblems, which the way, so so it's not just in reading the Bible, the whole issue of typological reading carries over to the vast revival of reading of the classics and so on, as it were in the secular literature although. And of course, you cannot open, you cannot literally, the first line in Dante is a reference to to to Isaiah, hidden away, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, you know, it's it's literally somebody who knows the Bible and knows that the life is meant to be seventy years old and he is in the

• 49:13Speaker 07

  middle of his way, immediately would pick this up, although it would be lost to most readers at other times.

• 49:19Speaker 09

  That's very interesting, what Harry was saying at the end about, you know, whether or not we've lost the key to typology. I was thinking about the other end of it, which is where the key is delivered. So I'm always struck when I read texts from late antiquity and early Middle Ages where preachers and teachers are trying to instruct new Christians in the content of scripture and its meaning. How, although on the one hand they acknowledge that some people, particularly the less educated, might find some of this quite hard work, there is nonetheless a fairly comprehensive effort to both outline what the relationship is between Hebrew Bible and New Testament and the provision of some really obscure examples

• 50:04Speaker 09

  and drilling down into details which, I mean, I've been reading Augustine on Noah's Ark as a figure of the church, and you know, he'll tell you that the door of the ark is the wound that's created in Christ's side and, you know, which animals go where in the ark. I mean, it really goes into an enormous quantity of detail. And I think part of my sort of general question about all of this is whether or not actually the capacity for pre-moderns, first of all, to amass a huge quantity of data is much greater than ours, right? So we are, because we're glued to our phones, we don't, we don't have to remember any of this stuff. The numerological things we were talking about earlier, it's possible to hold in your mind lots of complicated things simultaneously and indeed learn how to have meaning made of

• 50:48Speaker 09

  them. So that was one thing I was worried about. The other thing is actually again thinking about who gets to hear all this beyond Christian communities, because I think there's an increasing trend in scholarship now to show that rabbis are aware of Christian doctrine, Christian debates about doctrine, Christian typological readings of scripture, and that they're actually making rather clever use of these, very fleeting, elusive, often putting opinions into the mouth of a Jewish heretic that would actually belong more properly in a Christian mouth. Sometimes typological readings of scripture are in there. So we should be thinking of this as something

• 51:30Speaker 09

  that is in part derived from Jewish practices of reading their scriptures, but also something that Christian practice also influences ongoing Jewish practices of reading. It's a kind of conversation.

• 51:43Speaker 07

  I mean, you asked what I would have liked to say, and it really connects well with what you're saying, that is to say, people in the past, their capacity to think typologically. Because look at the figure of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is a type of the church. Now, what does it mean for a youngish woman to be a type of the church? And yet, that is accepted because of her identification with her son, because she was the tool, the mode, I mean, through her, the incarnation occurred, because she was chosen by her son, because she never died, but she was assumed to heaven. But still, the fact that you could do that,

• 52:22Speaker 07

  that you could just move from Mary to the church with ease, and this would not seem like

• 52:29Speaker 09

  Bamboozling.

• 52:30Speaker 07

  Bamboozling, exactly. I think shows that this capacity for typological reading was sort of about, around, and people did not question it. And particularly when it was unfolded in a sort of experience of preaching and guidance, et cetera.

• 52:47Speaker 09

  And actually, that ties back to thinking about the Song of Songs and the way in which, you know, extraordinary ways of de-eroticising a text by saying this isn't really about a lover and his wife, it's actually about the church and Christ. And we should read it in a

• 53:04Speaker 07

  The rabbis and the theologians both agreed that it's definitely not to be read literally.

• 53:10Speaker 08

  I wonder also if it's about the capacity to see layers within just one type. I mean, you know, Isaac being sacrificed to add insult to injury has to carry his own firewood up.

• 53:18Speaker 07

  He wasn't sacrificed.

• 53:20Speaker 08

  In order to.

• 53:20Speaker 07

  Almost sacrificed.

• 53:22Speaker 08

  And, you know, that is meant to be read that Isaac is himself a type for Jesus being crucified. But the wood is the type for the cross and the carry. I mean, these layers are so rich and so deep in a way that, as I think you say, we're talking about people who had a capacity to hold such a huge amount of information in their mind at one.

• 53:39Speaker 07

  But also, this was the job of tens of generations of the smartest people in Europe and elsewhere, in the whole Christian world. This was the, the most important work they did, the most prestigious work, biblical commentary.

• 53:59Speaker 07

  And even if you were just a monk in your monastery with no great ambitions, to do your prayers, to understand your texts that you're reading, be they Old or New Testament, there were in your library commentary books to help you understand them.

• 54:13Speaker 09

  Right, and you're reading the Bible on a cycle, so, you know, you might not have understood the correspondences in the lecture read the first time round, but maybe the 20th or 30th time you would.

• 54:22Speaker 08

  The cycle links to what I didn't think we maybe touched on, which is how this just relates to time in general, to understanding time. Because on the one hand, Christians want to think quite linearly about time, and there is something we're working towards, some fulfillment. And yet typology seems to say the complete reverse. This is circular or there are recurring patterns. And, and I think typology opens up many more questions for Christians than it answers about how you exist in, in a temporal world.

• 54:52Speaker 06

  Well, I think you have delighted us for long enough.

• 54:58Speaker 06

  You can go now, I want a cup of tea. Aleah will come in. Aleah, I can see her on the way.

• 55:06Speaker 06

  I think I might, tea would be great.

• 55:09Speaker 16

  Tea, Sophie? Tea would be lovely. Mary? Tea would be lovely. Tea for you as well. Four teas.

• 55:14Speaker 17

  In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg was produced by Eliane Glaser and it is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Hi, we're the Van Tullikens, the identical twin Dr Van Tullikens, Chris and Zandt. In What's Up Docs, we're diving into the messy, complicated world of health and wellbeing. We are living in the middle of what I would call a therapeutic revolution, but it can sometimes be hard to know what's really best for us. Do I need to take a testosterone supplement? How can I fix my creaky knees? Why do I get hangry? Is organic food actually better for me? We're going to be your guides through the confusion. We'll talk to experts in the field and argue about what we've learned and share what we've learned and maybe disagree a fair bit too. No, we won't. What's Up Docs from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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