THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

‘TREMBLING ON THE VERGE OF ALLEGORY’

INTERPRETIVE MODES OF LATE-ANTIQUE AND

EARLY-CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO

THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

BY

JOSEPH J. SHEPLEY, III

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

JUNE 2000
"The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his
hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a
sad caress.
"'Reading,' he says, 'is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing
made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and
through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not
present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisble world,
because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no
longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...'"

—Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

© 2000 Joseph J. Shepley, III

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................v

ABBREVIATIONS ......................................................................................vi

DEDICATION............................................................................................. viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................... ix

INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER ONE: Jacob Have I Loved, But Esau

Have I Hated. The Distinction Between Typology
and Allegory in the Modern Study of Exegesis............................... 6

P. Fairbairn: Typology and Allegory........................................... 10

F. Farrar: Alexandria and Antioch............................................... 18

Twentieth-Century Legacies......................................................... 22

Other Approaches: T. Luxon and D. Dawson............................ 46

CHAPTER TWO: From Recovery to Application. Contemporary

Approaches to the Problem of Reading.............................................55

Divination and Hermeneutics: P. Ricoeur and J. Z. Smith....... 58

The Death of the Author: N. Frye and I. Calvino...................... 65

CHAPTER THREE: Christian Fact and Pagan Fiction. Origen,

Porphyry, and Theodore of Mopsuestia........................................... 78

flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma........................................................ 81

Origen.............................................................................................. 84

Porphyry.......................................................................................... 97

iii
 Theodore of Mopsuestia................................................................ 110

CHAPTER FOUR: Models and Myths. Approaches to the

Study of Earliest Christianities........................................................... 121

CHAPTER FIVE: Angels, Intermediaries, and Elders. Paul,

Ps.-Barnabas, and Ptolemy.................................................................. 153

Moses................................................................................................ 171

Israel................................................................................................. 175

Intermediary....................................................................................177

Angel(s)............................................................................................ 179

Law................................................................................................... 181

Covenant.......................................................................................... 187

Jesus.................................................................................................. 190

Saviour............................................................................................. 197

Abraham.......................................................................................... 201

EPILOGUE.................................................................................................. 210

APPENDIX: FIGURES............................................................................... 213

BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................ 216

iv
 LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1.1: Shifting Relations of flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma .......……..213

FIGURE 2.1: Elements related to giving of Law in Letter to Flora,

Epistle of Barnabas, and Galatians ...........................................................….214

FIGURE 2.2: Texts cited in Letter to Flora, Epistle of Barnabas,

and Galatians ............................................................................................….215

v
 ABBREVIATIONS

1 Cor 1 Corinthians
1 Macc. 1 Maccabees
1 Pet. 1 Peter
2 Cor 2 Corinthains
Ad Haer. Irenaeus, Adversus
Haeresis
Adv. Math. Sextus Empiricus,
Adversus Mathematicos
Apol. Tertullian, Apology
Aristeas Letter of Aristeas
Cels. Origen, Contra Celsum
De Ant. Porphyry, De Antro
Nympharum
De Princ. Origen, De Principiis
EB Epistle of Barnabas
Ex Exodus
Gal Galatians
Galat. Theodore of Mospsuestia,
Commentary on Galatians
HB Hebrew Bible
Hom. Num. Origen, Homiliae in
Numeros
IMg Ignatius, Magnesians
ITr Ignatius, Trallians
IRo Ignatius, Romans
IPhld Ignatius, Philadelphians

vi
IPol Ignatius, To Polycarp
Liber. Theodore of Mospsuestia,
Liber ad Baptizandos
LSJ Liddel and Scott, Jones,
Greek-English Lexicon
LTF Ptolemy, Letter to Flora
LXX Septuagint
NT New Testament
OED Oxford English Dictionary
OT Old Testament
Rom Romans
RSV Revised Standard Version
SBL Society of Biblical
Literature

vii
 In Memoriam

John King, A.W.H. Adkins, and Lester Reiss

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want, first of all, to thank my disseration committee, Arthur Droge,

Bernard McGinn, and Michael Murrin, without whose generosity of time and effort
this project would have been impossible; and second, to thank those friends who put
up with my work in progress during my participation in reading groups—Constance
Furey, Patricia Beckman, Gordon Rudy, and Dawne Moon—as well as those who
offered less formal, but equally valuable, support in other ways— Matthew
Baldwin, Jonathan Leff, Chris Nashawaty, and Blake Wentworth. In addition, my
work was supported financially by a Harper dissertation fellowship in 1997 and
1998. And finally, thanks—and everything else—are due Emily, without whom
none of this would matter anyway.

ix
 INTRODUCTION

This dissertation is an attempt to bring together two disparate but

complementary disciplines: the history of exegesis and literary criticism. As

it stands now, historians of exegesis are, for the most part, engaged in what

we might call descriptive taxonomy—i.e., identifying and describing the

strains, schools, or epochs of past exegesis—, while literary theorists are

engaged in what we might call functional analysis—i.e., the workings or

mechanisms of interpretation and reading. Their relative segregation is due

more to the kind of specialization Stephen Gould and Willi Hennig have

described in the fields of paleontology and genetics than any real

incompatibility, and it is my belief that an increased attention to

contemporary explorations of the function and nature of reading and

interpretation will help historians of Christianity clarify their analysis of

ancient exegetical remains.1 To this end, my project seeks, on the one hand,

to offer a critique of present-day approaches to theory and method that are

1Hennig 1966 3; Gould 1977 esp. 202-206, but see also 6, 8, 109, 168, 183, and 186.
1
 2

central to the historical study of Christianity and, on the other, to reclassify

some of the texts that figure prominently in these present-day approaches.

In terms of method and theory, the dissertation will address three broad

historical and hermeneutical issues of importance for the study of

Christianities in the first four centuries AD: first, it analyzes the critical and

taxonomic uses of allegory and typology in the study of exegesis, outlining

their use by nineteenth-century theologians and tracing their development

in the work of historians of exegesis in the twentieth century (ch.1); second,

it critiques the premise—which underlies the uses of allegory and typology I

examine in chapter one—that exegesis is the recovery of the literal, original,

or intended sense of a text and offers an alternative view drawn from recent

works in literary theory, philosophical hermeneutics, and literature:

exegesis-as-application (ch. 2); and third, it explores some of the dominant

paradigms historians use to speak about the development of early Christian

communities—both about their growing distance from Jewish communities

and about the rise of catholic self-understanding between groups of

Christians—and explores the alternative models proposed by the recent

work of Jonathan Z. Smith, P.F. Craffert, and Gabriele Boccaccini, among

others (ch.4).

In terms of issues of data and classification, the dissertation pairs these

methodological chapters with two comparative text studies. The issues I

treat in chapters one (typology and allegory) and two (exegesis-as-application)

ground my analysis of Origen, Porphyry, and Theodore of Mopsuestia in

 3

chapter three; the issues I address in chapter four (models of early Christian

development) ground my analysis of Paul, Ps-Barnabas, and Ptolemy in

chapter five.

In bringing relevant aspects of contemporary literary theory to bear on

the study of Christian history and exegesis, I begin from two assumptions

about the nature of disciplinary work. First, as studies in the history of the

natural sciences and contemporary biological systematics have suggested,

neither the natural nor the human sciences progress in a straight line from

classification to analysis, as if from "young" to "mature" pursuits. Rather,

both disciplines are always modulating between these two possibilities for

constructive work.2 New finds—or new technology that allows closer looks

at old finds—occasion new classification, description, and analysis; and new

approaches to analysis, classification, and description inspire—or sometimes

necessitate—increased fieldwork in order to apply them to and test them on

things in the world.3

Second, the development of new systems of classification and new

methods of study are often staggered: any given discipline—and any given

person working in a given discipline—will be at the forefront of changes in

some respects while retaining outmoded elements in others.4 This is not an

2Hennig 1966 1-3; Laudan 1987 8; Kuhn 1996 1-9.

3Laudan 1987 20, 85.
4See Kuhn 1996 1-9 on the complexities of individual and general developments within
and between discplines. For staggered patterns of development in the sciences, see Gould
1977 155-164 on the survivial of eighteenth-century theories of recapitulation in modern
 4

unusual or lamentable state of affairs, but simply an expected part of any

vibrant intellectual discipline.

Working from these assumptions, in chapters one and four, I will

demonstrate that contemporary work in the study of Christian history and

exegesis exhibits taxonomic and theoretical recidivisms, due both to the

persistence of outmoded theories in novel classification schemes and to

outmoded classifications in novel theories;5 in chapter two, I suggest that

certain developments in philosphical hermeneutics and literary criticism

offer desirable correctives to many problems of theory and method that face

the historian of Christianity;6 and in chapters three and five, I build on the

work of scholars inside and outside the History of Christianity who have

increased the data available for the study of Christianity, either by drawing

attention to previously underappreciated aspects of known texts or by

bringing completely new texts into view.7 Although much of this new data

has has not, for the most part, been approached using the new theories of

interpretation put forward in other disciplines, the examination of such texts

psychoanalysis; and see Laudan 1987 20-46 on the continued use of seventeenth-century
mineralogical categories ("earths" and "salts") as technical terms in eighteenth-century
geology.
5 Goppelt 1939; Lampe and Woolcombe 1957; Hanson 1959; and Greer 1961 are
examples of the former; Daniélou 1960; Davies 1977; Kraabel 1981; Koester 1982; Kugel and
Greer 1986; and Young 1997, of the latter.

6Frye 1957; Calvino 1973, 1981, 1986; and Ricouer 1981.

7Theodore of Mopsuestia, Liber ad Bapitazandos; Ptolemy, Letter to Flora.
 5

will yield results of equal significance to the more theoretical advances

made in other disciplines in the study of hermeneutics.

And finally, in the most general sense, this project as a whole is an

attempt to address an issue raised by J. Z. Smith in "Sacred Persistence:

Toward a Redescription of Canon":

Other work remains to be done: an examination of the rules that govern the
sharp debates between rival exegetes and exegetical systems in their efforts
to manipulate the closed canon. There is need of a careful study of
individuals...who raise the endeavors of exegetical ingenuity to the level of
a comprehensive system. I look forward to the day when courses and
monographs will exist in both comparative exegesis and comparative
theology, comparing not so much conclusions as strategies through which
the exegete seeks to interpret and translate his received tradition to his
contemporaries.8

This dissertation is meant as such a monograph in comparative exegesis,

and therefore it seeks on the whole to compare "not so much conclusions as

strategies", both of the ancient interpreters I examine as well as of the

modern authors whose work is the foundation of the present-day study of

exegesis.

8 Smith 1982 52.

 CHAPTER ONE

Jacob Have I Loved, But Esau Have I Hated:

The Distinction Between Typology and Allegory

in the Modern Study of Exegesis

This chapter seeks to address one of the most significant issues facing the

historian of Christianity who wishes to study Christian exegesis: the

distinction between allegory and typology. This distinction, to judge from

much twentieth-century scholarship on patristic and early-Christian

exegesis, is rooted in the interpretive practices of the ancient church itself

and has continued to be upheld, admittedly with greater and lesser degrees

of precision, down to this day.1 What has changed, scholars will assert, is

that after the Reformation—due in large part to the Reformers’ concern with

the historical and literal—the study of types became more scientific and less

1Goppelt 1939 4; Buttrick 1953 1.110; Hanson 1959 79; Daniélou 1960 viii; Kittle 1972
251-2; Käsemann 1982 114, 132; Grant and Tracy 1984 18-19; Freedman 1992, s.v. "typology".

6
 7

arbitrary. Exegetes did not simply look for literary or formal resemblances,

as they had up through the Middle Ages, but now sought earnestly for

actual, essential relations between historical persons or events, which,

because of their historical character, were perceived as more real than the

philosophical, moral, or linguistic relations that allegory described.2

However, this is only one way to view the history or genealogy of

typology and allegory; in this chapter I am going to suggest another.

Typology, as it has been used since the nineteenth century, I argue, is not an

ancient or medieval category, despite the existence of Latin and Greek

cognates. The modern term, coined in 1855 by the English divine Patrick

Fairbairn, is used to describe interpretation in a way substantially different

than in the medieval and ancient periods. Its roots can be traced to the

seventeenth century, when Protestant theologians defined types as

“legitimate”, “real”, or “true” figurative meanings over against the

“illegitimate”, “fantastic”, or “false” figurative meanings of allegory.3 It

flourished in the following two centuries, developing into an interpretive

trope as varied and wide-spread as allegory had been previously.

In the nineteenth century, Christian scholars who were concerned with

the connection between the Old and New Testaments—and were also

committed to historical-critical methods in the human sciences—attempted

2E.g., Bodensieck 1965, s.v. "Bible Study"; Lampe 1969.

3Dawson 1992 15.
 8

to “rehabilitate” the study of types by finding a scientific, reasonable basis

for typological interpretation in order to counteract what they considered

the subjective, unreasonable use of types prevalent in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries.4 The work of two scholars in particular stands out as

central in this development. Patrick Fairbairn, in The Typology of Scripture

(1855), synthesized the scattered insights of Bishop Marsh, Oldhausen, Van

Mildert, and others on the study of types and clarified the interpretive

terminology then in use. He coined the term “typology” there and defined it

as fundamentally opposed to allegory. Thirty years later, William Farrar, in

his 1885 Bampton Lectures, The History of Interpretation, provided a historical

framework within which traditional interpretive materials could be

classified into two genealogical lines (sound and unsound interpretation),

which he aligned with general and particular theories of divine inspiration.

He presented not only a historical analysis (his “seven epochs of exegesis”)

but also a geographical one, identifying the various “schools” of ancient

exegesis by location, i.e., Alexandria, Palestine, and Antioch, rather than by

religious affiliation, i.e., Jewish, Pagan, or Christian.

The work of Fairbairn and Farrar can be seen as the backdrop for

important developments within the twentieth-century study of the history

of exegesis, primarily in Anglo-American circles, which we can characterize

broadly into three groups:

4See, e.g., Wilson 1823 3.

 9

1) Those scholars, like Goppelt, Lampe, and Woolcombe, who adopt the
categories of Farrar and Fairbairn in the service of self-consciously theological
aims.

2) Those scholars, like Hanson, Greer, and Galdon, who adopt their categories,
but do so for non-theological reasons.

3) Those scholars, like Danliélou and Young, who wish to critique these
approaches, either on theological (Daniélou) or theoretical (Young) grounds.

In the end, all of them, whether or not they have theological aims and

whether or not they are critical of previous scholarship, do not move beyond

the theories and methods of Farrar and Fairbairn. Their work, individually

and as a whole, operates within the conceptual limits established by these

nineteenth-century intellectuals, which will become clear at the close of the

chapter in my survey of the work of Dawson and Luxon, both of whom put

forward strong critiques of the modern study of exegesis.

This chapter, then, will examine in close detail the nineteenth-century

development of typology as a critical category and trace the three-fold

influence it has had on twentieth-century scholars who helped foster the

growth of the study of exegesis. By so doing, I will demonstrate that the

strict opposition between type and allegory is a modern product, dating

from the polemical debates between Protestant reformers and Catholics in

the sixteenth century; that typology, defined as a historical, non-literary,

non-figurative mode of reading, is also a modern—rather than an ancient or

medieval—product, first used by theologians of the nineteenth century; that

such a definition of typology and its strict separation from allegory

addressed specific theological problems, i.e., the interrelation of the Old and
 10

New Testaments and the character of scriptural inspiration, and that,

therefore, it is not a suitable critical tool for analyzing the exegesis of past

historical periods; and finally that many contemporary historians of

Christianity, in their studies of early Christian and patristic exegesis, have

taken over the terms of discourse of nineteenth-century theologians almost

verbatim and with practically no critical reflection on their origins or

methodological implications.

PATRICK FAIRBAIRN: OPPOSITION BETWEEN TYPE AND ALLEGORY

Patrick Fairbairn’s work is not the first major nineteenth-century work

on the study of types. Before him, there were a number of important studies

of typology in scripture, for example, Bishop Marsh’s Lectures on the

Criticism and Interpretation of the Bible (1810), Van Mildert’s 1814 Bampton

Lectures, Wilson’s A Popular Inquiry into the Doctrine of Scriptural Types

(1823), and Alexander’s The Connexion and Harmony of the Old and New

Testaments (1841).5 However, because he was the first modern to coin the

term “typology”, and because his work represents the fruition of a number

5See Davidson 1981 for a comprehensive survey of this literature.

 11

of developments in nineteenth-century research on types, Fairbairn is the

most relevant for this project.6

He begins by stating his objectives. First, he wishes to bring the study of

types in step with the “new lights and improved methods of investigation,

which have been introduced into theological study.”7 Second, he wants to

standardize the study of types, seeing as those who investigate types have

“differed widely, not only in their methods of explaining particular types,

but also in what they allowed to possess this character, and the degree of

importance they attached to it.”8 Last, he wishes to reverse the progress of

opinion that “has been tending for many years, both to lessen the amount,

and to depreciate the value, of the typical matter of the Old Testament.”9

He tries to accomplish these three things by i) clarifying the exact

definition of a type and its relation to other tropes, especially allegory; ii)

classifying the various types recorded in scripture; and iii) separating them

out from the many other so-called types in scripture, which are only formal

resemblances. Although the last two fill most of Fairbairn’s work (537

6OED., s.v. "typology".

7Fairbairn 1855 1.
8Ibid.

9Ibid. 2; so also Wilson: “Whilst the parables are generally understood, the analogous
subject of the types is by no means so familiar to Christians. It has fallen into some degree
of discredit, from an idea that it comes within the province of fancy more than of the
judgment; and the consideration of it has become associated with far fetched analogies and
overstrained explanations” (1823 3).
 12

pages), only the first is important for my project: the process of defining

types and differentiating them from allegory.

In order to define types, Fairbairn first looks to the fathers of the church

and finds that, although they used types in their interpretation, nevertheless

“in none of the earlier Christian writers do we find any clear and well-

defined principles of interpretation laid down, either on this, or on any other

branch of theological study,” except “perhaps...Origen.”10 He then turns to a

recent scholar, Bishop Herbert Marsh, whose Course of Lectures Containing a

Description and Systematic Arrangement of the Several Branches of Divinity...

(1810) is a sustained, closely reasoned analysis of the Christian faith that

produces a minute classification of all its aspects. Marsh, he claims, has

defined types admirably, except that he does not make enough of their

distinction from allegories. “I cannot but regard it, in particular, as unhappy,

that after pointing out the distinction so clearly, Bishop Marsh should still

have given to both kinds the one name of allegory.”11 Despite his

qualifications, Fairbairn provides Marsh’s definition in full:

There are two different modes, in which scripture has been thus allegorized.
According to one mode, facts and circumstances, especially those recorded in
the Old Testament, have been applied to other facts and circumstances, of
which they have been described as representative. According to the other mode,
those facts and circumstances have been described as mere emblems. The former

10Fairbairn 1855 2.
11Ibid.
 13

mode is warranted by the practice of the sacred writers themselves; for when
facts and circumstances are so applied, they are applied as types of those things,
to which the application is made. But the latter mode of allegorical
interpretation has no such authority in its favor, though attempts have been
made to procure such authority.12

Fairbairn augments this with his own thoughts on the distinction between

type and allegory:

In the interpretation, therefore, of the Scriptures, it is absolutely necessary that

we observe the exact boundaries between the notion of an allegory, and the
notion of a type...An allegory, as already observed, is a fictitious narrative; a
type is something real. An allegory is a picture of the imagination; a type is a
historical fact.13

It is important to notice that at the very first moment that Fairbairn

presents a definition of a type, he offers a definition of an allegory as well.

As the theological motivations for the invention of typology become

apparent, we will see that, as Luxon argues, allegory is its necessary other

and that without allegory, typology cannot function.14 Assigned to allegory

are all of the negative aspects of interpretation—subjective fancy, disregard

for the original meaning, imagination, and fiction—leaving typology free to

be accurate, factual, and historical interpretation. As we will see Dawson

and Luxon argue, this demonization of allegory began in the Reformation-

era, although in the nineteenth century it became all-but-unanimous.15 In the

sixteenth century, even someone as iconoclastic and reputedly anti-

12Ibid. 2-4.
13Ibid. 4
14See below, p. 45.
15Dawson 1992 15; Luxon 1995 ix.
 14

allegorical as Calvin could still waver between allegory and typology,

endorsing the judicious use of allegory on occasion.16 But by this point in the

nineteenth century, allegory had few friends. After Fairbairn's work, the

distinction between allegory and typology would not be questioned for at

least a hundred years.17

This sharp distinction between types and allegories is necessary for

Fairbairn in view of the wide-spread contemporary belief that types had

been much abused by writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Divines such as Witsius, Cocceius, Glass, and Vitringa, Fairbairn tells us,

“did not sufficiently distinguish between allegorical and typical

interpretations,” and the grounds on which their systems rested “were

chiefly loose and general principles, which left ample scope for any one who

chose, to run into endless extravagances."18 The main result was that “a

mere resemblance, however accidental or unimportant, between something

in the Old, and something in the New Testament scriptures, was deemed

16So Calvin on Gal. 4.24: “But what shall we say to Paul’s assertion [that these things
are éllhgoroÊmena]? He certainly does not mean that Moses deliberately wrote the story
so that it might be turned into an allegory, but is pointing out in what way the story relates
to the present case...And an anagogue of this sort is not foreign to the genuine and literal
meaning...Therefore, as in circumcision, in sacrifices, in the whole Levitical priesthood there
was an allegory, as there is today in our sacraments, so was there likewise in the house of
Abraham” (Calvin 1965 85).

17The first sustained criticism of the typology-allegory distinction that I know of is

Robert Grant's The Letter and the Spirit (1957).

18Fairbairn 1855 16, 17.

 15

sufficient to constitute the one a type of the other.”19 So, by defining types in

relation to allegory and by opposing them so sharply, Fairbairn can distance

problematical aspects of the last two centuries of interpretation by

associating them with allegory; whatever interpretation he wishes to

associate with his own work, he labels “typology”.

Fairbairn’s work on types also has a more specifically theological

concern. Although he examines the nature and practice of exegesis in great

detail, he is not a historian of exegesis as we might understand the

discipline, or even a textual critic; first and foremost, he is a theologian.

Fairbairn undertakes his work on exegesis to clarify and support certain

doctrines of the Christian faith, doctrines which, he tells us, are central to it

and whose refutation or rejection necessarily entails a rejection or refutation

of Christianity itself.

Broadly speaking, his theological dilemma is a perennial Christian one:

Judaism. Both its people and its scriptures reject the central figure of

Christianity, Jesus, as well as the Christian claim to be the rightful possessor

of the Hebrew Scriptures. Addressing the continued existence of Judaism

and the rupture between it and Christianity is the main motivation for

Fairbairn’s work. It is significant that his book, a study of the typology of

scripture, ends with an appendix titled “On the Restoration of the Jews”: it

informs us that establishing connection and harmony between the old

19Ibid. 17.
 16

covenant and the new is the driving force of his analysis; all the other

theological problems he addresses are but subspecies of it. As he puts it:

Now this difference between the Old and the New Testament revelations has
generally been regarded as presenting a serious difficulty in the way of a
harmonious and satisfactory reconcilement between them, and has given rise to
various theories of explanation, into which it is quite unnecessary at present to
enter. We believe, however, that a right understanding of the typology of
Scripture is the only ground, on which it is possible to raise an explanation
thoroughly consistent and satisfactorily. For, leave this out of view,—suppose,
that God’s method of revelation and dealing to the Old Testament church did
not entirely proceed upon the plan of conveying gospel ideas and principles
through means of common events and fleshly symbols, but admitted of these
being unfolded in their unveiled simplicity and proper fullness, then it will be
next to impossible to account for such profound silence and reserve being
maintained for many centuries on so important an article of faith as that of a
future state of reward and punishment.20

For Fairbairn, the differences between the old and new covenants stem

from God's choice to reveal the gospel first through “common events and

fleshly symbols” and only later in “unveiled simplicity and proper fullness.”

However, he admits, it could be objected that the events and symbols of the

old do not correspond to the simplicity and fullness of the new. This

objection is not recent; even in the ancient world, Christians were accused of

being adherents to a new faith, a faith with no roots in the past, as, for

example, Judaism had. In large part the earliest Christians were quite

concerned to show that they were in fact a part of the venerable and

(somewhat) respected tradition of Judaism.21 Fairbairn tries to do the same,

but with a different angle of approach. He uses a developmental model, one

20Ibid. 219.
21See also Lampe and Woolcombe 1957 22-24.
 17

in which the same revelation is ever present but simply manifested in

different forms.

There must have been, first of all, the same great elements of truth,—for the
mind of God, and the circumstances of the fallen creature, are substantially the
same at all times. What the spiritual necessities of men now are, they have been
from the time that sin entered into the world. Hence the truth revealed by God
to meet these necessities, however varying from time to time in the precise
amount of its communications, and however differing as to the hue and form in
which it might be preserved, must have been, so far as disclosed, essentially
one in every age. For otherwise, what strange and monstrous results would
follow? If the principles on which God acted toward men, and regulated his
intercourse with them, were materially different at one period from what they
were at another, then either the wants and necessities of men’s natural
condition must not be now what they once were, or the character of God must
be susceptible of change—he cannot be the immutable Jehovah...The primary
and essential elements of truth, therefore, which are embodied in the facts of
the gospel, and on which its oeconomy of grace is based, cannot in the nature of
things be of recent origin, as if they were altogether peculiar to the New
Testament dispensation, and had only begun with its introduction to obtain a
place in the government of God.22

Fairbairn, basing his theory of the typology of scripture on such

theology, concludes that the truth-value of types is not grounded in mere

resemblances of form, because types are preordained by God. A type “must

not be any character, action, or institution occurring in the Old Testament

scriptures, but such only as had their ordination from God, and were

designed by him to foreshadow the Gospel antitype.”23 Or as Marsh states it:

By what means shall we determine, in any given instance, that what is alleged as
a type was really designed for a type? Now the only possible source of
information on this subject is Scripture itself. The only possible means of
knowing, that two distant, though similar, historic facts, were so connected in
the general scheme of Divine Providence, that the one was designed to prefigure
the other, is the authority of that Work, in which the scheme of divine
providence is unfolded.24

22Fairbairn 1855 50-51.

23Ibid. 46.
24Marsh 1810 18.114; Marsh’s work is a collection of independently paginated sermons.
The first number refers to the sermon, the second to the page in that sermon.
 18

So, at this point, we have seen that Fairbairn—building on those who

came before him (esp. Bishop Marsh)—defined types as divinely ordained

prefigurations of gospel truths that actually happened to the people of the

Old Testament. He defined allegories, in contrast, as deeper or inner

readings of the text that, at best, pick out a relevant meaning for the

situation at hand and, at worst, are the result of an interpreter’s subjective

fancy. These two tropes were so-defined specifically in response to a

pressing theological dilemma: the relation between the old and new

covenants. For Fairbairn, types guarantee that divine providence was

behind the apparent differences between old and new, which were rendered

thereby essentially harmonious and unified.

FREDERICK FARRAR: GEOGRAPHICAL AND TEMPORAL

CLASSIFICATION OF EXEGESIS

Fairbairn’s hermeneutical work, as useful as it will be for understanding

late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies of exegesis, is incomplete by

itself. The historical scholarship of Frederick Farrar, although very different

in many ways from Fairbairn's, is as important a backdrop for the

development of the contemporary study of exegesis. His 1885 Bampton

Lectures presented a historical survey and analysis of the entire course of

 19

Jewish and Christian scriptural interpretation, from the Book of Ezra to

Coleridge. His almost genealogical classification of the “schools” of exegesis

as well as his theoretical map of “good” and “bad” interpretation has been

adopted by later British and American scholars almost unanimously, as we

will see in the later sections of this chapter.

The Bampton Lectures were established by Rev. John Bampton in the

eighteenth century:

so that eight Divinity Lecture Sermons [would] be preached upon either of the
following Subjects—to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute
all heretics and schismatics—upon the divine authority of the writings of the
primitive fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church—upon the
Divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—upon the Divinity of the Holy
Ghost—upon the Articles of the Christian Faith as comprehended in the
apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.25

Insofar as Bampton lecturers are to speak about one of these aspects of the

Christian faith, they necessarily address theological issues. Farrar’s main

concern in this regard is to distinguish general from particular divine

inspiration and providence. For him, the doctrine that God inspired each

syllable of scripture empties human existence, and therefore history, of any

meaning.

Biblical supernaturalism [is] an irreverent identification of “inspiration” with

“verbal dictation”. Whoever was the first dogmatist to make the terms “the
Bible” and “the Word of God” synonymous, rendered the cause of truth and of
religion an immense disservice. That phrase in that sense has no shadow of
Scriptural authority...Archbishop Agobard of Lyons even in the ninth century
had argued against the absurdity of reducing the Prophets to a level no higher
than that of a dumb-ass.26

25Farrar 1885 1.
26Ibid. 369.
 20

For Farrar, inspired tongues parroting divine oracles is neither a

Christian nor a scriptural ideal. Instead, he approaches the Bible “not as a

dead Oracle, but as a living organism” and asserts that, as scientific research

has shown, it is a diverse collection of books in three languages, written at

various times for a wide range of audiences and purposes.27 The authors of

scripture “cannot be regarded as faithful or accurate, still less as inspired

interpreters. Their intentional variation may be counted by scores, and the

unintentional errors by hundreds.”28 To attempt to corroborate their work

down to the letter and discern a unified purpose and expression in all of

them is not only impossible but ignorant.29

In contrast to Fairbairn, Farrar is not concerned with the connection

between old and new covenants, nor is he bothered to define types or even

discuss them.30 But he is concerned to trace the history of what we might

call “reasonable” interpretation, by which he means interpretation that is not

founded on a theory of particular divine inspiration and providence.31 This would

exclude any exegesis that seeks divine significance for every word in

27Ibid. 393.
28Ibid. 122.
29See his discussion and analysis of Rabbi Akiba, especially page 78.
30“Type” does not appear in the index, and he only mentions them three or four times
in his lectures.

31See especially his critique of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant

interpretation, pages 357-94.
 21

scripture, including for such obviously human errors (to Farrar's mind) as

lacunae, inconsistencies, or syntactic variation.

The results of his labors are a vast genealogical classification of the

history of interpretation, the “Seven Epochs of Exegesis” and the three

“schools” of exegesis, which are:

SEVEN EPOCHS OF THREE SCHOOLS OF

EXEGESIS: EXEGESIS:

1) RABBINIC (BC 457 - AD 498) 1) PALESTINIAN

-Ezra to Rab. Abina -Midrash, Targum,
Pesher, etc.
2) ALEXANDRIAN (BC 180 - AD 40)
-Aristobulus to Philo 2) ANTIOCHENE
-Chrysostom,
Theodore, etc.
3) PATRISTIC (AD 95 - AD 1117)
-Clement of Rome to Anselm of 3) ALEXANDRIAN
Laon -Didymus, Clement,
Origen, etc.
4) SCHOLASTIC (AD 1100 - AD 1519)
-Abelard to Reformation

5) REFORMATION (AD 1500 - AD 1600)

6) POST-REFORMATION (AD 1600 - AD 1750)

7) MODERN (AD 1750 - PRESENT)

These epochs and schools, he admits, are for the most part filled with error;

however, he distinguishes sharply between pious and incorrect interpretation

and believes that a particular reading can be both at the same time—in fact,

according to him, most of the interpretation he surveys in his lectures is just

that. Right interpretation and piety are separate issues for Farrar. As he puts

it:

But it may perhaps be asked, ‘How can the Bible have been liable to age-long
misapprehensions if it be a Divine Revelation?’
The answer is very simple: the Bible is not so much a revelation as the
record of a revelation, and the inmost and most essential truths which it
 22

contains have happily been placed above the reach of Exegesis to injure, being
written also in the Books of Nature and Experience, and on the tables, which
cannot be broken, of the heart of Man.32

Furthermore, the errors of past interpreters and traditions have led to the

general upward progress of biblical criticism. Like the believer beset by

temptation, God "tests" the interpretation of scriptures with false

interpretive practices in order to strengthen and purify it.

Happily, however, in the Providence of God, the knowledge of scripture was

advanced not only in spite of these aberrations, but even by means of them. The
disputes with heretics in the first four centuries secured the authority of a pure
canon. The attention paid to separate phrases led to textual criticism. The
arbitrariness of allegory served to establish the importance of the historic sense.
The tyranny of hierarchic tradition necessitated the Reformation. The half-
Pagan Renaissance brought in its train the thorough mastery of the original
languages. The unprogressive deadness of Protestant Scholasticism ended in
the overthrow of an unnatural hypothesis of verbal dictation. And when the
reaction had gone too far—when nothing was left but a cold and unspiritual
rationalism to meet the unbelief caused by idealising philosophies—there
occurred the great revivals of deep faith and spiritual feeling, of Christian
philanthropy and evangelic truth.33

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY LEGACY OF FARRAR AND FAIRBAIRN

As I suggested at the opening of the chapter, the ideas of Farrar and

Fairbairn have been adopted by later scholars in three ways:

32Ibid. xiii-xiv.
33Ibid. 13.
 23

1) Those scholars who adopt the categories of Farrar and Fairbairn in the
service of self-consciously theological aims.

2) Those scholars who adopt their categories, but do so for non-theological

reasons.

3) Those scholars who wish to critique these approaches, either on theological

or theoretical grounds.

I want to survey these groups of scholars, paying particular attention to

their correlations with the works of Farrar and Fairbairn. In some cases, e.g.,

Galdon, Bright, and Charity, there is a simple one-to-one correlation with

some or all of the frameworks I outlined above; in other cases, e.g., Hanson,

Daniélou, Young, and Greer, their correlations are more nuanced and will

necessitate closer, more detailed readings. I close by examining two scholars

who stand completely outside the parameters of theory and classification

proposed by Farrar and Fairbairn: David Dawson and Thomas Luxon. Both

put forward strong and able critiques that help locate my analysis of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought on these issues in a larger, i.e.,

Reformation-era, perspective.

Leonhard Goppelt, in his landmark work Typos, is thoroughly grounded

in the approach to exegesis we saw in Fairbairn and Farrar. His work is

aimed at a recovery of authentic early-Christian interpretation, which for

him, as for Fairbairn, is typology.

 24

Typology and the typological method have been a part of the church’s exegesis
and hermeneutics from the very beginning...So far as we can tell, Paul was the
first to use the Greek word tÊpow as a term for the prefiguring of the future in
prior history...It cannot be demonstrated that the word had this meaning prior
to Paul...The meaning originated in biblical thought.34

At the same time, allegory, “which appears alongside typology in the

church’s interpretation of Scripture and is found sporadically in the NT,”

must be rejected, since it is not a strictly-speaking “Christian”

hermeneutic.35

Goppelt judges the relative merits of typology and allegory using

theological criteria that will be familiar from the discussion of Fairbairn and

Marsh: in distinction from allegory, typology proper is less an interpretive

trope—and thus not open to the charge of interpretive fancy—than a

product of divine inspiration.

[The Adam-Christ relation] is genuine typology. These important relationships

have not been developed from general speculation about man as originally
created or about redemption. They are revealed in the presence of the glory of
Jesus Christ to the man who studies Scripture and in whom a divine miracle
has caused the light of the new creation to shine.

It is very clear that typology is not so much a method of exegesis as it is a

spiritual approach that is the background for, and is independent of, the formal
treatment.36

Goppelt here transfers typology from a literary category to a non-literary

one: it is a sign-post pointing to the historical events behind the text as well

as an indication of divine action and favor.

34Goppelt 1939 4.
35Ibid. 5.
36Ibid. 135, 162; see also 58, 177, 202, 223.
 25

The concept of typology...may be defined and distinguished from other

methods of interpretation as follows: Only historical facts—persons, actions,
events, and institutions—are material for typological interpretation; words and
narratives can be utilized only insofar as they deal with such matters. These
things are to be interpreted typologically only if they are considered to be
divinely ordained representations or types of future realities that will be even
greater and more complete.37

Goppelt then traces the mutual opposition of these tropes in Christian

history, measuring each period according to the relative importance it

placed on both tropes. As Farrar did for "sound" and "unsound"

interpretation (i.e., interpretation based on general and specific doctrines of

inspiration), Goppelt thereby places typology and allegory in a historical

trajectory. Allegory

had previously been employed by the Stoics in their interpretation of myths

and was passed on to the church largely through the writings of Alexandrian
Jews. The Alexandrian Christians, whose most outstanding representative was
Origen, made allegorizing predominant in the church’s exposition of
Scripture.38

The exception to the centrality of allegory in the interpretation of the early

church were the Antiochenes, whose “sober exegesis...advocated typology

as a suitable middle ground between the wooden literalness of Jewish

exposition and allegorical fictions. But they were not able to win out.”39

For the next thousand years, Goppelt continues, the church was under

the authoritative yet “arbitrary” exegesis of the four senses of scripture,

which was the legacy that “Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome” left to

37Ibid. 17-18; see also 145: “The historicity of the rock is destroyed by Philo’s allegorical
interpretation in which he relates the rock to wisdom and the Logos.”
38Ibid. 6.

39Ibid.
 26

it.40 This situation only changed for the better, “at the beginning of the

Protestant Reformation,” when, “Luther broke away from the idea of a

fourfold meaning of Scripture...He repudiated allegory and embraced

typology.”41 Goppelt views his own work as a direct outgrowth of the most

recent stage of typological interpretation: nineteenth-century Old Testament

theologians. “In the nineteenth century after the overthrow of the

Enlightenment, the example of the NT induced church theologians to once

again seek a typological interpretation of the OT.”42

At this point, the parallels between Goppelt's work and Farrar and

Fairbairn's should be apparent: he classifies the history of exegesis into

similar geographical and temporal categories, views allegory and typology

as mutually opposed modes of reading scripture, and sees divine sanction in

the latter and profane influence in the former. Further, he sees himself as an

heir to nineteenth-century Old Testament theology—he cites Fairbairn

approvingly—and so his work can be seen as materially and formally

influenced by these two.43

In Lampe and Woolcombe’s 1957 work, Essays in Typology, we also find

numerous points of contact with the work of Farrar and Fairbairn. First,

40Ibid.

41Ibid.

42Ibid. 7; see esp. 8-15.

43Ibid. 13.
 27

there is the strict separation between typology and allegory on historical and

theological grounds.

Typological exegesis is the search for linkages between events, persons or

things within the historical framework of revelation, whereas allegorism is the
search for a secondary and hidden meaning underlying the primary and
obvious meaning of a narrative.44

And we also find, as in Goppelt, the correlation of typological and

allegorical interpretation with the geographical areas of Alexandria and

Antioch:

The Antiochene Fathers had an infinitely greater respect for the continuity of
the biblical narratives than the Alexandrians, and therefore consistently used
typology as an historical method of exegesis. The Alexandrians always had a
tendency to confuse historical typology with symbolic typology or allegorism,
and consequently to overlay the search for historical patterns in God’s
redemptive work with the search for hidden meanings which belonged to the
world of nohtã.45

Further, the inferiority of Alexandrian allegory is not in any way related

to authentic Christian interpretation. As we saw in Goppelt, Lampe and

Woolcombe shield pure Christian exegesis from the error of allegory by

constructing a genealogy that locates the genesis-point of allegory outside of

Christianity.

If it can be claimed for typology, in the sense of the recognition of historical

correspondences, that it is grounded upon the Biblical writers’ own
understanding of history, allegory must be referred to Hellenistic ideas about
the correspondence of the earthly order as the shadow with the intelligible
sphere as the reality, to the Alexandrian tradition of moralizing allegorization
of the Homeric poems, and to a lesser extent to Rabbinic exegesis with its
disregard of the context and original meaning of proof-texts.46

44Lampe and Woolcombe 1957 40.

45Ibid. 72.
46Ibid. 32.
 28

Authentic Christian exegesis, then, is typological and is diametrically

opposed to allegory, which is part of the Christian tradition only by way of

infiltration from without (Hellenism, Philo, Rabbinism).

Lampe and Woolcombe’s concluding summary is worth citing in full

here, as it sets forth concisely and openly all the categories found in Farrar

and Fairbairn and situates them in the New Testament and early-Christian

period.

The principles which determined the use of historical typology in the Bible,
and in the writings of those Fathers who followed the Biblical rather than the
Hellenistic tradition of typological exegesis, seem to have been:

1. To confine typology to the search for historical patterns within the

historical framework of revelation.

2. To reject spurious exegesis and Hellenistic allegorism as means of

discerning the patterns.

3. To insist that the identity between the type and antitype must be real and
intelligible.

4. To use it solely for expressing the consistency of God’s redemptive

activity in the Old and New Israel. 47

Having looked at two examples of a theologically grounded

appropriation of Farrar and Fairbairn, I wish to turn now to those

contemporary scholars who adopt these approaches without a self-

consciously theological agendum.48 On the whole, their work has been more

influential on the study of early Christian exegesis—especially in Anglo-

47Ibid. 75.
48Interested readers can investigate the subject further in Westermann 1963 (see esp. 21,
51, 78, 227, and 244); Bodensieck 1965 240-41, 250; McDonald, Magner, and McGuire et al.
1967 351-52; and Ellis 1991.
 29

American circles—than the theologians surveyed above. In large part, this is

because their lack of driving theological concerns allows them to analyze

exegesis in itself, rather than particular theological difficulties as illustrated

in exegetical texts. As we will see, however, despite their focus on exegetical

(as opposed to theological or doctrinal) issues, their continued use of the

approaches found in Fairbairn and Farrar imparts unintended theological

dimensions to their work.

R.P.C. Hanson, although he is not primarily concerned with theology,

owes his historical and hermeneutical frameworks for the study of ancient

exegesis to the work of Farrar and Fairbairn as much as the more

theologically-oriented scholars do. Alexandria and Palestine as locales that

gave rise to distinctive, cross-cultural styles of exegesis—a central thesis of

Farrar’s lectures—is one of the two fundamental assumptions driving

Hanson’s Allegory and Event. And Hanson’s sharp distinction between the

categories of typology and allegory—his other driving, fundamental

assumption—is a product of Fairbairn’s work. Essentially, he takes the

nineteenth-century theories of typology and allegory put forward by

Fairbairn and others and weaves them into Farrar’s historical tapestry. This

is not in the service of self-conscious theological aims—as it was for Goppelt

and Lampe and Woolcombe—but rather to study exegesis per se. Yet, as we

will see in great detail, his use of critical terms without a revision of the
 30

theory and method that they originally supported creates a number of

tensions in his work, such that his particular approach can be of little use to

the contemporary study of exegesis.

Hanson begins Allegory and Event, a detailed study of Origen’s exegesis,

with a clear and precise definition of a type, which, incidentally, is paired

negatively with his definition of an allegory.

Typology is the interpreting of an event belonging to the present or recent past

as the fulfillment of a similar situation recorded or prophesied in Scripture.

Allegory is the interpretation of an object or person or a number of objects or

persons as in reality meaning some object or person of a later time, with no
attempt made to trace a relationship of ‘similar situation’ between them.49

These tropes, as he defines them, are as unliterary as they were in Goppelt:

“typology is the interpreting of an event” and “allegory is the interpretation

of an object or person”—nowhere in these definitions is a text mentioned.

Hanson thereby centers his analysis not on the literary comparison of two

textual elements, e.g., Noah and Jesus or the lÒgow and the Good, but rather

on the objects picked out by the language of the text, i.e., the events, objects,

or persons signified therein.

Consequently, the main difference between allegory and typology for

Hanson has to do with the historical character of the referents of each trope.

Typology deals with things that occur, i.e., historical episodes, whereas

allegory deals with isolated textual elements that, insofar as they are not

integrated into an event, are unhistorical and sometimes even antihistorical.

49Hanson 1959 7.
 31

In addition, allegory makes no claims, according to Hanson, that the two

things linked by the exegete share “similar situations”. For example:

Hellenistic allegory was characterized by being entirely unhistorical; it took no

account at all of the historical situation, and very little of the original meaning
of the material allegorized. It was not only arbitrary; it required no sense of
history at all; the results of its allegorization were general statements of a
philosophical or psychological or scientific nature. What we have called
typology was wholly unknown to it. 50

The historical character of Hanson's distinction between typology and

allegory is similar—as Goppelt's was—to Fairbairn’s work. As we look

again at his definition of types, notice how similar it is to Hanson’s:

There are two different modes, in which scripture has been thus allegorized.
According to one mode, facts and circumstances, especially those recorded in
the Old Testament, have been applied to other facts and circumstances, of
which they have been described as representative. According to the other mode,
those facts and circumstances have been described as mere emblems...An
allegory, as already observed, is a fictitious narrative; a type is something real.
An allegory is a picture of the imagination; a type is a historical fact. 51

The difference between types and allegories for both Hanson and

Fairbairn is their historicity. However, because Hanson’s idea of history is

radically different than Fairbairn’s, his distinction between these tropes is

problematical. As stated above, for Fairbairn, types are true not simply

because they are historical facts, but because God himself ordained them:

they are historical facts that God orchestrated and He thus guarantees their

50Ibid. 62; cp. 82-83: “Paul is not [in Gal. 4.24f.] trying to emancipate the meaning of the
passage from its historical content and transmute it into a moral sentiment of philosophical
truth, which is the almost invariable function of Alexandrian allegory...[Paul’s] motives for
using [allegory] were, as far as we can discover, far from being those of the Alexandrians,
and especially Philo, who wanted by allegory to avoid the necessity of taking historical
narrative seriously”; see also 95, discussing Acts 7.1-53.

51Fairbairn 1855 2-4.

 32

validity. For Hanson, in contrast, types are true solely because they have to

do with “historical facts”. He doesn’t mention the providence of God

anywhere in his analysis.52

But according to Fairbairn and Marsh—who first used the definitions of

allegory and type that Hanson is drawing on—without divine ordinance

typology is no different than allegory. From the purely human perspective,

it is impossible to distinguish true types (those really meant to prefigure)

from false (those that simply appear to prefigure). As Bishop Marsh

explains:

Destitute of that authority [i.e., a scriptural proof that a type is ordained by

God], we may confound a resemblance, subsequently observed, with a
resemblance pre-ordained: we may mistake a comparison, founded on a mere
accidental parity of circumstances, for a comparison, founded on a necessary
and inherent connection...There are no other possible means, by which we can
know, that a previous design, and a preordained connexion existed.53

Hanson, rather than using divine ordination as his criterion for

distinguishing between true and false interpretation, draws instead on

Farrar’s historical genealogy of ancient exegetical “schools”, i.e.,

Alexandrian = unsound, Palestinian = sound (or, less unsound).

52The closest he comes is his mention of a “revelation event” in the following

paragraph:
History, according to [Origen’s] view, is meaningless unless a parable is derived
from it, unless it is made into an allegory. This is not the same as saying that to history
there must be brought an interpretation or it is a mere jumble. It is to say that history is
a mere jumble unless there is brought to it this interpretation, this Philonic, allegorical
essentially anti-historical interpretation which dissolves particularity and ignores the
possibility of revelation really taking place in an event. (Hanson 1959 280)

53Marsh 1810 18.114.

 33

But we must keep in mind that Farrar and Fairbairn have opposing

theories of divine inspiration and providence. Fairbairn sees divine

providence directly guiding the literary and historical record of the

scriptures, so that events and persons in one are divinely ordained to be

types of events and persons in the other. Farrar, in contrast, sees the

scriptures as fallible human documents, historically conditioned and

limited. He does not think that God’s providential design extended to the

words of scripture: such a belief has led, he tells us, to countless absurd and

ignorant interpretations of the Bible.

Hanson’s acceptance of Farrar’s more limited, general view of divine

inspiration and providence render his definitions of typology and allegory

ineffective (and inappropriate) as critical, analytical tools because they only

function properly within the “high” doctrine of divine providence put

forward by Fairbairn and Marsh. They are less a way to critically analyze

ancient exegesis than vehicles for stressing the essential, divinely

orchestrated connection between ancient Israelite culture and literature and

Christian culture and literature.

I consider them critically inappropriate because, most importantly, they

ground Hanson’s scholarship in anti-Jewish attitudes, insofar as they are

terms designed to make apologetic claims about Christian supercession of

 34

Jewish culture.54 The following quote from Allegory and Event demonstrates

this clearly:

Those who are anxious to champion [Origen’s] doctrines in a modified form,

under the title of “the catholic doctrine of inspiration” should realize that this
doctrine derives from an Hellenistic Jew, who, although he was a
contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, never knew of his existence and never met
any of his apostles.55

Although, as my analysis has shown, Hanson’s work is compromised by

the conflicting theological presuppositions that underlie his terminology, his

intention in the work was only to discover if Origen had anything of value

for the twentieth-century Anglican intellectual.56 He approached exegesis to

see if it “made sense” to him, understanding “making sense” not in an

overtly theological way, but rather in a common-sense one: i.e., did

interpreters read the texts correctly or did they read their own ideas into

them? Nevertheless, the incompatibility of Farrar and Fairbairn's theologies

create inconsistencies in Hanson's analysis that, as we will see now, recur in

later works which adopt his general approach and framework.

One of the most important scholars influenced by Hanson's work is

Rowan Greer, who began his career with a detailed study of the theology

and exegesis of Theodore of Mopsuestia.57 Greer often cites Hanson

54I treat the more philosophical reasons for Hanson's "inappropriateness" in chapter
two, below.
55Hanson 1959 368.

56Ibid. 374.
57Theodore of Mopsuestia: Exegete and Theologian (1961).
 35

approvingly in his notes, an indication that his work, which was published

only two years after Allegory and Event, draws substantially on it. Greer,

however, examines a tradition of Christian exegesis largely ignored by

Hanson, which we have seen was fundamental to the work of Goppelt and

Lampe and Woolcombe: the exegesis of the school of Antioch. Despite the

centrality of Antioch in his work, Greer fully endorses Hanson’s

geographical classification of Palestinian and Alexandrian exegesis,

although he nuances it somewhat by differentiating between various types

of Palestinian exegesis, e.g., targumic, midrashic, and talmudic.

In considering Christian exegesis, it is necessary to realize that in great

measure that exegesis was determined by Jewish ideas on the subject...Jewish
interpretations of [scripture] may be considered under two headings. First, the
Palestinian Jews interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures largely in terms of the Law.
Second, the Alexandrian Jews were more directly influenced by such
Hellenistic phenomena as Stoic allegorization of Homer.58

Separate from these two was the school of Antioch, which consisted

primarily of “Theophilus, Paul of Samosata, Lucian, Eustathios, Diodore,

Theodore [of Mopsuestia], and John Chrysostom—and later, of course,

Nestorius, Theodoret, Ibas, et al.”59 Greer portrays the exegesis Antioch,

although “in point of fact we know very little of this tradition,” as the early

stirrings of the historical-critical sentiments of the Enlightenment. In this

respect, he tells us, it is to be distinguished from both Alexandria and

Palestine.

58Greer 1961 86.

59Ibid. 93.
 36

We may now turn to the antithesis of this Alexandrian method of exegesis,

the Antiochene tradition...The Antiochenes wished to exclude allegory, to
maintain theoria (presumably, in some sense, typology), and to insist upon the
historical basis of the scriptural text itself.60

Leaving aside Greer’s equivocation of typology and theoria, the contrasts

between Alexandria-Antioch and allegory-typology are the most relevant

aspect of this passage for our inquiry. As we can see, both contrasts are

grounded in the work of Farrar and Fairbairn, respectively, and owe a great

deal to Hanson, Goppelt, and Lampe and Woolcombe. Although Greer

presents his preference for typology over allegory in a more appealing form

than Hanson or Fairbairn, nevertheless the basis for his scientific-seeming

classification is, critically speaking, just as arbitrary.

Perhaps the most helpful way of thinking of these three methods of exegesis is
this. Typology can be considered the normative method of specifically
Christian exegesis. Allegory represents “left wing” typology, while fulfillment
of prophecy represents “right wing” typology. Admittedly, this sort of
definition is a very vague one; but it does guard itself against any kind of
specific generalization.61

The situation is much the same with other scholars, who adopt the basic

synthesis of Farrar and Fairbairn and nuance it. We need only, therefore, to

proceed rapidly through a representative sampling of such works before

turning to the scholars who are critical of the approaches of Farrar and

Fairbairn.

60Ibid. 92, 93.

61Ibid. 94.
 37

For example, John Bright, in The Authority of the Old Testament, claims

that,

[t]he result [of the church’s adoption of allegory] was a wholesale and
uncontrolled allegorizing of Scripture, specifically the Old Testament. This did
not confine itself to difficult or morally offensive passages, or to passages that
tell of something that seems unnatural or improbable, or to places where
Scripture contradicts, or seems to contradict, other Scripture; it extended itself
almost everywhere.62

There was, however, some sound exegesis in the ancient church according

to Bright: Antiochene. “The school of Antioch was far soberer in its use of

Scripture than was the rival school of Alexandria.”63 And so, as a result of

the essential differences between typology and allegory, the Antiochene

appeal to the Old Testament was intuitive rather than exegetical, a

reinterpretation of meaning on the basis of the new understanding of God’s
purpose that had been given them. They found types in the Old Testament not
as a result of grubbing through its texts in search of hidden meaning but
because they had already seen a new significance in all Israel’s history in the
light of Christ.64

Joseph Galdon’s Typology in Seventeenth-Century Literature treats biblical

typology extensively, and his methodological framework will by now be

familiar. He contrasts types and allegories and aligns them with right and

wrong interpretation:

Because of [the] neglect of the essential nature of both type and antitype as
things, typology has also often been confused and unfairly condemned with the
wild extravagances of the allegorical, symbolic, and mythical interpretations of
scripture.65

62Bright 1967 79.

63Ibid. 79, n. 51.
64Ibid. 91-92.
65Galdon 1975 33.
 38

Further, he determines right and wrong interpretation based upon the

historical character of the interpretation.

The allegorical interpretation of scripture takes little account of the

historical reality. It rests upon an interpretation of scripture which is essentially
unhistorical because it looks upon the Bible as a collection of oracles and
riddles. The outward form, or letter, of the scriptural text conceals an inner,
secret, mysterious meaning which must be discovered and analyzed by diligent
search and study. The letter of scriptures is only the outer shell which contains
and, in a sense, conceals, the real meaning. Allegory becomes the search for
these secondary and hidden meanings which underlie the primary and obvious
literal meaning of the text and which have little if any connection with the
historical context of the narrative.66

Or again, A.C. Charity, in Events and Their Afterlife, drawing on von Rad,

Eichrodt, and Hanson, discusses the effect of patristic exegesis on the

Christian tradition:

We point first to the devaluation of history and the "historic" which the
allegorical exegesis of the patristic tradition implied. It was impossible, in
Christianity, that this devaluation should take such extreme form as that which
was current in the mythopoetic religions...But the connection between this
"historic" character of the divine activity and typology was very imperfectly
realized in exegesis, and it would be hard to deny that the allegorical methods
deriving from Philo and Hellenism carry...a tendency to transpire in
propositions...which may be quite unconnected with revelation.67

We could go on to examine many other examples of the influence of

Farrar and Fairbairn on contemporary work on exegesis; it will suffice, for

reasons of space, simply to conclude by pointing the interested reader to

some significant examples.68 I want to turn now to two scholars, one English

and one French, who stridently attempt to revise the approaches I critique in

66Ibid. 34.
67Charity 1966 161-62; for his debt to other "typologists", see, e.g., 7, 22, 31.
68E.g., Buttrick 1953 1.109-111; Lampe 1969 379-80, 413-26; Kepple 1976/7 248; Barker
1983; Perriman 1993; Cross 1997.
 39

this chapter, but who, for different reasons, fail to move their work beyond

them.

Jean Daniélou, in From Shadows to Reality, is concerned to defend the

Church Fathers from Protestant scholarly disparagement and to sharpen

critical analysis of patristic exegesis.

If Origen speaks of the "vast forest of the Scriptures", how much more true is
this of the luxuriant growth of commentaries which have grown up round the
Scriptures. True enough that attempts have been made to classify. The various
senses of Scripture have been grouped together. But these attempts, for want of
a scientific analysis, have often enough made matters worse, by introducing
artificial categories.69

Despite these caveats, he sets out his critique squarely within the conceptual

frameworks of Farrar and Fairbairn, applying the same terminology in his

analysis of ancient exegesis. Daniélou preserves the orthodox utility of

patristic exegesis by scapegoating Philo, who bears the blame as the genesis-

point of "extraneous" strains of Christian allegory.

This [analysis] will allow us to distinguish more clearly what in the Fathers
belongs to ecclesiastical tradition and is strictly speaking typology, and what
has origin in extraneous sources, especially in the allegory of Philo.70

From Philo, fathers like Clement, Origen, Ambrose, and Gregory of Nyssa

adopted allegory, which Daniélou, like Fairbairn and Marsh before him and

Hanson and Greer after him, considers the antithesis of true, legitimate

Christian interpretation: typology.

69Daniélou 1960 vii.

70Ibid. viii.
 40

But we find that certain of the Fathers, Clement, Origen, St Ambrose, St

Gregory of Nyssa, introduce a further theme from Genesis 2 and 3 to this
ecclesiastical and catechetical tradition, not the recalling of a historic event as
destined to form a hope based on another similar event, but a philosophy
expressed in an allegorical form. This trend, strictly philosophical, is something
quite different from typology. It goes back to Philo...Under the guise of allegory
Philo is therefore introducing Greek philosophy. This is obviously far removed
from typology.71

Using a typically Protestant understanding of late-antique exegesis,

Daniélou strives to rehabilitate important patristic intellectuals, exempting

them—or at least those aspects of their work that he considers most

important—from Protestant attack. But in so doing, Daniélou does not call

into question the foundations of the Protestant approach; he simply shifts

the dividing line between proper and improper exegesis so as to include

segments of patristic exegesis discredited by Fairbairn, Farrar, Marsh, et al.

Side by side with Biblical Theology, as an authentic development of it, and

remaining the basic element of patristic exegesis, even in those who depart
from it in various ways, we find another stream going back to Philo...This
interpretation is based on the Christological significance of Isaac. Still it is an
extension of a certain and definite incident into wider spheres, and this leads to
the approach which finds a spiritual sense in every text in Scripture. This is
quite contrary to the true spirit of typology, which is content to find types of
NT only in those events in which the divine action outlines as it were what will
later receive its fulfillment in Christ. We are close to the boundary which
divides major types which form part of the general tradition of the Church and
the private interpretations of the fathers, which may be of great spiritual value,
but cannot be considered as providing the authentic interpretation of the
Bible.72

We can see a similar approach in Daniélou's study of Origen, but as his

71Ibid. 57-58.
72Ibid. 149; see also 239: “We must not confine Origen's allegorizing to Philo's methods.
It is not to be denied that there are in his work elements borrowed from Philo, but he is also
an eminent witness of the common tradition, and this we shall endeavor to prove.”
 41

general aims there mirror his concerns in Shadows, I will simply point the

reader to some representative passages in Origen: on the rehabilitation of the

Fathers;73 on Philo/"culture of [Origen's] times" as insulator;74 and on the

distinction between allegory/unsound and typology/sound.75

Analogous difficulties impact the far-reaching recent work of the English

scholar Francis Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture,

which calls into question accepted approaches to the history of Christian

exegesis. As a critic of traditional categories, she hits the mark consistently,

especially by highlighting both the bias against figurative interpretation

among post-Reformation scholars as well as the limitations of the terms

"allegorical", "literal", and "typological" for critical analysis. For example,

The traditional categories of 'literal', 'typological' and 'allegorical' are quite

simply inadequate as descriptive tools, let alone analytical tools. Nor is the
Antiochene reaction against Alexandrian allegory correctly described as an
appeal to the 'literal' or 'historical' meaning. A more adequate approach needs
to be created.

Standard analyses in terms of 'literal', 'typological' and 'allegorical'...do not in

fact constitute an approach to method at all. Method should surely address the
mechanics employed to extract meaning, and those mechanics may be used in
any of the approaches usually treated as 'methods'.76

Further, her criticisms are not divorced from detailed historical and textual

analysis, and she makes an effort to integrate them at every turn, whether

73Daniélou 1955 viii-ix, 139, 148, 174.

74Ibid. 139-40, 161, 165, 179.
75Ibid. 165, 174, 184-85, 189, 199.
76Young 1997 2, 202.
 42

by staggering the focus of her chapters or by performing both criticism and

analysis in one stroke. For example,

What we observe in this Oration [of Gregory of Nazanius'] is a highly

developed and subtle intertextuality. What we seek is some account of how the
Bible came to be exploited in this way—indeed how such a bold use of the Bible
operated methodologically. The usual categories of literal, typological, and
allegorical are clearly inadequate to describe most of what we have observed. 77

What Young uses to describe and analyze Christian interpreters is

neither the simple opposition "allegorical-literal" nor the triad "allegorical-

typological-literal"; she rightly wishes to do away with—or at least move

beyond—such language. She instead attempts to nuance and expand

traditional terminology, which she accomplishes chiefly by attaching

adjectival modifiers to these terms (e.g., "rhetorical allegory", "prophetic

typology"), or by offering synonyms for them (e.g., "paranetic", "oracular",

"deductive").78 In conjunction with her rehabilitation of traditional

vocabulary, Young introduces the "referent" of interpretation as an

overlooked aspect of exegesis that scholars should recognize.

So the important difference between Origen and Eusebius is that Eusebius puts
greater emphasis on the long-standing tradition of prophetic reference, whereas
Origen, while incorporating that, tended to emphasize the reference to
transcendent spiritual realities rather than earthly events. Origen's exegesis
finds its apex in 'spiritual' meanings, Eusebius focuses on the 'oracular'. But the
distinction is a matter of reference, and the attempt to distinguish through the
categories of 'literal' and 'allegorical' is little more than confusing.

77Ibid. 99.
78Allegory: rhetorical, parabolic, prophetic, moral, natural/psychological, philosophical,
theological (ibid. 192); typology: exemplary, prophetic, spatial/geographical, recapitulative
(ibid. 201); synonyms: paranetic, oracular, lexical, explanatory, deductive, mimetic (ibid.
212).
 43

The difference [between Jewish and Christian interpretations of the HB] lies in
the perception of the reference of the text...the reference of texts from both Law
and Prophets could then be deduced according to this hermeneutical key.79

Yet, as radically as she formulates her constructive project, and as radical

and ground-breaking as her critique initially appears, a closer look reveals

that her work displays many of the tensions I identified in earlier scholars.

First, the exact way in which "referent" is different from "meaning" is

unclear in Young's book; and so in plainer language, it seems that Young is

claiming that the difference between Antiochene and Alexandrian or Jewish

and Christian interpretation, for example, is the meanings ("referents") they

find in the text of the Bible. Saying this, however, is not any different from

the scholarship she is critiquing.80 Both place emphasis on the results of

interpretation rather than on its strategies, the "mechanisms employed to

extract meaning."81

Second, the exact way in which her rehabilitation of traditional

terminology is effective in curing her analysis of the critical myopia she

identifies in others is also unclear. This can be seen especially in the values

she assigns to the kinds of "referents" that Alexandrians and Antiochenes

find in the Bible, namely, that the Antiochenes "sought" a "genuine",

"integral", "true", "straightforward referent", while the Alexandrians

79Ibid. 122, 128.

80E.g., Ibid. 2,4-5,165-6, 162, 211.
81Ibid. 202.
 44

"decoded" an "intellectualized", "philosophical", "token", "arbitrary" one. For

example,

Origen was happy to decode symbols without worrying about textual or

narrative coherence, and the symbols were tokens. His procedures were not
entirely arbitrary, for two reasons: the symbols were consistent, each metaphor
having a scriptural reference which could be consistently decoded; and there
was an underlying spiritual coherence, guaranteed by the unity of scripture,
and unveiled by allegory. But this meant the wording of the text found its
significance in jots and tittles over-exegeted rather than in context and flow. The
Antiochenes sought a different kind of relationship between wording and
content, style and meaning. The narrative sequence and flow of argument
mattered. The text was not a pretext for something else. It might pre-figure
something else, but it would do so "ikonically". Ikonic exegesis, I suggest, implies
some kind of genuine representation, by contrast with symbolic exegesis, where the
symbols are signs and tokens.

The question was whether the mimesis happened through genuine likeness or
analogy, an 'ikon' or image, or by a symbol, a token, something unlike which stands
for the reality. One could argue that both are types of allegory.

Origenist allegory, as we have seen, tended to take bits of the text piecemeal as
more or less arbitrary symbols of truths which provided the underlying
coherence. What the Antiochenes sought was a more integral relationship
between the coherence of text or narrative and the truth discerned by theoria or
insight...Thus 'typology' may usefully be used as a heuristic term to distinguish
interpretive or compositional strategies which highlight correspondences, not
just at the verbal level, but at the level of mimetic sign.82

Her language here and throughout her book echoes almost word-for-word

the language of the scholars I surveyed above, e.g., the contrast between

allegory-words and typology-reality (Fairbairn), between allegory-philosophy

and typology-event (Hanson), or between allegory-fanciful-arbitrary-unsound

and typology-sober-genuine-sound (Goppelt, Daniélou, Fairbairn, Hanson,

Greer, et al.), much of which she openly wishes to distance herself from.

And so her project, despite her nuanced use of allegory, typology, and

literal and her foregrounding of the "referent" of interpretation, does not

82Ibid. 184, 191, 200, emph. mine.

 45

adequately solve the methodological problems in traditional scholarship she

confronts. For the most part, this is because her critique is aimed at the

symptoms of the problem (terminology) rather than the causes of it, which

are primarily philosophical, as my analysis in chapter two will show. In the

final analysis, the constructive sections of her book conclude that the

"referents" of Alexandrian and Antiochene exegesis were different, the

former being arbitrary, symbolic, or token and the latter being genuine,

intrinsic, or ikonic. This has, admirably enough, gotten rid of the strict use of

standard terms like allegory, typology, and literal, but the basic

pattern—which I have shown to be operative at least since the middle of the

nineteenth century—of allegory/bad and not-allegory/good remains. As

she tellingly remarks in her introduction:

Debate is needed about potential criteria for distinguishing justifiable and

unjustifiable 'allegory'.

Part I shows how...exegesis was slanted by the assumption that the scriptures
formed a unity.83

As such, her constructive analysis is prevented from going as far as her

able critique goes, because it is grounded in the use of an arbitrary scale

(from "justifiable" interpretation to "unjustifiable" or "slanted"), according to

which she judges past exegetes. "What rules," Young's book, despite her

successful criticisms of the dominant approach to the study of exegesis, "is

83Ibid. 3, 7; emph. mine.

 46

an overwhelming concern for assigning value, rather than intellectual

significance, to the results of comparison."84

OTHER APPROACHES: THOMAS LUXON AND DAVID DAWSON

A number of scholars have directly addressed the kinds of problems I

have pointed to in the work of twentieth-century scholars in this chapter,

but two in particular have put forward critiques directly relevant to my

argument: Thomas Luxon and David Dawson.85 Luxon is a professor of

English at Dartmouth College, and his work Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory

and the Reformation Crisis in Representation, is an analysis of Bunyan’s

writings. The question he seeks to answer in the book is:

if John Bunyan’s work, as has been generally supposed, represents a kind of

literary flowering of English Puritanism, a Puritanism theologically rooted in
Calvin and Luther as anglicanized and popularized by the sectarian
movements of the revolutionary years, than what is he doing writing
allegory?86

To answer this, he presents a sustained critique of sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century Protestant hermeneutics, with special attention to the

development of typology as a trope distinguished from and opposed to

84Smith 1990 46.

85For example, Barr 1966; Sandmel 1979b; J. Z. Smith 1990; Boccaccini 1993; and Craffert
1993.

86Luxon 1995 ix.

 47

allegory. He argues that typology was a way for Protestant hermeneutics,

which placed the highest priority on utilizing only the literal, historical, or

plain sense of scriptures, to incorporate figurative meanings in its

understanding of the Bible.

The principle dodge that allowed Protestantism to attack allegorical

interpretation as a “licentious system” devised by Satan and the equivocating
“Papists” while simultaneously preserving the absolute otherness of God and
“the world which is to come” is called typology. I call it a dodge because it is
largely a euphemism for allegory designed to mask Protestantism’s continued
commitment to allegorical structures of thought and representations of reality
or truth even as it constituted itself under the anti-allegorical banner of the one
true literal sense of God’s Word.87

Their inclusion of figurative meanings under the heading of types,

concomitant denial that such interpretations were anything but “literal”,

and sharp division they drew between types and allegories had serious

repercussions for Protestant hermeneutics.

...Christianity’s two-world ontology requires an allegorical discourse, and...the

banner of literalism, or the “one true sense of Scripture,” under which the
Reformers marched had the effect, not of dispensing with allegorical modes of
thought, but of installing a denial of Christianity’s allegorical structures, a
denial that prompted a crisis in Reformation theories of representation more
generally.88

However, without types, he insists, Protestant hermeneutics would have

undergone more than a crisis, it would have collapsed: the structure of the

Christian world view is inherently allegorical, figurative, and metaphorical,

and so the drive towards an exclusively literal understanding of scripture

87Ibid. 40.
88Ibid. 34.
 48

would have undermined Christianity itself.89 This, he argues, is the reason

for the virulent attacks against seventeenth-century religious radicals like

William Franklin and Mary Gadbury, who called attention to the

fundamental tensions in Protestant, especially Puritan, hermeneutics by

claiming that scripture itself was simply “allegorical ‘types and shadows’”

and that they themselves were literally Christs.90 As he explains:

Even though reformers from Luther to Milton abominated allegory and

allegorical interpretations of God’s Word, and even though they announced
allegiance to a literalist hermeneutics, these attitudes proved impossible, in
practice, to square with the insistently allegorical metaphysics of Christianity.91

Acording to Luxon, then, typology is simply allegory that denies it is

allegory. He argues that the commonly acknowledged differences between

it and allegory—historical vs. philosophical, real vs. imagined, event vs.

idea—are not substantial: “the real reality signified in typology turns out to

be every bit as ahistorical, spiritual, eternal, timeless, ever present, (and so,

historically speaking, ever absent) as God and his majesty, the very things

typology was first defined as prohibited from figuring.”92

89“[R]eformed Christianity, for all its insistence on literalism, remains profoundly

committed to an allegorical ontology. It is incessantly about the business of othering. It
others the self and the world into God’s allegory of himself and his kingdom; it others the
past as an allegory of the present and the present as an allegory of the future. And
Christianity’s names for the other, whether it be the old self, the other of the past, or the
other of the present (as viewed from eternity), are the Jew, the Synagogue, the “carnal”
Jerusalem, the whore, the flesh, and the world. In short, Reformation thought allegorizes
the Christian much as medieval theology allegorized ancient Israel” (ibid. 26).

90Ibid. 20-21.
91Ibid. 38.
92Ibid. 53.
 49

Although he does not go as far as Luxon does towards an anti-

Protestant, anti-typological stance, David Dawson, a professor of Religion at

Haverford College, shares the insights of Literal Figures that bear on the

review of scholarship I presented above. In Allegorical Readers and Cultural

Revision in Ancient Alexandria, a comparison of the allegorical exegesis of

Philo, Valentinus, and Clement of Alexandria, Dawson defines textual

meaning as a relation between individual, text, and society.

“Meaning”...is a construct of readers who seek to use texts to accomplish

certain ends, to satisfy certain desires. “Meaning” is thus a thoroughly
rhetorical category—it designates the way composers of allegory and
allegorical interpreters enact their intentions toward others through the
medium of a shared text. Consequently, although the ‘literal sense’ has often
been thought of as an inherent quality of a literary text that gives it a specific
and invariant character (often, a “realistic” character), the phrase is simply an
honorific title given to a kind of meaning that is culturally expected and
automatically recognized by readers.93

For Dawson, “allegorical” and “literal” do not refer to a relation between

interpreter and text, but rather between interpreter and reader. Allegory

challenges what readers expect from a text, the so-called “literal” meaning,

and is not therefore a wrong or false, but simply an unexpected,

interpretation. It is simply a way to challenge or support culturally

sanctioned readings of a text, and Dawson sees this challenge as a rhetorical

operation performed by an interpreter aimed at a reader or readers.

However, Dawson points out, allegory does not merely displace or

supplant the expected meaning, but instead always exists in tension with it.

93Dawson 1992 7-8.

 50

Consequently, one can understand the character and function of allegory

only in relation to its necessary “other,” traditionally called the “literal

sense” or “literal meaning.” Whether as a mode of reading or as a kind of

composition, allegory always appears with the literal sense, which it may

accompany, revise, or displace.94

If there is not a perception of a “literal” or expected sense does not accompany

the allegorical sense offered by the interpreter, Dawson argues, the allegory
“simply becomes a literal sense itself—either the old literal sense it once
challenged or the new literal sense readers now take it to be.”95

Furthermore, just as Dawson locates the distinction between

“allegorical” and “literal” in the relation between interpreter and reader

rather than between interpreter and text, he also finds the difference

between the categories of “allegory” and “typology” in that interpersonal

relation. Based on this essentially rhetorical understanding of the typology-

allegory distinction, he asserts that, “the decision to divorce typology from

allegory has obscured the underlying formal similarity of the two

procedures by focusing on material theological considerations.”96 These

“material theological considerations” first arose in the Reformation era,

94Ibid. 7.
95Ibid.

96Ibid. 16.
 51

Dawson asserts.97 As proof, he offers one of the earliest definitions of types

that distinguished them from allegories, that of J. Gerhard (1582-1637):

A type [tupus] exists when the Old Testament puts forward some fact in order
to foresignify or adumbrate something done or to be done in the New
Testament. An allegory exists, when either the Old or the New Testament
expounds something in a new sense and accommodates it to a spiritual
doctrine or new institution. A type consists in the collation of facts. An allegory
is concerned not so much with facts as with the conceptions themselves, from
which it extracts useful and recondite doctrine.98

From here, Dawson goes on to outline his approach to the study of

allegory, which, as one might expect from his attention to the rhetorical

aspects of interpretation, incorporates post-modern literary criticism and

sociological theories. In presenting my own approach below to the

hermeneutical issues Dawson and Luxon have identified (ch. 2), I will have

more to say on this subject. For now, however, I wish to close my

consideration of Allegorical Readers by presenting Dawson's critique of the

study of allegory, which dovetails with my analysis of nineteenth- and

twentieth-century studies of exegesis.

Dawson identifies three lines of debate in the study of allegorical

exegesis: defensive vs. positive allegory, allegory vs. symbol, and allegory

vs. typology.99 The first two, he points out, are debates native to the study of

Classics and English literature, respectively. The last is a debate fostered by

97“The claim for the uniqueness of typological meaning and its essential distinction
from, and incompatibility with, allegory arose...in large part as a result of Reformation
polemic against the use of allegory” (ibid. 15).

98J. Gerhard, Loci Theologici, cit. and tr. in Dawson 1992 255.
99Dawson 1992 11-12.
 52

Christian theologians and is therefore of greatest relevance to the material I

presented above. Dawson’s observations about the rise of typology as a

category are, therefore, worth citing in full:

The contrast between allegory and typology grew out of an ancient

discrimination of various “levels” of meaning in scripture, a discrimination
rooted in the difference between Hebrew scripture as “Old” Testament and
early Christian literature as “New” Testament, a distinction produced in large
part by christological exegesis of Hebrew scripture. But the claim for the
uniqueness of typological meaning and its essential distinction from, and
incompatibility with, allegory arose much later, in large part as a result of
Reformation polemic against the use of allegory. Theological preferences for
typological, rather than allegorical, ways of reading scripture reflect a desire to
preserve the historicity of the persons and events depicted in Hebrew scripture,
the “types” of which are thus not entirely negated and replaced by
corresponding Christian “antitypes.” This desire in turn reflects concern to
preserve the underlying continuity of Judaism and Christianity, the distinction
of both from Greek (and modern, secular) culture, and the concrete reality of
divine action and self-identification (i.e., revelation) in history.100

As I think it is clear from my analysis of the work of Fairbairn and Farrar

and from of the critiques of Dawson and Luxon, nineteenth-century writers

had conscious, deliberate motivations for, as they called it, “rehabilitating”

the study of types, which had fallen into disrepute. The twentieth-century

scholars I have surveyed here all, in various ways, adopt terminology or

classifications from this successful "rehabilitation" in order to approach the

study of Christian exegesis. And all of them, in spite of my sometimes

strident criticisms, have also contributed positively to the study of exegesis

at the close of the twentieth century. My analysis is not meant as an

invalidation of their work, but rather as one way to take the criticisms of

Dawson and Luxon seriously and, by honestly reevaluating past

 53

scholarship, better discern fruitful directions for the continued development

of the present-day study of exegesis.

Further, the tensions in method and terminology that I have pointed out

in the modern study of Christian exegesis are not unique or even atypical;

such tensions are a normal component of disciplinary growth, as historians

of science have frequently remarked.101 The gradual shift of intellectual aims

and presuppositions beneath a stable lexicon of technical terms is a common

result of the vibrant intellectual debates of a scholarly community. But in

order for their debates to remain vibrant, such tensions need to be

addressed and, ultimately, resolved.

As I have argued in this chapter, terminology that is fundamental to the

study of exegesis today was forged in the nineteenth century to answer

intellectual questions very different from those that interest us. The

categories of "typology" and "allegory" worked for Farrar and Fairbairn

because they were defined so as to assist their stated cognitive aims: to

restore the organic, divinely ordained connection between Old and New

Testaments (Fairbairn) and to refute the doctrine of specific divine

inspiration (Farrar). These terms have been appropriated in the late-

100Ibid. 15.
101See,e.g., Ritvo 1997 30 on the persistence of "chain" and "link" metaphors long after
the theory of the Chain of Being had been abandoned in theoretical biology; Hennig 1966 5-
9 on the continued use of "individual" as a term in phylogenetic systematics, when scientists
have long suspected the misleading abstraction this entails; and Laudan 1987 20 for the
influence of outdated mineral classifications ("earths", "metals", "salts", and "bituminous
substances") on the emergence of geology in the eighteenth century.
 54

twentieth century and applied to intellectual tasks quite different from—and

in some cases at odds with (Daniélou, Hanson, and Young)—those of earlier

periods.

Following Dawson and Luxon, I want to focus critical energy at

remedying the problems caused by the continued use of these terms in the

study of exegesis (particularly in Anglo-American circles), since, as I have

tried to show, the classifications proposed by Farrar and Fairbairn are still

operative with, at best, only slight modifications. As the text study I present

below (ch. 3) will demonstrate, we can move past their work and reclassify

even the most seemingly typical examples of their systems along new lines.

But this cannot be done by simply altering this or that detail, by placing

allegory in quotes, or by using the terms in a more intuitive, "natural"

way—or conversely, using them in more rigorous, scientific ways (as Young

has done). Rather, self-conscious, deliberate revisions in theory and method

are needed. This chapter has pointed to a number of tensions in our critical

vocabulary; the next explores the philosophical roots of these tensions: our

understanding of the interpretive situation as the recovery of the original or

intended meaning of a text. I will offer there an alternative understanding of

the interpretive situation, one which presents a way out of the dilemmas

encountered in the scholarship I surveyed and which is drawn from recent

work in the history of religions, literary criticism, and philosophical

hermeneutics: exegesis-as-application.
 CHAPTER TWO

From Recovery to Application:

Contemporary Approaches to the Problem of Reading

As long as astronomers regarded the movements of the heavenly bodies as

the structure of astronomy, they naturally regarded their own point of view
as fixed. Once they thought of movement as itself explicable, a
mathematical theory of movement became the conceptual framework, and
so the way was cleared for the heliocentric solar system and the law of
gravitation. As long as biology thought of animal and vegetable forms of
life as constituting its subject, the different branches of biology were largely
efforts of cataloging. As soon as it was the existence of forms of life
themselves that had to be explained, the theory of evolution and the
conceptions of protoplasm and the cell poured into biology and completely
revitalized it.1

In this quote—from a work that sought to realign the aims and methods

of literary criticism—Northrop Frye describes an important moment in the

development not just of the physical and biological sciences, but of any

intellectual discipline: methodological shift. There are times, this quote

suggests, when scholars working in a particular discipline reconsider what

their proper objects of study are, what constitute legitimate methods of

1Frye 1957 15.

55
 56

classification and analysis, and what intellectual problems or questions they

should address. Such reconsiderations, Frye points out, often issue in a

revitalization of the kind of work undertaken in that field (heliocentric

cosmology, evolutionary theory, and cell biology).

Although scholars have usually viewed such methodological shifts as a

development from an immature to a mature stage in the history of a

discipline—or from pre-scientific to scientific pursuits—a number of

historians of science recently have suggested that such methodological shifts

are neither products of naive or early stages of a discipline nor once-for-all

events in a given area of study; rather, problems relating to theory, method,

data, classification, and the proper or fruitful relations between them are an

integral and ongoing part of any vibrant intellectual discipline.2

The study of exegesis is no exception to these patterns of development.

As I argued in the last chapter, approaches and terms currently in use—and

which nowadays almost carry the weight of common sense—were adopted

to solve intellectual problems radically different than those of many

contemporary scholars of exegesis. The theological aims of men like Farrar

and Fairbairn are quite removed from the twentieth-century study of

exegesis, and so the continued use of typology and allegory—even in works

avowedly critical of the standard approaches—seriously compromises the

2See, e.g., Laudan 1987 85 and her discussion of both sides of recent debate.
 57

success of contemporary studies of exegesis, for all the reasons I sketched at

the close of chapter one.

And, as I also suggested, what is needed is a realignment of terminology

and method, which we might fruitfully understand as analogous to those in

the natural sciences Frye describes above. Like sixteenth-century physics

and nineteenth-century biology, the study of exegesis today is in transition

because many of its fundamental assumptions have been called into

question, in part, by scholarship in other fields, such as philosophy, literary

criticism, and the history of religions. In order for the study of exegesis to

complete the methodological shift that has already begun and to benefit

from these advances in other fields, then, historians of exegesis must

reevaluate their methods, beginning with the way they understand the very

situation of interpretation itself. It is my goal in this chapter to do so by first

presenting some of the advances made in these other fields that I feel can

most effectively broaden the contemporary study of exegesis; I then suggest

a revision of the study of exegesis that, to my mind, resolves the tensions

that result from the continued use of typology and allegory as critical tools.
 58

DIVINATION AND HERMENEUTICS: PAUL RICOEUR AND JONATHAN

SMITH

I want to begin with a consideration of Paul Ricoeur, who, in

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, is concerned to explore the nature and

structure of hermeneutics in dialogue with post-Enlightenment philosophy,

in particular the thought of Schliermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer.

Fundamental to Ricoeur's analysis there is the distinctive character of written

over against spoken language. The latter is characterized by the simultaneous

presence of the speaker, the hearer, the words spoken, and the world

"pointed to" by the speech act. The former, although seeming "only to

introduce a purely external and material factor: fixation" into the discursive

character of dialogue, in fact completely alters the kind of communication

that takes place.3 Textuality "divides the act of writing and the act of reading

into two sides, between which there is no communication. The reader is

absent from the act of writing; the writer is absent from the act of reading.

The text thus produces a double-eclipse of the reader and the writer."4

What results from this eclipse, especially after the death of the author, is

that "the relation to the book becomes complete and, as it were, intact. The

author can no longer respond; it only remains to read his work."5 In

3Ricoeur 1981 139.

4Ibid. 146-7.
5Ibid. 147.
 59

approaching a text from this side of the eclipse, the reader must explode the

"psycho-sociological conditions" of its creation (the intention of the author as

well as the world pointed to by the work) in order to understand it, which

for Ricoeur is to "recontextualize" the text in a new situation through "the act

of reading."6

He speaks of this "recontextualization" as the "application" (Aneignung)

of a text to the situation of the reader:7 "According to the intention of the

word, the aim of all hermeneutics is to struggle against cultural distance and

historical alienation."8 But, Ricoeur is quick to point out, the interpreter does

not do so by finding the original meaning of the text, whether construed as

the author's intention or the meaning the text had for its first audience.

Rather, "interpretation brings together, equalises, renders contemporary and

similar" without recourse to the meanings the text might have once had for

its author or audience.9

Ricoeur's philosophical considerations of the hermeneutical situation

have suggestive overlap with Jonathan Z. Smith's ethnographic work on

divination and canonical exegesis. In a short essay entitled "Sacred

Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon," Smith presents a description

6Ibid. 139.
7Ibid. 185.
8Ibid.

9Ibid.
 60

and analysis of Yoruba and Ndembu divination practices.10 The diviner,

faced by the problem brought to him by a client, consults a fixed number of

sacred objects (Yoruba: 16 palm nuts; Ndembu: 24 figurines) which have a

range of oracular poems associated with them. The diviner, after

manipulating the objects (dropping nuts or shaking figurines from a basket),

arrives at a poem or poems to be applied to the situation of his client.

In the Ndembu tradition, the diviner and his client then seek a "fit"

between the poems suggested by the manipulation of the objects and the

situation at hand.11

What enables the fixed canon of divinatory objects in the diviner's basket to
be applied to every possible situation or question is not the number of
objects...nor the breadth of their range of meanings. Rather...the diviner has
rigorously questioned his client in order to determine the...situation with
precision...[This] application...is not a generalized systematic process, but a
homiletic endeavor, a quite specific attempt to make the "text" speak to a
quite particular situation.12

The Ndembu diviner makes the closed canon of divinatory symbols

meaningful, Smith tells us, not by accessing the "original" meaning of these

symbols, but rather by recontextualizing them in such a way that they

"speak" to a new situation through his act of reading. Or, as Ricoeur says:

above all, the characterization of interpretation as appropriation is meant to

underline the 'present' character of interpretation. Reading is like the
execution of a musical score; it marks the realisation, the enactment, of the
semantic possibilities of the text...Indeed, the feature of realisation discloses

10Smith 1982 36-52.

11InYoruba divination, the diviner knows nothing of the client's situation, and so, as
Smith points out, the interpretive dynamic is similar to Chinese divination using the I
Ching.

12Smith 1982 50-51; emph. mine.

 61

a decisive aspect of reading, [namely, that] the sentences of a text signify a

here and now. The 'actualised' text finds a surrounding and an audience; it
resumes the referential movement—towards a world and towards
subjects.13

For both Ricoeur and Smith, then, the structure of the interpretive

situation entails, at the very least, a text, an interpreter, and an audience. Yet in

the case of canonical interpretation, there must be more, for if there were

only these three, nothing would prevent the interpreter from becoming an

author, from creating a new document in order to overcome the

inconsistencies of the text at hand.14

As Smith expresses it, tradition is this "something more". It discourages

the hermeneute from becoming an author by transforming culturally

significant texts into a canon, thereby fixing such texts with considerable

authority.

A canon cannot exist without a tradition and an interpreter. That is to say,

without the public lexicon and the explicit engagement in application, the
closure of canon would be impossible.15

In addition to limiting what texts constitute the canon, tradition prescribes a

variety of acceptable, “orthodox” uses—by de-limiting the situations and

the issues to which the canon is applicable—and proscribes a variety of

"unorthodox" uses—by instituting strong taboos against its out-and-out re-

13Ricoeur 1981 159.

14Although, as Smith notes, "in some complex situations, there may be a further need to
develop parallel, secondary traditions that will recover the essentially open character of the
list or catalog," for example the New Testament, Qu'ran, or Book of Mormon (Smith 1982
50).

15Ibid. 49.
 62

writing and punishing deviations from orthodox methods of interpretation

or application. There are always, of course, opportunities to exercise

innovation inside of these proscriptions and to subvert traditional forms,

but such innovative activity is strictly regulated: “the broad semantic field is

never violated...although some debate about this or that possibility of

interpretation is possible.”16

Using Ricoeur's language, we might say that the referential movement of

a text toward a world and toward subjects that the hermeneute occasions is,

in the situation of canonical interpretation, guided by the ideological

authority of tradition.

All ideology is simplifying and schematic. It is a grid or code for giving an

overall view, not only of the group, but also of history and, ultimately, the
world.17

Ideology is "the interpretive code...in which men live and think" for

Ricoeur.18 And although he is mainly concerned with rescuing ideology

from the negative appraisals it has received from Marxist and post-colonial

scholars, Ricouer's ideas, once again, provide a philosophical framework for

Smith's more historically-grounded ones.

All interpretation takes place in a limited field; but ideology effects a

narrowing of interpretation which characterized the original momentum of
the event. In this sense we may speak of ideological closure.19

16Ibid. 50.
17Ricoeur 1981 226.
18Ibid. 227.
19Ibid. 227-8.
 63

Ricoeur's exploration of the "play" of reading and writing (drawn self-

consciously from Gadamer) provides another, more philosophical way of

expressing Smith's ideas about the role of tradition.20 Tradition is analogous

to the rules of a game, i.e., the boundaries of the enterprise in which

hermeneute, client, and audience are participants. The hermeneute's

appropriation of the canonical text to a current situation, like any attempt at

play, is determined by the rules of the game, by the acceptable limits of

tradition.

Whoever plays is also played: the rules of the game impose themselves
upon the player, prescribing the to and fro (hin und her) and delimiting the
field where everything 'is played'.21

This idea of play, however, is not meant to describe a closed system. For

Ricoeur, play expresses the way that humans become more than what they

presently are. "In playful representation, 'what is emerges'. But 'what is' is

no longer what we call everyday reality; or rather, reality truly becomes

reality, that is, something which comprises a future horizon of undecided

possibilities."22

Smith also does not view traditional sanctions on hermeneutical freedom

as stifling. For him, the limits of tradition are an important (if not necessary)

component of interpretation, as his metaphor of food and cuisine suggests:

20Gadamer 1989 101-110.

21Ricoeur 1981 186.
22Ibid. 187.
 64

without the delineation of what is and is not acceptable to eat from the

almost limitless range of what could be eaten, the pleasing and delicious

variations of cuisine would never arise. For Smith and, it would seem, for

most cultures as well, the hundreds of ways to prepare a tuber, for example,

are preferable to one recipe for each of a hundred different foods.23

The most important aspect of the work of Smith and Ricoeur is their

analytical shift away from the moment of composition and toward the

moment of interpretation. That is, rather than approaching interpretation as

the more or less successful recovery of the original or intended meaning of a

text, their work understands interpretation as the act of making a text

meaningful through its application to a contemporary situation. For this

reason, Smith does not have to consider the content of the divinatory poems

used by Yoruba and Ndembu diviners in his article. How well a diviner

understands the original meaning of such poems or how faithful he remains

to their literal sense is not an issue for Smith at all. Rather, he focuses on the

exegetical mechanisms that allow the diviner to apply the poems to a given

situation. Similarly, for Ricoeur, the author is not a consideration in the

study of hermeneutics because she cannot be: the act of writing eclipses her

and requires that her words be rendered meaningful by readers through the

23Smith 1982 40.

 65

play of application. For both Simth and Ricouer, the proper focus of the

history of exegesis and philosophical hermeneutics is the act of reading (i.e.,

making a text meaningful through application), not the act of writing (i.e.,

the recovery of the intended, original, or literal meaning of a text). As Smith

concludes:

I look forward to the day when courses and monographs will exist in both
comparative exegesis and comparative theology, comparing not so much
conclusions as strategies through which the exegete seeks to interpret and
translate his received tradition to his contemporaries.24

THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR: NORTHROP FRYE AND ITALO CALVINO

An analogous shift from writing to reading has already been made in

literary criticism. Northrop Frye, in The Anatomy of Criticism, turns his

analysis away from authors—whose meaning the critic has traditionally

been thought to discover—and toward the act of reading, i.e., making

literature meaningful through critical analysis.

The absurd quantum formula of criticism, the assertion that the critic
should confine himself to "getting out" of a poem exactly what the poet
may vaguely be assumed to have been aware of "putting in," is one of the
many slovenly illiteracies that the absence of systematic criticism has
allowed to grow up...The critic is assumed to have no conceptual
framework: it is simply his job to take a poem into which a poet has
diligently stuffed a specific number of beauties or effects, and complacently
extract them one by one.25

24Ibid. 52.
25Frye 1957 17-18.
 66

For Frye, the critic is not a detective who hunts down what the poet meant

to say in a poem. Rather, using a systematic critical framework, he finds

meanings that the words of the poem can sustain.

Commentary, which translates the implicit into the explicit, can only isolate
the aspect of meaning, large or small, which is appropriate or interesting
for certain readers to grasp at a certain time. Such translation is an activity
which the poet has very little to do. The relation in bulk between
commentary and a sacred book, such as the Bible or Vedic hymns, is even
more striking, and indicates that when a poetic structure attains a certain
degree of concentration or social recognition, the amount of commentary it
will carry is infinite.26

He is, like Smith's diviner and Ricoeur's reader, engaged in the application

of a text to a situation. In this case, however, the situation is that of the

literary critic rather than a puzzled reader or troubled client.

Further, Frye makes explicit the importance of second-order

criticism—an idea compatible with ideas in Hermeneutics and the Human

Sciences and "Sacred Persistence," but not openly expressed in either—and

does not consider it subsidiary or adjunct to the act of writing. Rather, it is

an intellectual operation distinct from but of equal importance to it:

"Criticism can talk, and the arts are dumb," and so poets and authors have

one task, critics another.27

The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a wonderful flash of critical insight, is
not heard but overheard. The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet
does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what
he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to
assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its
own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with.28

26Ibid. 87-88.
27Ibid. 4.
28Ibid. 5.
 67

The perhaps unsettling and counterintuitive result of Frye's work—that

what the author meant to say in a text is less important than what readers

say that text means—is, if looked at properly, neither unsettling nor

counterintuitive, according to Frye:

We can describe objectively what happens when a tulip blooms in spring

and a chrysanthemum in autumn, but we cannot describe it from inside of
the plant...The same would be true of criticism to the extent that criticism
has to deal with imponderables other than consciousness or logically
directed will. If one critic says that another has discovered a mass of
subtleties in a poet of which that poet was probably quite unconscious, the
phrase points up the biological analogy. A snowflake is probably quite
unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study
even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.29

We might here object that the ideas of these scholars about the eclipse of

the author, the "mute" character of the arts, or the importance of second-

order, critical discourse are the attempts of scholars to usurp the creative

primacy of authors; however, it is not exclusively scholars who have found

such ideas appealing. One fiction writer in particular whose ideas on

literature accord well with the work of Smith, Ricoeur, and Frye is the

Italian author Italo Calvino, who was also a prolific literary critic.30 His

fiction since the late-fifties has been concerned, among other things, with the

ability of language to convey meaning and the role of the reader in

literature.

29Ibid. 89.
30Calvino mentions a number of literary predecessors for his ideas (Cervantes, Flaubert,
Brecht, Cornielle, Pirandello [Calvino 1986 109, 111]), to which we could add others (e.g.,
Pinter, Albee, Woolf, Beckett). For reasons of space, I examine only Calvino's work here.
 68

For example, in the Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), travelers stranded in

a castle and an inn are under a curse that prevents them from speaking.

Despite this, they attempt to tell stories to one another using tarot cards that

they arrange in sequences along a table. The protagonist-narrator guesses at

the meaning of each tale and relates his reconstructions of the stories to the

reader, but the exact meaning in each case remains indeterminate. As he

explains at one point:

Even if [one] is the sort who knows [one's] own mind, [one's] tale is not
necessarily easier to follow than another. For cards conceal more things
than they tell, and as soon as a card says more, other hands immediately
try to pull it in their direction, to fit it into a different story. One perhaps
begins to tell a tale on his own, with cards that seem to belong solely to
him, and all of a sudden the conclusion comes in a rush, overlapping that
of other stories in the same catastrophic pictures.31

The book closes with the protagonist-narrator's own tale, which is a

reading that subverts the proposed explanations of the card sequences from

both halves of the novel. It does this using themes and imagery from Hamlet,

Macbeth, King Lear, Faust, Parsifal, Oedipus Rex, and the history of the Church

and European painting and, in so doing, subverts common-sense

understandings of them all. Through his peculiar premise in the

novel—mute authors displaying commonly-known images to an audience

who are responsible for creating their narrative meaning—Calvino stresses

the indeterminacy of language and draws attention to the active role that

such indeterminacy forces on the reader.

31Calvino 1969 71.

 69

Another example of a work that treats issues of meaning and

interpretation is Invisible Cities (1972), in which Marco Polo describes for

Kublai Khan the cities of the empire. Neither man initially speaks the other's

language, and so as the story progresses, they experiment with various

forms of non-verbal communication (gestures, props, chess-board,

telepathy), all of which, for Calvino, are more fruitful than the languages

they eventually come to share.

As time went by, words began to replace objects and gestures in

Marco's tales: first exclamations, isolated nouns, dry verbs, then phrases,
ramified and leafy discourses, metaphors and tropes. The foreigner had
learned to speak the emperor's language or the emperor to understand the
language of the foreigner.
But you would have said communication between them was less
happy than in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and
gestures...and yet when Polo began to talk about how life must be in those
places...words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on
gestures, grimaces, glances.32

Furthermore, even when Marco Polo is able to speak to the Khan about a

particular city, Calvino undermines the connection between the description

and the city described. For him, the relation between words and things (city-

description) is not what is central, but rather the relation between reader and

words (description-Khan):

"I speak and speak," Marco says, "but the listener retains only the words he is
expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is
one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the [common folk] another;
and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life if I were taken
prisoner...and put in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not
the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."33

32Calvino 1972 39.

33Ibid. 135.
 70

In both these works—and we could go on to examine others, e.g., The

Baron in the Trees (1957), t zero (1967), If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979),

or Mr. Palomar (1983)—we see that Calvino calls into question the ability of

language to communicate the meaning of an author ("the voice") while

simultaneously elevating the powers of the reader ("the ear"), who, rather

than the author, renders a piece of writing meaningful.

We also find these ideas expressed in Calvino's explicitly critical

writings. For example, as with the mute "authors" of the Castle of Crossed

Destines—and as we saw in Ricoeur's double-eclipse and Frye's statement

that "the arts are dumb"—in "Levels of Reality in Literature," Calvino

questions the idea that the author is present in an unmediated way in a text.

He suggests, instead, that the author, when writing a book, projects himself

into the work of creation just as he projects characters into the plot.

The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who
is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work.
That a person puts his whole self into the work he is writing is something
we often hear said, but it is never true. It is always only a projection of
himself that an author calls into play when he is writing; it may be a
projection of a real part of himself or the projection of a fictitious "I"—a
mask, in short. Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological
attitude, a rapport with the world, a tone of voice, a homogeneous set of
linguistic tools, the data of experience and the phantoms of the
imagination—in a word, a style. The author is an author insofar as he enters
into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection
of himself at the moment of writing.34

Furthermore, the projected "I" of the author does not hold the definitive key

to the meaning of the work. This "I" is no more privileged than any other

34Calvino 1986 111.

 71

character in the book, and so the reader must make meaning, explain

significance, and draw conclusions. In so doing, the reader will often go

beyond what the author's projected "I" seems to say about the work, just as

for Frye the critics task is not "getting out" only what the author "put in".

Consequently Calvino privileges the situation in which a text is read

over the situation in which it was composed. For him, the text is but the raw

material from which a reader builds meaning, the starting-point rather than

the goal—just as Marco Polo's descriptions are less important than the

conversation with Kublai Khan that they occasion. As Calvino puts it in

"Cybernetics and Ghosts":

Literature can work in a critical vein or to confirm things as they are and as
we know them to be. The boundary is not always clearly marked, and I
would say that on this score the spirit in which one reads is decisive: it is
up to the reader to see to it that literature exerts its critical force, and this
can occur independently of the author's intentions.35

Further, Calvino points out that a shift has occurred in our

understanding of the written as opposed to the spoken word, and his ideas

resemble Ricoeur's on the categorical difference between the two modes of

communication:

If at one time literature was regarded as a mirror held up to the world, or

as the direct expression of feelings, now we can no longer neglect the fact
that books are made of words, of signs, of methods of construction. We can
never forget that what books communicate often remains unknown even to
the author himself, that books often say something different from what
they set out to say...36

35Ibid. 26.
36Ibid. 99.
 72

And finally, as we also saw in Frye, Calvino considers the act of

writing—despite his prolific literary output and a lifetime of creative

writing—to be subordinate to the act of reading, so much so that he even

welcomes the creation of a machine that could write as well as a human can,

because this would allow us to abandon our fixation on the will of the

author and focus on what is for him most important, the reader.

What will vanish is the figure of the author, that personage to whom we
persist in attributing functions that do not belong to him...The author: that
anachronistic personage, the bearer of messages, the director of
consciences, the giver of lectures to cultural bodies. The rite we are
celebrating at this moment would be absurd if we were unable to give it the
sense of a funeral service, seeing the author off to the Nether Regions and
celebrating the constant resurrection of the work of literature; if we were
unable to introduce into this meeting of ours something of the gaiety of
those funeral feasts at which the ancients re-established their contact with
living things.37

"And so," Calvino concludes, "the author vanishes—that spoiled child of

ignorance—to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will

know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works":

the reader.38

These ideas from philosophy, history of religions, and literary criticism

suggest strongly that historians of exegesis must re-think their

understanding of interpretation. If they wish to benefit from the work in

these other fields, they cannot continue to approach exegesis as the more or

37Ibid. 15-16.
38Ibid. 15-16.
 73

less successful recovery of the original or literal meaning of texts, because,

as the above thinkers have argued, meaning is not something texts "have"

but is rather the result of a process initiated by readers. "It is not the voice

that commands the story," as Calvino states, "it is the ear."39 Readers, not

authors, allow texts to become meaningful and they do so by extending the

words of a text to the world and applying them to the situation at hand.

To judge an interpretation "allegorical" or "typological" then—in the

sense that I argue these terms have been commonly used since the

nineteenth century—makes little sense when we view interpretation as Frye,

Smith, Calvino, and Ricoeur do. When someone claims that an exegete

interprets a passage "allegorically", for example, what he usually means is

that the exegete presents a reading that runs counter to the plain-sense,

literal, or original meaning. But, since we do not have access to whatever

such meaning or intent might have been—as the exegete also did not—, in

effect, "allegorical" (as well as "typological" and "literal") simply refers to the

distance between what an exegete says a text means and our own

interpretation of it. As Dawson puts it:

[A]lthough the "literal sense" has often been thought of as an inherent

quality of a literary text that gives it a specific and invariant character...the
phrase is simply an honorific title given to a kind of meaning that is
culturally expected and automatically recognized by readers...The "literal
sense"...stems from a community's generally unself-conscious decision to
adopt and promote a certain kind of meaning.40

39Ibid. 1972 135.

40Dawson 1992 7-8.
 74

And so, as Dawson continues, "an 'allegorical meaning' obtains its identity

precisely by its contrast with this customary or expected meaning."41 When

the contrast with the cusomary or expected meaning is sufficiently great, but

a particular scholar agrees with the reading (e.g., an Old Testament event as

a prefiguration of a New Testament one), it is considered "typological"; and

if there is little or no contrast between the interpretation and the expected

meaning, it is considered "literal", as when in every-day language we speak

of the "'arm' of a chair."42

Whatever merits such an approach to exegesis may have—and it has

many for scholars of historical and constructive theology—when used in the

service of the critical analysis of interpretation, it has few. Scholarship

founded on such an approach has less to do with the description and

analysis of interpretation in and of itself than with the individual tastes of a

particular scholar. As Frye aptly notes in regard to the study of English

literature:

The various pretexts for minimizing the communicative power of certain

writers, that they are obscure or obscene or nihilistic or reactionary or what
not, generally turn out to be disguises for a feeling that the views of
decorum held by the ascendant social or intellectual class ought to be either
maintained or challenged. These social fixations keep changing, like a fan
turning in front of a light, and the changing inspires the belief that posterity
eventually discovers the whole truth about art.43

41Ibid. 8.
42Ibid.

43Frye 1957 23.

 75

The dominant approaches to the history of exegesis consist primarily of

just such value-judgments, as I illustrated in chapter one.44 Beginning with

nineteenth-century theologians, especially Farrar, scholars have been

concerned to weed out sound from unsound exegesis.45 Whether they do so

based on theological criteria (as Farrar, Goppelt, Lampe, and Woolcombe

did) or whether they do so for more strictly speaking exegetical ones (as

Young, Daniélou, Greer, and Hanson did), the results are analogous: the

analysis serves to craft a genealogy of correct or admirable readings of the

Christian Bible, which is contrasted with a twin genealogy of incorrect ones.

As Frye, once again, puts it:

Value-judgments are subjective in the sense that they can be indirectly but
not directly communicated. When they are fashionable or generally
accepted, they look objective, but that is all...every new critical fashion...has
been accompanied by a belief that criticism has finally devised a definitive
technique for separating the excellent from the less excellent. But this has
always been an illusion of the history of taste. Value-judgments are
founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be
founded on value-judgments.46

And so what is needed to move the study of exegesis forward, first of all,

is to approach exegesis as the application of a text to a situation by an exegete. As

such, we should not be concerned with the interpreter's faithfulness to the

original or literal sense of his base-text. Rather, the methods and

mechanisms by which he makes a given text meaningful should be of

44E.g., Hanson 1959 361-63; Greer 1961 94; Bright 1967 91-92; Galdon 1975 33.
45Smalley, Simonetti, Dawson, Grant, and Boccaccini are important exceptions to this
project.

46Frye 1957 20.

 76

central importance for analysis. Second, we should make no attempt to

judge the propriety or soundness of the interpretation of past exegetes.

Whether or not a particular application succeeded is always difficult to

determine—and sometimes, for lack of pertinent data, impossible—and not

central for our understanding of how an exegete renders a text meaningful.

It should be absolutely central, no doubt, when we turn from an examination

of exegesis itself to the reception of a given interpreter or to his importance

for the historical development of the church, for example. But these other

projects are quite distinct from the study of exegesis itself, which study is an

invaluable prerequisite to further considerations of the social or historical

effects of interpretation.

The aim of the historical study of exegesis, then, should not be to sift the

exegetical tradition of the West for interpretation useful to the church,

believers, or "orthodox" theology, or even to decide what constitutes

legitimate or reasonable exegesis. Such an approach to the exegetical legacy

of late antiquity is more rightly the province of historical or constructive

theology. The proper end of the study of exegesis, in contrast, is to describe

and analyze interpretation, using comparison as "a hermeneutic device...a

principle of discovery for the construction of theories or generic

categories...a methodological manipulation of...difference to achieve some

 77

stated cognitive end."47 As Goethe aptly remarked concerning the

classification and analysis of plants:

The brightest and fullest flowers, the most delicious and attractive fruits, have
no more value to the science of botany than a lowly weed in its natural setting
or a dried and useless seed capsule, and may even be of less value in a certain
sense.48

In the next chapter, I analyze three interpreters (Origen, Theodore of

Mopsuestia, and Porphyry) from the viewpoint suggested by the ideas

surveyed in this chapter (Ricoeur, Smith, Calvino, and Frye) as well as the

last (Dawson and Luxon). Through this comparison, I hope to present

constructive work on exegesis that avoids the problems I identified in

chapter one, while at the same time takes advantage of the new possibilities

suggested by the authors I examined in this chapter for the study of exegesis

in general.

47Smith 1990 46, 47.

48Goethe 1988 54.
 CHAPTER THREE

Christian Fact and Pagan Fiction:

Origen, Porphyry, and Theodore of Mopsuestia

In the first chapter, I argued that contemporary understandings of

typology and its relation to allegory are not based on ancient practice and

that the classification of Alexandrian and Antiochene exegetes according to

these categories is misleading. I suggested instead that the present-day

usages of typology, allegory, Alexandria, and Antioch are the outgrowth of

two nineteenth-century projects: to unite the Old and New Testaments into

a single semantic field (Fairbairn) and to judge and classify sound and

unsound exegesis in the Judeo-Christian tradition (Farrar).

In this chapter, I compare three late-antique exegetes without using the

categories of typology and allegory, choosing instead terms that Robert

78
 79

Grant has identified as fundamental to ancient literary criticism: flstor a,

mËyow, and plãsma.1 Furthermore, I use these terms to compare authors

(Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia) who are commonly considered the

representatives of each side of the geographical and exegetical dichotomies I

critiqued in chapter one (Alexandria-Antioch and allegory-typology).2 My

aim is to show that the historian of exegesis can operate fruitfully without

having recourse to these dominant paradigms, even when approaching the

very authors who have been used to prove their validity.

I triangulate Origen and Theodore with Porphyry, who, although he is

not discussed in any of the literature reviewed in chapter one, nevertheless

fits nicely into the text-study for two reasons. First, he had extensive

knowledge of and contacts with Christianity, which were the foundation for

his lengthy and penetrating attack on Christian theology and exegesis, Kata

Christianon.3 Second, his particular approach to the interpretation of Homer

is formally parallel to Theodore’s approach to the interpretation of the

Christian Bible, and both approaches can be seen as reactions to the kind of

arguments Origen puts forth for Christianity and against Greco-Roman

religion in the Contra Celsum.

By taking Grant’s insights seriously and using the ancient categories of

11961 120-122.
2See Goppelt 1939 4; Daniélou 1960 57-8; Hanson 1970 422; Wiles 1970 492; and Cross
1997, s.v. "Antiochene Theology".

3Ed. and tr. J. Hoffmann (1994).

 80

flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma to approach Origen, Theodore, and

Porphyry—rather than using modern understandings of allegory and

typology—we will see that they are not concerned to argue for or against the

general validity of figurative readings. For these exegetes, that literature

could have deeper or inner meanings was taken for granted. What was

debated, and what may in fact turn out to be one legitimate basis for

differentiating late-antique exegetes generally, is the protocol for

undertaking figurative interpretation, i.e., what kind of texts and what sort

of passages should be searched for deeper readings? For Origen, a text that

contained elements or passages that could not have happened (mËyow) was the

primary—although not exclusive—arena for deeper reading. He saw the

stumbling-blocks or épor ai with which the scriptures were filled as a

divine call to figurative reading.4 For Theodore, the narratives in the Bible

that described what did happen (flstor a) were the premier justification for

deeper, figurative readings. Porphyry, finally, choose plãsma, what could

have happened but did not, as the locus for allegorical interpretation.5 And so

what I will argue in this chapter is that, rather than a concern with "the facts

themselves" or for "history itself", Theodore was concerned to find a new,

4Gk. épor a: “an embarrassment, difficulty, hesitation, or perplexity” (LSJ, s.v.

"épor a").

5See Appendix: Figure 1.1.

 81

uniquely Christian ground for the figurative interpretation of the Bible, just

as Porphyry was concerned to find a uniquely non-Christian one.

flstor a, mËyow, plãsma

In The Earliest Lives of Jesus, Robert Grant points out that ancient literary

criticism was a sophisticated undertaking. Debates raged within and

between the disciplines of rhetoric, philosophy, and grammar as to the

proper way to classify and interpret literature.6 In large part these debates

centered around the definitions of flstor a and mËyow and their application

to literary texts.7 Writers like Theon and Dio were concerned with the kinds

of questions one must raise in order to test the validity of a historical

narrative, e.g., the obscurity of its language, the incredible or inappropriate

nature of the events described, the omission of necessary and the inclusion

of superfluous details, the self-contradiction of the author, the disorder of

the narrative, or the inappropriate "moral" drawn from the story.8

6Grant 1961 38-49.

7Ibid. 1961 40-44; plãsma, for the most part, was considered a close cousin of mËyow
because both of them did not happen (ibid. 122). We will see that Porphyry rethinks this
and aligns plãsma with flstor a because both had to do with what was possible, i.e.,
plãsma could have happened (but did not), and flstor a did happen.

8Ibid. 41-42.
 82

As Grant also points out, the early-Christian intellectual learned how to

analyze literature exactly like his Greco-Roman counterpart, and "the

methods he learned did not slip from his memory [when] he became a

Christian".9 We must therefore understand Christian exegesis of the second

and third centuries, Grant urges, not as simple, unlearned expressions of a

naive faith, practiced in isolation from contemporary intellectual

developments, but rather as highly polished, theoretically sophisticated

approaches to textual problems in the Christian Bible that used methods

practiced in the Greco-Roman academy of the day. As he says,

we sometimes think that textual, literary, and historical criticism were

created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or that at any rate they
were not previously applied to the gospels. By this convenient fiction, we
can present ourselves with a picture of early Christianity in which we can
see faith constantly triumphing over intelligence—a picture attractive, for
different reasons, both to the very orthodox and to the very unorthodox.10

Furthermore, I would add, when we examine Christian and pagan texts that

argue with each other over the nature of their sacred texts and over the

nature of literature and criticism generally, we may overlook aspects of the

individual works and of the debate as a whole if we ignore the larger

literary-critical discourse specific to late antiquity within which these

debates took place.

Following Grant, my analysis closely examines each author's

deployment of flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma. These terms, he tells us, were

9Ibid. 38.
10Ibid.
 83

used by literary critics to classify narratives and, as we will see in great

detail, to explain and justify the occurrence of figurative meanings in a text.

In his glossary, Grant provides Sextus Empiricus's (fl. ii AD) concise

definitions of them: "History is an account of what did take place; myth is an

account of what could not take place; fiction is an account of what did not

take place".11 Although these definitions are fairly straightforward, there

were differences in how any given writer explained the relation between

them. For example, Grant tells us, while Theon considered all three kinds of

narrative to be historical (flstor a = true history, plãsma = false history,

and mËyow = impossible history), his contemporary, Lucian, distinguished

absolutely between historical and mythical writing.12

Because these terms occupied a position of theoretical and conceptual

centrality for the ancient literary critic, such debates are to be expected.

Ancient literary critics were engaged in a constant process of classification

and reclassification, of reading and rereading, in order to allow their

conceptual framework to better "fit" the corpus of their important

literature.13 And as we turn to examine the writings of Origen, Porphyry,

and Theodore of Mopsuestia, we will see that their exegesis provides a

11Ibid. 121-2 (Sex. Emp. Adv. math. 1.263-4), emph. mine.

12Ibid. 120-21.
13On a similar process in the emerging natural sciences in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Europe, see Gould 1977 and Ritvo 1997; for more universal examples of this in
biology, see Medin and Atran 1999; for an investigation of the cognitive underpinnings of
the human urge for classification, see Atran 1990.
 84

snapshot of one particularly significant moment in the ancient debates about

the classification of literature and terminology.

ORIGEN

In attempting to silence Greco-Roman criticisms of Christian belief,

Origen's Contra Celsum presents a description of allegorical interpretation

that, because it comes from someone in the heat of exegetical and religious

polemics, is striking for its detached, almost ecumenical perspective. Origen

states that all cultures have embarrassing, crude mËyoi as their culturally

significant texts and that it is the task of all intelligent members of each

culture to use allegory to draw out the higher, more noble sense of these

narratives. Origen, unlike Porphyry and Theodore, as we will see, is

unconcerned with finding a unique ground for his interpretation. His

interest, rather, is to level the playing field, so to speak, and to characterize

all figurative interpretation—Jewish, Christian, or any other—as analogous

in theory and practice.

I wish to begin, by way of introduction and background, with a

discussion of Origen's exegetical principles in general before analyzing his

specific arguments in the Contra Celsum. The classic statement of the

principles of his interpretation is the De Principiis, a complex, multiform

 85

work that contains Origen's thoughts on fundamental Christian doctrines,

e.g., the nature of Christ, the Trinity, Hell, sin, and redemption. But for my

purposes here, I wish only to highlight the aspects that bear directly on

Origen’s debt to Greco-Roman literary criticism. An examination of the

relevant passages from the exegetical material in book four shows clearly

how fundamental the categories of flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma were for

Origen’s interpretation of scripture. Although his theological

concerns—which take up the first three-quarters of the work—are more

important to an overall understanding of the De Principiis, by analyzing

Origen’s theory of exegesis in comparison with accepted methods of late-

antique textual analysis we can better appreciate his grounding in

interpretive models that were part and parcel of Greco-Roman and Jewish

interpretation of the time.

Book four of the De Principiis is a discussion of how and why a Christian

should interpret the Bible. First, it is the most inspired of books, as shown by

its adoption by peoples all over the Mediterranean:

all over Greece and in the barbarian part of our world there are thousands
of enthusiasts who have abandoned their ancestral laws and their
recognized gods for observance of the laws of Moses and of the teaching
contained in the words of Jesus Christ.14

Furthermore, many prophecies—too many to number—have come to pass

that were foretold by the Bible, and the apostles did many daring things that

14De Princ. 4.1.1; I follow Butterworth's translation (Origen 1973), with some alterations
to highlight Origen's literary-critical usage. I follow Crouzel and Simonetti (Origen 1984)
for the Greek text of the De Principiis.
 86

they could not have were God not working through them.15 And yet despite

this, Origen tells us, "in every passage of the scriptures the superhuman

element of the thought does not appear obvious," since the activity of the

divine, whether in scripture or in the world, is often obscure or invisible.16

That having been said, Origen continues, neither the divine character of the

world nor of scripture is abolished simply "because our weakness cannot

discern in every sentence the hidden splendor of its teachings, concealed

under a poor and humble style".17

Rather, because the divine is hidden in scripture, the exegete must know

how to read it properly in order to appreciate the superhuman meanings

within. To this end, God has hinted at the location of deeper meanings,

leaving us literary sign-posts so that we will not be lulled into complacency

by the "ease of the narrative" at first glance and remain "unaware that there

was anything beyond the obvious meaning for us to understand in the

scriptures".18 These signposts and hints are disruptions in the history and

law that startle us, that cause us to wonder whether what is written is

possible.

Consequently the Word of God has arranged certain stumbling-blocks

[tina skãndala], as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities [ka‹
proskÒmmata ka‹ édÊnata ] to be inserted in the midst of the law and the

15Ibid. 4.1.5, 7.
16Ibid. 4.1.7.
17Ibid.

18Ibid. 4.2.9.
 87

history, in order that we may not be completely drawn away by the sheer
attractiveness of the language, and so either reject the true doctrines
absolutely, on the grounds that we learn from the scriptures nothing
worthy of God, or else by never moving away from the letter [grãmmatow]
fail to learn anything of the more divine element.19

It is at this point that we can begin to see Origen's training as a literary

critic coming to the fore. Ancient interpretation of Homer, in an attempt to

explain seemingly gross or impious passages, would turn to figurative

interpretation and would justify their turn as Origen does here: Homer would

not have written this to be taken literally; the implausibility is his way of telling us

to read "deeper".20 This is the kind of approach that we will see Porphyry

arguing against in De Antro Nympharum; it is found in all the ancient

Homeric interpreters of the “allegorical” strain (e.g., Heraclitus, Cronius,

Ps.-Plutarch, Numenius).21 So, for Origen, as for these ancient interpreters of

Homer, textual épor ai telegraph the deeper, divine content of the

narrative under consideration. Without the difficult passages, we might

treat the Bible—or Homer—like any other book.

19Ibid.

20E.g., Heraclitus, Homeric Problems 1.1, 70.13. Throughout the chapter, I will refer to
this kind of justification for allegory as aporetic. It uses puzzling elements in the text as foot-
holds for interpretation: if something does not make sense, there must be a deeper meaning.
Aporetic interpretation is premised on the assumption that the text is always intelligible,
even if only below the surface. The exegete never throws up his hands and admits that
Homer or God, for example, was being frivolous or confusing; appearing frivolous or
confusing is the author's way of indicating to the careful reader that more lies beneath.

21Hersman 1906 7-23; Rollinson 1981 27; Hays 1983 1; Dawson 1996 38f.; Struck 1997 4-
10.
 88

Origen goes on to tell us that these tina skãndala are of two kinds,

those that could have happened (but did not) and those could not have

happened.

...whenever the Word found that things which had happened in history
[genÒmena katå tØn flstor an] could be harmonized with these mystical
events he used them, concealing from the multitude their deeper meaning.
But whenever in the narrative the accomplishment of some particular
deeds [prçjiw], which had been previously recorded for the sake of their
more mystical meanings, did not correspond with the sequence of the
intellectual truths, the scripture wove into the story [t∞w flstor aw]
something which did not happen: sometimes something which could not happen
and sometimes something which might have happened but in fact did not [tÚ mØ
genÒmenon t∞w m°n mhd° dunatÚn gen°syai t∞w d¢ dunatÚn m°n gen°syai oÈ
mØn gegenhm°non].22

Origen here presents the literary-critical categories of flstor a, mËyow, and

plãsma without, however, using the actual terms. This is done perhaps to

distance himself from Greco-Roman and Jewish literary critics, but, as we

will see in the Contra Celsum, in other contexts he was wholly willing to

equate the mechanics of Christian and non-Christian exegesis. Despite this,

what we have in the above passages from book four of the De Principiis is an

adaptation of the basic methods of Greco-Roman literary criticism,

specifically those of the allegorical tradition, to the spcific problems raised

by Christian scriptures: Origen first categorizes a given passage of scripture

as mËyow, plãsma, or flstor a and next, because the "Word of God" has

concealed the more divine things under a humble exterior and has

telegraphed this via an array of épor ai, he proceeds to explain the truths

beneath the impossible or improbable passages; finally, the aporetic

22De Princ., 4.2.9, emph. mine.

 89

passages provide a justification for a deeper reading of the entire text,

insofar as they are reminders that the Bible always means more than it says,

even when "what it says" makes perfect sense by itself.

The Contra Celsum defends Christianity against Celsus, a second-century

detractor. Although his work is no longer extant, Origen seems to quote him

at length and, as Borret and Chadwick have done in their editions, it is

possible to glean many things that Celsus said from Origen's text.23 It

appears that Celsus attacked the Christian faith on a number of fronts—e.g.,

the divinity of Jesus, the character and quality of biblical miracles,

geographic inconsistencies in scripture, and the intellectual poverty of its

theology—but for my purposes here, I wish to concentrate on the more

exegetical criticisms he brought forward. From Origen's responses, these

criticisms seem to comprise a two-part argument against Christian

interpretation: the Christian scriptures are i) "manifestly very stupid fables"

(êntikruw eÈhy°stata memuyolÒghtai) that are ii) "incapable of being

interpreted allegorically" (¶sti d' oÈx oÂa éllhgor an §pid°xesya ).24

In answer to the first, Origen presents examples of Greek stories that are

at least as "manifestly stupid" as anything in the Christian scriptures, if not

23I follow Chadwick's English translation (Origen 1965)—with minor alterations—and

Borret's Greek text (Origen 1968) of the Contra Celsum.

24Cels. 4.49-50.
 90

more. For example, he remarks:

One might say to [Celsus] that if any stories of myths and legends [mÊyvn
ka‹ énaplasmãtvn] may be said to be shameful on the ground of their
literal meaning [katå tØn pr≈thn §kdoxØn ], whether they were composed
with a hidden interpretation [di' Ípono aw] or in any other way, what
stories [flstori«n] deserve to be so regarded more than those of the
Greeks? In these divine sons castrate their divine fathers. Divine fathers
swallow their divine sons...[and have] sexual intercourse with [their]
daughter[s]...Why need I enumerate the outrageous stories [flstor aw] of
the Greeks about the gods which are obviously shameful even if they are to
be interpreted allegorically [éllhgoroum°naw]?25

In this vein, he also mentions a picture at Samos "in which Hera is portrayed

as performing unmentionable obscenities with Zeus", the "poems of Linus,

Musaeus, and Orpheus, and the writings of Pherecydes", the "irrational

animals" worshipped by the "very wise" Egyptians, the crass materialism of

the Stoics, and the irreverent ideas about providence attributed to Aristotle

and Epicurus.26

As for Celsus' second criticism, Origen presents two defenses to prove

that the Christian scriptures are indeed capable of being interpreted

allegorically: they are written in such a way as to invite and even require

allegorical readings, and the authors of the texts themselves openly

allegorize.27 As proof of the first, he points out that "Adam" also means

"man", and so, "in what appears to be concerned with Adam Moses is

speaking of the nature of man."28 Origen continues:

25Ibid. 4.48.
26Ibid. 4.48, 1.18, 20, 21.
27Ibid. 4.40, 4.49.
28Ibid. 4.40.
 91

For, as the bible says, "in Adam all die", and they were condemned in "the
likeness of Adam's transgression". Here the divine Word says this not so
much about an individual as of the whole race. Moreover, in the sequence
of sayings which seem to refer to one individual, the curse of Adam is
shared by all men. There is also no woman to whom the curses of Eve do
not apply. And the statement that the man who was cast out of the garden
with the woman was clothed with "coats of skin"...has a certain secret and
mysterious meaning [épÒrrhtÒn tina ka‹ mustikÚn ¶xei lÒgon].29

As proof of the second, Origen cites many examples where the author of a

scriptural book either presents an allegorical reading or confesses that the

scriptures must be read allegorically.

Paul, the apostle of Jesus, says: "It is written in the law, Thou shalt not
muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. Does God care for oxen? Or does
he say this altogether on our account?"...And..."For it is written that for this
cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave...This is a
great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and his church." And...Asaph
showed that the stories in Exodus and Numbers are "problems" and
"parables", as it is written in the book of Psalms.30

"Furthermore," Origen tells us, "had the Law of Moses contained within it

nothing to be interpreted as containing hidden meaning [Íponoi«n], the

prophet would not have said to God in his prayer 'Open thou mine eyes,

that I may understand the wonders of thy law'."31

So far, Origen's argument is standard exegetical polemic:

I have ventured upon an extended discussion from a desire to show

that Celsus is incorrect when he says that the more reasonable Jews and
Christians try somehow to allegorize [their scriptures], but they are incapable of
being explained this way, and are manifestly very stupid fables. But the truth is
much rather that it is the legends of the Greeks [tå •llhnikå plãsmata]
which are not only very stupid, but also very impious.32

29Ibid.

30Ibid. 4.49.
31Ibid. 4.50.
32Ibid.
 92

Or, put another way: Yes, our myths are crude, but yours are cruder; or, Our

myths only seem crude (if you read them incorrectly), but yours are actually crude

(no matter how you read them).

Such a defense is ineffectual in the long run, however, because it does

not sufficiently answer the charges Celsus leveled against Christianity; it

merely turns them back against him, and the accusation that Christian

scriptures are crude still stands. In fact, Origen echoes the latter in the De

Principiis.33 His lasting success in the Contra Celsum, in contrast, lies in his

willingness to go beyond such standard exegetical name-calling and place

his defense on an altogether different ground. In so doing, he draws

attention to issues fundamental to the theory and practice of ancient

exegesis, opening the door for the kind of theoretical innovation we will see

in Porphyry and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

First, Origen admits the truth of Celsus's charges: yes, Christian

scriptures are crude; but so are Homer and Hesiod.

But it is not treating the matter fairly to refuse to laugh at the [stories of
Homer and Hesiod] as being a legend [mËyon], and to admire the
philosophical truths contained in it, and yet to sneer at the Biblical stories
and think that they are worthless, your judgment being based on the literal
meaning [tØn diãnoian] alone. If one may criticize simply on the ground of
the literal sense [l°jevw] what is expressed by veiled hints [§n Ípono aiw],
consider whether it is not rather the stories of Hesiod which deserve to be
laughed at.34

33De Princ. 4.1.7, 4.2.9.

34Cels. 4.38.
 93

He then goes on to argue that, since all cultures, even the lofty Greeks, have

embarrassing sacred myths, they all can and must find the higher

significance of their sacred texts through allegorical interpretation.

In reply to the man who gives a profound allegorical interpretation

[éllhgoroËnta] of these verses [of Hesiod’s], whether his allegory is
successful or not, we will say this: Are the Greeks alone allowed to find
philosophical truths in a hidden form [§n Ípono &], and the Egyptians too,
and all barbarians whose pride is in mysteries and in the truth which they
contain? And do you think that Jews alone, and their lawgiver, and the
authors of their literature, are the most stupid of all men, and that this
nation alone had no share at all of God’s power, although it had been
taught so magnificently to ascend to the uncreated nature of God...?35

In this passage, Origen presents a radical equivocation of all allegorical

interpretation irrespective of text or tradition. His stance strikes the reader

as peculiarly detached from the heated environment of third-century

Christian-pagan polemics and seems to be the kind of assessment a later

reader, unconcerned with the subtle disagreements between the parties

involved, would present.

And despite the differences in polemical tone between the Contra Celsum

and the De Principiis, in the former as in the latter, Origen understands the

mechanics of textual interpretation in terms of flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma:

what happened, what could not happen, and what did not happen.

Before we begin the defense, we must say that an attempt to substantiate

almost any story [flstor an] as historical fact, even if it is true, and to
produce complete certainty about it, is one of the most difficult tasks and in
some cases is impossible. Suppose, for example, that someone says the
Trojan war never happened, in particular because it is bound up with the
impossible story about a certain Achilles having had Thetis, a sea-goddess,
as his mother, and Peleus, as man, as his father...How could we
substantiate [kataskeuãsaimen] this, especially as we are embarrassed by

35Ibid.
 94

the fictitious stories [plãsmatow] which for some unknown reason are
bound up with the opinion [dÒj˙], which everyone believes, that there
really was a war in Troy between the Greeks and the Trojans?36

For Origen, interpretation consists chiefly, as we saw in the De Principiis, in

distinguishing flstor a from mËyow and plãsma with certainty and then

"searching out the meanings of the authors" (tÚ boÊlhma §reun«n t«n

énaplasam°nvn).37 The successful critic, "who reads the stories with a fair

mind," will decide "what he will accept [at face value] and what he will

interpret as a trope [tropologÆsei]".38

But we can see that Origen's defense in the Contra Celsum does more than

simply silence the criticisms of Celsus. Because he frames his defense using

the categories of flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma, rather than simply name-

calling, he brings to light fundamental aspects of the practice of antique

literary criticism. Origen shows that allegorical interpretation, whether

Jewish, Christian, or pagan, disregards the distinction between the

categories of mËyow and plãsma and sets them over against flstor a. In

evaluating a narrative, there is, on the one side, that which happened (flstor a)

and, on the other, that which did not (mËyow and plãsma).

As we have seen from Grant's work, this is not peculiar to Origen or

even to Christianity. Many ancient critics considered mËyow and plãsma to

36Ibid. 1.42; cp. Grant 1961 41-42.

37Cels. 1.42.
38Ibid.
 95

be closely related and to be more different from flstor a than from each

other.39 But, placed in the context of fierce inter-exegetical debate, the

ramifications of this alignment of mËyow and plãsma for the study of

literature were more pronounced than they were in other contexts. By

grouping mËyow and plãsma together and claiming that all cultures

interpret their own scriptures allegorically, Origen made it difficult to

defend one tradition of interpretation against another. He leveled the

playing field, making the similarities between the aporetic interpretation of

pagans, Jews, and Christians difficult to ignore.

This is not to say that Origen believed all scriptures to be equal,

however; he did not. To his mind, Christian scriptures were the highest

form of inspired writings because they taught not only the most educated,

but also the uneducated masses.40 Pagan literature, in contrast, could only

be appreciated properly by the highly educated.

Come, sir, examine the poems of Linus, Musaeus, and Orpheus, and the
writings of Pherecydes, side by side with the laws of Moses, comparing
histories with histories [flstor aw flstor aiw], moral precepts with laws and
commandments; and see which are more able to transform instantly those
who hear them, and which of them would do harm to the hearer. Notice
also that the men in your list of writers pay very little attention to those
who would read them without any deeper understanding; they wrote
down their own philosophy, as you call it, only for people able to interpret
figuratively and allegorically [tropolog∞sai ka‹ éllhgor∞sai].41

39See above, p. 81, n. 7.

40E.g., Cels. 3.21.
41Ibid. 1.18.
 96

For Origen, the distinction between Christian scriptures and interpretation

and those of other traditions is a rhetorical one: the intended audience of

Greek literature is the upper echelon of readers; those less-educated cannot

see beyond the absurdities and impieties to the higher, noble truths.

Christian scriptures, in contrast, have something to nourish all readers,

whether they can only stomach "milk", have strength enough for

"vegetables", or have fortified themselves enough to endure "all foods".42

What is most significant about Origen’s defense is that it lays bare the

methodological underpinnings of the ancient study and practice of exegesis

and, in the case of some later exegetes, provides the impetus to move

scriptural interpretation onto new theoretical ground. No longer did

exegetes defend their interpretation solely with the aporetic justification that

had been the norm since Philo and Heraclitus the allegorist, i.e., the

scriptures contain stumbling-blocks to human reason that telegraph the

deeper meaning of the passage.43 For such writers, the mythic passages of

the text were the primary locus of figurative meaning. After Origen argued

that all cultures use the mËyoi of their scriptures to find deeper meanings,

some exegetes searched for new ground from which to undertake allegorical

interpretation free from equivocation with rival interpreters. His defense

was so successful that it was impossible to argue against, but its success

42Hom. Num. 27 (Origen 1979 245f.).

43Rollinson 1981 24-28; Struck 1997 20-21.
 97

came from the fact that it rendered all polemics ineffectual; it thereby

offered no advantage to either side—or, at most, only a slight

advantage—and so it was subsequently abandoned by some Christians and

pagans, although of course standard polemic continued to thrive as well.

As we will see in Porphyry's interest in the figurative possibilities of

plãsma as distinct from mËyow, Origen’s accurate observation that all

cultures interpret their own mËyoi allegorically was to become less true with

time. Origen's concern was to answer critics of Christianity, and his

argument effectively did this, although polemics between Christians and

pagans did not come to an end as a result of his work. He did, however,

highlight an essential but uncomfortable truth about allegorical

interpretation up to that point: regardless of the text under consideration, all

allegorical interpreters do essentially the same thing in the same way, no

matter what specific conclusions they reach.

PORPHYRY

Porphyry's De Antro Nympharum marks a watershed in the study of

Homeric literature. By challenging Cronius' reading of Homer—which rests

on over eight hundred years of study of the Homeric corpus—he effectively

challenges the way Homer's poems have been read for deeper meanings
 98

since anyone started commenting on them.44 Of course, Homeric

interpreters had been challenged before. There is a long history, at least

from Plato up through Cicero and Plutarch, of those who refuse to find

deeper meaning in the Odyssey and Iliad.45 Porphyry, however, is not one of

them. He never doubts that Homer's poetry has deeper, inner meanings.46

What he does challenge is the basis on which the interpreter finds these

deeper meanings. He revises the then commonly-held view that the textual

épor ai of works of literature classified as mËyoi are the primary entry-way

for the interpreter seeking deeper meanings in a text, which was Cronius'

position. In its place, Porphyry argues that texts classified as plãsma can

contain figurative meanings. It is not a simple thing for him to argue this

point, and his essay is a complex and carefully formulated argument that

succeeds in opening up interpretive avenues for the study of Homer that

had been previously unexplored.47

As a consequence, De Antro Nympharum is not so much a piece of textual

commentary as it is a piece of scholarly criticism. Porphyry concerns himself

with “what the text means” only briefly and in closing. The rest of the work

44Struck 1997 15.

45The premier example of this attitude is, of course, to be found in Plato's Republic (book
10). But see also Plato's criticisms of Homeric interpretation in the Ion, as well as his tongue-
in-cheek send-up of etymological interpretation of the gods in the Cratylus.

46Struck 1997 21.

47Contra Lamberton 1986 120.
 99

is given over to a debate with Cronius about “how the text means”, i.e., how

Homer conveys meaning in his work. As Porphyry presents it, Cronius

believed that the reader is justified in searching out deeper meanings in

Homer when the text as it stands is confusing or puzzling. “Lovely

murkiness”, “stone looms”, “amphoras and kraters filled with honey”,

“paths for men and for gods”, and so on, make no sense, according to

Cronius, and so both layman and scholar alike must conclude that Homer is

speaking allegorically.48

Therefore, as we will see, Porphyry is concerned to criticize Cronius’s

aporetic explanation for Homer’s deeper significance, not his interpretations

per se. Porphyry nowhere presents a reading attributed to Cronius that he

then contrasts with his own. In fact, one suspects that his interpretation of

the olive tree is the only exegetical innovation to be found in his entire

commentary.49 Exegetical innovation, however, was not his goal. Porphyry

instead wishes to call into question the assumption that textual épor ai

justify allegorical interpretation, and the entire essay strives to show how

reasonable and intelligible Homer’s description of the cave is. All of the

elements that Cronius finds perplexing, we are told by Porphyry, have

48De Ant. 3 (22); I generally follow Lamberton’s translation (Porphyry 1983), except
where I find it necessary to clarify Porphyry’s literary-critical usage. I cite the Greek text
edited by Nauck (Porphyry 1886) with the page number of Lamberton’s English text of the
De Antro Nympharum in brackets.

49De Ant. 32 (38).

 100

parallels in other temples or other religious traditions, and so Homer was

not trying to confuse the reader. According to Porphyry, Homer was simply

presenting a thorough and accurate description of a temple, one that

incorporated images and symbols of wide-ranging and lofty spiritual

significance. Our feeling of confusion must move us to research better,

Porphyry demonstrates, not allegorize deeper.50

Porphyry begins his reading from an entirely different premise than

Cronius. For him, the passage in question, far from being an unclear or

obscure Homeric fabrication (mËyow), is one of two things, both of which will

be familiar from Origen's arguments in the Contra Celsum and from my

discussion of Grant's work: i) a faithful description of an actual cave-temple

and the elements in it (flstor a) or ii) a Homeric creation, in which Homer

described a real cave but added the temple elements himself (plãsma). In

either case, Porphyry argues, the elements of the temple are symbolic

because the ancients routinely used symbols in their places of worship, and

Homer was well educated in such symbolism. What is not the case,

however, is that the elements are confusing or unintelligible without

“forced” or “fanciful” interpretation of the sort that other interpreters have

offered.51

50Contra Lamberton 1986 11, 9.

51De Ant. 36 (40).
 101

In contrast, Cronius’s position, as Porphyry presents it, is that the

passage in question is mËyow and that its unreal qualities lead the reader on

to find a deeper meaning.

Given that the description is full of such obscurities, Cronius concludes that
it is not, in fact, a casual fiction [plãsma] created for our amusement, but
neither is it a geographically accurate description [flstor aw topik ∞w] and so
the poet must be saying something allegorically [éllhgore›n] here.52

“Lovely murkiness”, “kraters filled with honey”, “one gate for mortals and

one gate for gods”, “stone looms”, and “sea-purple cloth woven by the

nymphs” all challenge our understanding and, according to Cronius, force

us to seek deeper meanings. Furthermore, Cronius finds no account of any

cave—fantastic or otherwise—at this location in any of the geographical

writings available to him.53

Porphyry’s first criticism of Cronius is that the passage in question

cannot be myth, as a cave exists in the location that Homer describes. After

citing a description of the cave taken from Artemidorus of Ephesus, he

states: “It seems, then, that [the cave] is not entirely a Homeric fiction”.54

Porphyry, moving to his second criticism, goes on to say that,

52Ibid. 4 (23), emph. mine.

53Ibid. 2 (22).
54Ibid. 4 (23): plãsma m¢n oÔn ÑOmhrikÚn pantel«w oÈk ín e‡h, that is, not as Cronius
claims, made purely from poetic license. If the description of the cave were purely Homer’s
creation with no basis in fact, then it could be either mËyow or plãsma. Since it is based on a
real cave, Porphyry argues, it must be either plãsma or flstor a. See Appendix: Figure 1.1
for a chart of these shifting relations.
 102

whether Homer described it as it was or added something himself,

however, the aforementioned [textual] problems persist for anyone trying
to track down the intention either of those who established the shrine or of the
poet who made the additions.55

Here Porphyry equates Homer with those who established the shrine and

his poetry with the shrine itself. By so doing, he attempts to blur the

distinction between plãsma and flstor a, at least in respect to this passage.

That is, since the ancients set up their temples using religious symbolism,

Porphyry argues, whether Homer accurately described a cave-temple

designed by the ancients or made plausible additions to an actual Ithacan

cave, the symbolic value of its elements is beyond question: “The ancients

who founded shrines would not have done so without incorporating

mysterious symbols nor would Homer have described it in any random

manner”.56

At this point, Porphyry begins his foray into comparative religious

history without supporting his equation of Homer with “those who

established the shrine”. He simply states:

to the extent that one undertakes to show that the business of the cave is
not a Homeric creation [plãsma] but rather of those, before Homer’s time,
who consecrated the place to the gods, one will be establishing that the
dedication is full of the wisdom of the ancients and on this account that it
deserves investigation and its cult symbolism should be interpreted.57

55Ibid. 4 (23-24), emph. mine.

56Ibid.

57Ibid.
 103

He now begins his analysis of the elements of Homer’s cave, which consists

chiefly of drawing parallels to various religious traditions. Although this

section seems to be a rather long digression and perhaps ancillary to his

task, this is actually an integral part of his argument.58 So far, he has shown

that the passage in Homer cannot be mËyow, because a cave exists in the

Phocys harbor in Ithaca, and that therefore it is either plãsma or flstor a;

then, putting aside the former option, he addresses the latter: if the

dedication is full of the wisdom of the ancients, i.e., is factually accurate,

then its cult symbolism deserves investigation. What we will see, however,

is that by presenting the rich meanings of the cult symbolism of the cave,

Porphyry is able to render the difference between plãsma and flstor a

meaningless in respect to this passage. The symbolism of the cave-temple is

so profound and there are so many parallels to it in other important

religious traditions that it remains meaningful even if it is a Homeric

plãsma.

We can see that Porphyry hopes to persuade his audience of the

significance of Homer’s plasmatic description because, as the comparative

section of the piece develops, he turns his attention away from the task that

ostensibly gave impetus to the comparative endeavor in the first place: “to

the extent that one undertakes to show that the cave is not a Homeric

plãsma but rather of those, before Homer’s time, who consecrated the

58Contra Lamberton 1986 126.

 104

place, etc.”.59 Instead, having presented an overwhelming array of examples

of religious symbols, he admits both as possible:

we must now explore the intention of those who consecrated the cave (if
indeed the poet is reporting historical fact), or his own riddle, if the
description is his own fabrication.60

After he presents yet more parallels between Homer’s poetry and other

religious traditions, Porphyry turns to the olive tree, which he believes to

encompass the entire mystery of the cave. It was put there, Porphyry tells

us, by “the theologian” (Homer) in order to symbolize the entire truth of the

cosmos, which by now the reader understands to be the true significance of

the cave episode. Porphyry makes no mention of the ancients who planted

the tree, and the possibility that they might have actually dedicated the cave

has dropped out of his line of argument.

Finally, he closes the essay by stating that:

when one takes into consideration the ancient wisdom and the vast
intelligence of Homer, along with his perfection in every virtue, one cannot
reject the idea that he has hinted at images of more divine things in
molding his little story.61

Notice here, in the final few words of the essay, that there is no longer any

indication that Homer might have factually described (flstore›n) an actual

cave-temple dedicated by the ancients. In contrast to the passage that began

59De Ant. 4 (24), emph. mine.

60Ibid.
21 (32): e‡per flstor an ı poihtØw épagg°llei, µ aÈtoË ge tÚ a‡nigma, e‡per
aÈtoË plãsma tÚ diÆghma.

61Ibid.
36 (40): …w §n muyar ou plãsmati efikÒnaw t«n yeiot°rvn ºn sseto. (as
construed by Lamberton, following the Buffalo editors). The line is somewhat garbled in the
MSS: M reads: muyar( Ä ) plãsmat( )... efikÒna; V reads: mÊy( ) plãsm(a)tow... efikÒna.
 105

his survey of world religions, Porphyry has not undertaken to show that the

description of the cave is a creation of those “before Homer’s time” and

therefore symbolic.62 Rather, as the wealth of comparative religious data has

shown, Homer was a religious genius, perfect in every virtue, whose

plãsma has as much symbolism as any of the historical elements of actual

religions that Porphyry has presented. The comparative material Porphyry

marshals confirms the symbolism of the cave whether it is real or only

plausible. What the symbolism is not, however, is mythic, aporetic, or

purposely obscure.

For Porphyry, Homer does not simply parrot ancient symbols in literary

form. He is, instead, on par with the ancient religious founders and has

created a religiously significant and symbolic discourse as valid as any

Mithraic initiation or Zoroastrian mystery. In fact, Porphyry leads his

reader, who at the opening of the essay perhaps feels that the description

must be flstor a to be symbolically valid, to see that Homer is a religious

genius equivalent to the ancients. This process of leading the reader is

shown by the progression his statements make from focusing on the

ancients 100%, to splitting focus 50-50 between them and Homer, to

focusing 100% on Homer at the close of the essay.63

62Ibid. 4 (24).
63Ibid. 4 (24f.), 21 (32f.), 32-36 (40f.).
 106

Because Porphyry has led the skeptical reader to see Homer’s symbolic

fluency and to let go of the need for the cave to have been established by the

ancients, he becomes more expansive at the close of the essay and outlines

more ambitious interpretations. Having shown the incredibly rich symbolic

power of Homer’s writing in the cave passage and by showing that it is as

symbolically accurate as any ancient religious tradition, he has managed to

clear interpretive space for himself. Porphyry can then go on to assert that

other sections of the poem that are more mythic (in the ancient literary

critical sense) are also as symbolically accurate and rich. His analogy from

the opening of the essay, Homer : cave = ancients : temples, is expanded to,

Homer : Odyssey = ancients : temples, i.e., the whole of his poem, whether

classified as mËyow, plãsma, or flstor a, is symbolic to the highest degree.64

Because we have seen Homer describe a symbolically plausible temple in

the cave of the nymphs episode—and have seen this significance through a

detailed survey of world religions—we can trust that Homer is as symbolic

in the rest of his work, although of course it is not all as plausible on the

surface as the cave episode.65

And in closing, as Porphyry looks back upon Cronius’s claims, he thinks

it is quite clear that Homer was not using aporetic language to draw the

64Cp. Origen, who uses the figurative nature of mËyow to argue for the figurative nature
of scripture generally (see above, p. 86).

65Unfortunately, he "postpone[s] writing on this...and leave[s] it for treatment at some

time in the future" (De Ant. 36 [40]).
 107

confused reader to read more deeply. “It is impossible that he should have

successfully created the entire basis of the story without shaping that

creation after some sort of truth”.66 Homer, just like the ancient founders of

temples, crafted a religious space that symbolized higher truths through its

architectural elements. This is not mËyow, because a cave did exist where

Homer described it, but rather plãsma, because it is a plausible account of a

sacred locale.

Determining what, if any, material or historical connections there were

between Porphyry's arguments in De Antro Nympharum and Origen's in the

Contra Celsum is problematical, primarily because Porphyry's Kata

Christianon is so fragmentary.67 We would expect to find in this text some

direct mention of Origen's Contra Celsum and, perhaps, something of

Porphyry's reaction to the work. Short of the discovery of such sections of

Porphyry's text, any attempt at reconstructing the relations between the two

can be nothing more than suggestive.68 But the possibilities are intriguing:

two literary critics from different and rival religions, but both well-versed in

the thought and writings of the other's, each make ground-breaking

contributions to the theory and practice of textual criticism within fifty years

66Ibid. 36 (40).
67See Hoffmann (Porphyry 1994 21-23) on the difficulties of reconstructing the text.
68However, see Grant's thoughts on the matter (1973 292).
 108

of each other; and their work, at least formally, can be seen as closely

interrelated, i.e., Origen considers all interpretation to be the allegorization

of mËyoi, and Porphyry distinguishes his work by allegorizing non-

mythological plãsma—something unheard of in eight hundred years of

previous textual interpretation.

In the case of Theodore of Mopsuestia, however, it would be impossible

to imagine his work, much of which is a direct challenge to Origen's, arising

independently of the Contra Celsum. Theodore was engaged, along with

John Chrysostom and others, in a staunch rivalry with Alexandria (which

Robert Grant has aptly likened to the rivalry between New York and

Chicago), from whose interpretation and exegesis he wished to distance

himself. As we will see, he argued that figurative meanings in Christian

texts are not to be found in the épor ai of mËyoi, as Origen claimed, nor in

the author's skillful blending of flstor a and plãsma, as Porphyry did, but

rather in everyday, “this is how it happened” details in the text, i.e., from

flstor a. He even sometimes gave a new name to this kind of figurative

interpretation in order to distinguish it from Origen’s éllhgor a: yevr a.69

69In its primary sense, yevre›n refers to sending out a person or persons i) to consult an
oracle, ii) to have an embassy with a king, or iii) to officiate at public events; it can also refer
to the act of watching a public spectacle; finally, it refers to the act of contemplation or the
act of viewing in general. These last senses build i) on the effort needed to decipher the
content of the oracle received and ii) on the main activity one engages in at the games, i.e.,
looking. The application of this term to textual interpretation accords well with the primary
meaning of the verb (to send an embassy to consult an oracle), since interpreters—like those
who receive an oracle—are concerned with the significance of divine utterances (LSJ s.v.
yevr°v, yevr a). For the general importance of this term in Patristic hermeneutics, see
Young's excellent analysis (1997 161-185). She also critiques the simple correlation between
 109

But we misrepresent the debate if we cast it simply as a conflict between

literal and figurative or historical and a-historical modes of interpretation,

despite Theodore's rejection of the term éllhgor a. Origen and Theodore

agreed that scriptural or authoritative texts meant more than they said and

that they could be interpreted for a number of reasons: because language

usage had changed, because passages were puzzling or obscure, because the

divine speaks in veiled or hidden speech, or because a higher or deeper level

of meaning was expected and welcomed. What was in fact at stake, and

where these thinkers differed sharply, was their understanding of the

mechanics of textual signification, specifically the entry-point for figurative

reading. The Contra Celsum, as we have seen, by taking a kind of non-

apologetic, ecumenical stance, equates Christian, Jewish, and pagan

interpretation based on their figurative readings of épor ai.70 Theodore and

Porphyry, in contrast, wished to render the interpretation of their respective

traditions unique and did so by distinguishing their work from others’

Antioch, literal reading, and historical concerns, on the one hand, and Alexandria,
allegorical reading, and philosophical concerns on the other. But as I pointed out in chapter
one, in contrast to my approach, she locates the distinction between Antiochene yevr a and
Alexandrian éllhgor a in the difference between rhetorical and allegorical criticism. See
Struck 1997 2-14 on the modern and ancient contours of this distinction in the practice of
literary criticism.

70He distinguishes them, instead, according to the rhetorical complexity of their

figurative meanings. See above p. 93.
 110

based on the location of figurative meanings: Porphyry in realistic fiction

[plãsma] and Theodore in the everyday happenings recorded in the

Christian bible [flstor a].

THEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA

Theodore was a prolific writer, but much of his work does not survive.

Particularly regrettable is the loss of his five-volume attack on allegorical

interpretation, which is presumed to have been directed at Origen. Of the

texts that have survived, the most important for my argument is his

commentary on one verse of Paul's: Galatians 4.24.

This verse has played a significant role in the development of Christian

hermeneutics, primarily because Paul uses the participle éllhgoroÊmena in

it, the only occurrence in the New Testament of any form of éllhgore›n or

éllhgor a.71 For most early-Christian exegetes, his usage created

interpretive space: since the apostle had no reservations about allegorizing,

neither should they. For Theodore, this passage causes difficulties because,

as I mentioned above, he wished to distance himself from the kind of

71E.g., Kepple 1976/7 243-44; see, e.g., John Chrysostom 1994 34; Aquinas 1966 134-45;
Luther 1963 435-61; Calvin 1985; Marsh 1810 18.114; Fairbairn 1855 2-4, 219; Lightfoot 1865;
Burton 1920; Goppelt 1939 6, 17-18; Lampe and Woolcombe 1957 32, 40, 72; Hanson 1959 7,
62, 82-83; Daniélou 1960 57-58, 149; Greer 1961 72, 92-94; Kugel and Greer 1986 133-36; and
Brosend 1993; see also the survey at Lightfoot 1865 [1957] 227-234.
 111

interpretation done by Origen, which was also caled éllhgor a. Had Paul

not called his interpretation éllhgor a, Theodore would have had no

problem with the passage, because the kind of interpretation that Paul

presents in Galatians 4.24f. is not so different from interpretations found in 1

and 2 Corinthians or Romans.72 Be that as it may, Theodore's desire to

discredit the kind of figurative interpretation called éllhgor a and

promote his own brand of figurative interpretation, which he called yevr a,

required that he somehow account for the apostolic endorsement of the

former.

Unlike John Chrysostom, who simply asserts with no further justification

or explanation that in Galatians 4.24 Paul uses the word "allegory" to

describe what is in actuality a "type", Theodore tackles the problem from a

solidly literary-critical perspective, one which by now will be quite familiar

from Grant's work and my analysis of Origen and Porphyry.73

Theodore begins with an attack on other interpreters of Paul, criticizing

the ways that they i) explain the character of the Biblical narrative and ii)

find the deeper or higher meanings in the text.

Countless students of scripture have played tricks with the sensus of

the divine scriptures and want to rob it of any sensus it contains. In fact, they
configure inept fabulas out of it and call their inanities allegories. They so
abuse the voice of the apostle as to extinguish all the intelligence of the
scriptures, and they rely on saying "through allegory" just as Paul does,
and they have no idea how much difference there is between their
"allegory" and Paul's "allegory" here. [Paul] neither diminishes the historia

721 Cor 10.1f; 2 Cor 2.1f.; Rom 6.12f.

73"Contrary to usage, he calls a type an allegory" (Chrysostom 1994 34).
 112

nor is he adding new things to an old story. Instead Paul is talking about
historia, then submits the story of those events to his present
understanding.74

In this first section, Theodore is concerned not only to show that other

interpreters "play tricks" with "allegories", but that Paul, despite his usage of

the term, is not doing this. Paul, according to Theodore, views the scriptures

as historia (flstor a) rather than fabulae (mËyow or plãsma). To Theodore's

mind, Paul simply takes flstor a and interprets it ("submits it to his present

understanding").

He continues:

For example, he says in one place, "She corresponds to the present

Jerusalem" (Gal 4.25) and in another, "But as at that time he who was born
according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the
Spirit" (Gal 4.29). Above all else, Paul acknowledges the historia of the
account. Otherwise he could not say that Hagar "corresponds to the present

74Theodore 1880 73; Trigg 1988 173. From this point forward, I will refer to Theodore's
commentary as Galat. and cite Trigg's translation in parentheses alongside Swete's Latin
edition. I have taken Trigg's generally sound translation and nuanced it, at some points
retranslating sentences in order to highlight Theodore's literary-critical use of historia, gestae,
and facta, and at others leaving Latin terms untranslated for clarity.
The following list of definitions from the LSJ and Lewis and Short dictionaries is
provided as a guide to the reader interested in the rich semantic range associated with these
important terms:

flstore›n: inquire into or about a thing; examine, observe; inquire of, ask; inquire of an
oracle; give an account of what one has learnt, record.
flstor a: inquiry; observation; body of recorded cases [in empirical medicine];
knowledge so obtained, information; written account of one's inquiries, narrative, history;
[gen.] story, account.
factum: that which is done, a deed, exploit, achievement; bonum factum: a good deed,
deed well done.
historia: = Gk. flstor a; a narrative of past events, history; historiam scribere: to inform
one's self accurately of any thing, to see a thing for one's self; a narrative, account, tale,
story.

Although the feminine form of factum appears frequently in Theodore, this is somewhat
peculiar; the neuter form is found more frequently in Latin literature generally (Lewis and
Short 1879, s.v. factum).
 113

Jerusalem," thus acknowledging that Jerusalem does exist in the here and
now. Neither would he say "just as" had he referred to a non-existent
person. By saying "just as" he demonstrates an analogy, but an analogy
cannot be demonstrated if the things compared do not exist. [i.e., are either
mËyow or plãsma] In addition he says "at that time," indicating the
particular time as uncertain or indefinite, but he would not have had to
distinguish the particular time if nothing at all had really happened. This is
the Apostle's manner of speaking.75

Paul, according to Theodore, does not claim that the flstor a is mixed with

impossible or untrue events, thereby diminishing it; neither does he take

flstor a and add elements to it to make plãsma. Paul has a baseline concern

for the facts, i.e., there was a city called Jerusalem, a man and woman

named Esau and Hagar. But this does not indicate Theodore's concern for

the "historical sense" over and above the figurative sense, any more than

Porphyry's concern that a cave actually exists in Ithaca does. It is, instead, a

concern that Paul should have undertaken his interpretation on flstor a

rather than mËyow, which is what the pagans, Jews, and Alexandrians do.

Those allegorizers, though, turn it all inside out, as if the accounts in

the Bible were no different from dreams in the night. They do their exegesis
of scripture "spiritually"—they like to call this silliness "spiritual
interpretation". Adam is not Adam, paradise is not paradise, and the
serpent is not a serpent. I want to tell those interpreters this: if they play
tricks with historia, in the end they will have no historia.76

This passage is extremely significant: "dreams in the night" would have

suggested prophetic dreams sought in temples overnight by devotees of a

god, which were shared in the morning with a priest and interpreted.77 As

75Galat., 73-74 (173-174).

76Ibid. 74 (174).
77See Struck 1997 157-184 for the suggestive material and formal connections between
divination and exegesis in the late-antique world.
 114

such, they have not happened; they are simply like descriptions of realistic

events (plãsma) or like descriptions of unreal events (mËyow). What they are

not, Theodore here asserts, is descriptions of actual events (flstor a).

Next, Theodore turns to an analysis of the character of the narrative of

Galatians 4.24f.:

But, if they insist on such explanations, let them answer these questions:
Who was the first man made? How was he disobedient? How was the
sentence of death introduced? If they have any answers from the bible, then
what they call "allegory" is exposed as foolishness, because, throughout, it
is proven to be over and above what is necessary. If, however, their
"allegory" is true, if the bible does not retain one narration of deeds
[gestarum] but truly points to something else altogether, something so
profound as to require special understanding, something "spiritual", as
they wish to call it, which they have uncovered because they themselves
are so spiritual, then where does their understanding come from?
Whatever they call this type of interpretation, has the bible itself taught
them to read it like this?78

Notice here that his method of separating the descriptions of real events

from the description of plausible or unreal events is thoroughly literary-

critical in bent: if one "plays tricks with flstor a", one will have no more

flstor a. For most ancient literary critics, as Grant points out, flstor a was

thoroughly distinct from either mËyow or plãsma, which were grouped

together based on their contrafactual qualities.79 The series of questions

Theodore poses is what one would expect of an ancient literary critic testing

the validity of a narrative thought to be flstor a: the obscurity of its

language, the incredible or inappropriate nature of the events described, the

78Galat. 74-75 (174).

79Grant 1961 120-121.
 115

omission of necessary and the inclusion of superfluous details, the self-

contradiction of the author, the disorder of the narrative, or the

inappropriate "moral" drawn from the story.80

Having asked these of the text, he then asks his rival interpreters: if the

Bible cannot pass this test of historical integrity, then we need allegory, but

does it in fact fail to pass it? He, of course, thinks that it does pass it and

closes by adding that, whatever Paul calls his interpretation, it is not the

"spiritual" allegorization of mËyoi/fabulae done by some interpreters, but

rather a submitting of the flstor ai/factae of the Bible to his own

understanding in order to "make his case".81

That Theodore, in his reading of Gal 4.24f., is concerned with the

location of figurative meaning (historia vs. mythos/fabula) rather than with

figurative meaning itself (literal/historical vs. figurative/allegorical) can be

seen from his Liber ad Baptizandos, a text devoted to the proper instruction of

catechumens. In it, there is a free and unrestrained application of figurative

meanings to every aspect of the liturgy and sacraments. Note the following

passage:

Every sacrament consists in the representation of unseen and unspeakable

things through signs and emblems. Such things require explanation and
interpretation, for the sake of the person who draws nigh unto the
sacrament, so that he might know its power. If it only consisted of the

80Ibid. 41-42.
81Galat. 76 (175).
 116

(visible) elements themselves, words would have been useless, as sight

itself would have been able to show us one by one all the happenings that
take place, but since a sacrament contains the signs of things that take place
or have already taken place, words are needed to explain the power of
signs and mysteries.82

In the vital task of instructing catechumens on the verge of receiving the

sacrament of baptism, Theodore portrays the very heart of the Christian

faith as symbolic and figurative: the power and mystery of the sacraments

require interpretation and explanation. If they did not, he argues, we would

simply perform them and thereby fully understand their significance.

As he continues, he speaks more of the essentially figurative nature of

Christianity and also of the Judaism out of which it developed, which are

related as a shadow is related to an image.

The Jews performed their service for the heavenly things as in signs and
shadows, because the law contained only the shadow of good things to
come, and not the very image of the things, as the blessed Paul said. A
shadow implies the proximity of a body, as it cannot exist without a body,
but it does not represent the body which it reflects in the same way as it
happens in an image. When we look at an image we recognize the person
who is represented in it—if we knew that person beforehand—on account
of the accurately drawn picture, but we are never able to recognize a man
represented only by his shadow, as this shadow has no likeness whatever
to the real body from which it emanates. All things of the law were similar
to this. They were only a shadow of the heavenly things, as the Apostle
said.83

Despite the fact that in his comments on Galatians, Theodore was anxious to

delimit precisely the mechanics of figurative readings of the Hebrew Bible,

in Liber ad Baptizandos, he freely and unrestrainedly finds deeper, higher

82Liber 2 [17]. The Syriac text of this document, along with an English translation, can
be found in volume six of the Woodbroke Studies (Theodore 1933). The first number refers
to chapter of the text, the bracketed number to the page of the English translation.

83Liber 2 [17-18].
 117

meanings in nearly every aspect not only of the sacraments and liturgy, but

of the history of Israel as well.84

Thus the law contained the shadow of the good things to come, as those
who lived under it had only a figure of the future things. In this way they
only performed their services as a sign and a shadow of the heavenly
things, because that service gave, by means of the tabernacle and the things
that took place in it, a kind of revelation, in figure, of the life which is going
to be in heaven, and which our Lord Christ showed to us by his ascension
into it, while he granted all of us to participate in an event which was so
much hidden from those who in that time that the Jews, in their expectation
of resurrection, had only a base conception of it.85

This stance towards the events of Israelite history is found throughout

the work. And, we must remember that, since the events of Israelite history

came to Theodore through the texts of the Hebrew Bible, this stance is

essentially hermeneutical. His discussion of the "shadow" of future events

deals with the words of the text, which he claims refer to something that the

original, intended audience had only a "base conception" of because it was

"so much hidden" from them: the coming of Christ and the Christian church.

And this is not a concern for historically accurate reading; it is a concern to

find connection between the vastly different scriptures of the Old and New

Testaments. History, insofar as it is extra-textual, is not his concern;

however, flstor a as a kind of narrative (one distinct from mËyow and

plãsma) is.86 As this is a literary-critical distinction, Theodore's work must

84See, e.g., 2 [23, 27], 3 [46], 4 [51-53], and 5 [73, 79].

85Liber 3 [19].
86See Appendix: Figure 1.1.
 118

be understood squarely in the context of the kind of ancient literary-critical

usage I have explored in this chapter.

And so, in both the exegetical and pedagogical works I've examined, that

scripture had figurative senses was never at issue for Theodore. In the Liber

ad Baptizandos, we have seen just how pervasive his figurative outlook was:

almost every aspect of Christian life (liturgy, architecture, sacred texts,

sacraments) and Jewish history (temple, wanderings, prophecy, exiles) had

symbolic import. And even in his commentary on the one occurrence of self-

proclaimed allegory in the New Testament, we have seen that his concern

was not to rescue the historical or literal sense from figurative

interpretation, but rather to allow narratives that recorded deeds or

happenings (flstor ai/gestae/factae) to be read figuratively. His work, as this

chapter has demonstrated, must be understood in light of the ancient

literary critical distinctions of flstor a (what happened), plãsma (what

could have happened), and mËyow (what could not have happened), rather

than the strict modern dichotomy between literal and figurative reading.

And as this chapter has also shown, in the second and third centuries

AD, there was heated debate about the universal validity of allegorical

interpretation, that is, did the interpretation of one sacred text, e.g., Homer,

exclude the interpretation of others, e.g., the New Testament or Septuagint?

Most interpreters answered in the affirmative: our texts only seem gross, and

our interpretations of them are true and show them to be of the highest significance;
 119

your texts and interpretations, however, are false and ingenuine. Origen's

approach differed from this, as we have seen. He adopted a critical,

comparativist approach in the Contra Celsum, claiming that all cultures

interpret their own mythical texts allegorically. Therefore, he argued, you

should feel free to read yours just as we read ours—however, don’t disparage us for

doing what you also do.

Origen’s comparative stance was challenged by two important

hermeneutical developments in the next 100 years. Porphyry, one of the

most significant pagan scholars of late antiquity, attempted to move the

interpretation of Homer off of the kind of exegetical ground so well

described by Origen and undertaken on Homer by his predecessor Cronius.

In the De Antro Nympharum, as we have seen, he claimed that Homer’s text

had deeper meanings because it was plãsma, not because it was mËyow.

That is, Homer’s description of the cave of the nymphs was an account of a

plausible temple, and like a real temple, had symbolic import not because it

was impossible, but simply because it was symbolic.

In Antioch, Theodore explored another hermeneutical avenue. He

asserted that not only mËyow but also flstor a could speak other than what it

said. In so doing, he did not deny that such reading was figurative, but

simply gave figurative readings taken from flstor a a more legitimate basis

than figurative readings taken from mËyow. He sometimes called them

yevr a, “contemplation” or "viewing". We should notice just how important

 120

it was for Theodore to do this, because not only had Origen claimed that

everyone interprets their own myths allegorically, but the passage of

Genesis that Paul considers allegorical in Galatians chapter 4 treats material

not so different from the mËyoi of the pagan poets: three immortals visit and

dine with a family in exile; a god miraculously “helps” a barren, elderly

woman to conceive; and her son, after almost being sacrificed by his father,

becomes a heroic figure of immense cultural importance (wrestles a god,

changes his name, and becomes the father of a nation).

To take a narrative like this allegorically is so very similar to what Stoics

and others did to the mËyoi of Homer and Hesiod that some kind of an

explanation was necessary to maintain the privileged place of Christian

exegesis. Hence the so-called “anti-allegorical” interpretation of Theodore,

which is simply allegory drawn from texts that he classifies as flstor a and

to which he gives a different name, yevr a.

 CHAPTER FOUR

Models and Myths:

Approaches to the Study of Earliest Christianities

In the last forty years, increasing numbers of scholars have identified an

ever-widening array of difficulties with accepted approaches to the study of

ancient Christianity.1 In general, these approaches are based on the

assumption, sometimes-tacit, that Jesus rejected mainstream Judaism and

founded Christianity as a new and separate religion. In Mack's view, this

"myth" is at least as old as the author and audience of Mark:

Mark appropriated the Christ myth and linked it with the Jesus traditions.
By doing that he radicalized the appearance of the man of authority and
power. Jesus' appearance marked the absolute beginning of the end, his
activity the sealing of the borders, and his death the violent event of

1E.g.,
E. R. Goodenough 1968; B. Mack 1988; J. Charlesworth 1990; J. Z. Smith 1990; G.
Boccaccini 1991, 1993; P. F. Craffert 1993; and M. Nanos 1996.

121
 122

decisive significance for history and its goal. By locating the Christ myth
precisely as an originary event complete with social historical motivation
and consequence, Mark created the story that was to give to Christian
imagination its sense of a radical and dramatic origin in time.2

And while recent scholarship on early Christianity has undergone many

beneficial revisions, for the most part these do not adequately overcome the

problems of the dominant approaches. Of those scholars who do recognize

the shortcomings implicit in the prevailing view, many have often simply

modified one or another of its elements without thereby resolving its

essential tensions.3 In general, such scholars simply re-name the characters

in the traditional formulation of the "myth" of Christian origins: "Jesus" as a

historical person is replaced by "Jesus" as a literary figure,4 "shift in

eschatological expectations",5 "Paul",6 or "the destruction of the Temple";7

"Judaism" is replaced by "the Pharisees" or "Sadducees",8 "common

Judaism",9 or "Palestinian Judaism";10 and "Christianity" is replaced by

2Mack 1988 355.

3Boccaccini's remarks on the history of terminology used to describe Judaism from 300
BC to AD 200 ("late", "early", "intertestamental") are apropos here: "Trying to find a more
neutral language is completely in vain if the same confessional schemes are reproduced"
(1991 23). See also Gould 1977 and Ritvo 1997 on analogous terminological problems in the
natural sciences.

4E.g., Kugel and Greer 1986 112f.; Scott 1991 45.

5E.g., Bultmann 1956 86-93.
6E.g., Gager 1977; Mason 1990 181, 207.
7E.g., Sawyer 1994 41.
8E.g., Bultmann 1956 65.
9E.g., Mason 1990 196; Baukham 1993; Sanders 1997.
10E.g., Hanson 1959; Ellis 1991.
 123

"Jesus followers",11 "Jewish Christianity",12 "Gentile Christianity",13 or

"nascent" and "proto-Christianity".14 The basic structure of the "myth",

however, remains the same: a person or event causes a new movement to

come about from an older movement or movements. And while others have

openly professed dissatisfaction with the "myth" of Christian origins, they

use it in their analyses nonetheless.15

Despite this rising awareness of the limitations of contemporary

approaches to the study of early Christianity, the degree to which these are

accepted without question should not be underestimated. For example, at

the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco

(1997), Hans Dieter Betz, whose inaugural address was entitled "Antiquity

and Christianity", began the second section with the following paragraph:

The theme of antiquity and Christianity permeates Early Christian

literature from its beginnings in all of its aspects. Christianity originated
from within antiquity, but as a new phenomenon. More precisely, what
became Christianity had its origins indirectly in the confrontation between

11E.g., Kee 1992 242-243 et passim.

12E.g., Donahue 1978; Buchanan 1980; Kraabel 1981; Koester 1982 105; Simon 1986 306f.;
Aune 1987 11; Mason 1990 211, 221-222; Hultgren 1991; Baukham 1993; Donaldson 1993;
Dunn 1993; Verseput 1993; Hong 1994.

13E.g., Davies 1977; Callan 1980; Koester 1982 105; Segal 1990 6-7; Hultgren 1991;
Wilson 1992 609; Donaldson 1993; Glasser 1993; Nanos 1996 8; J. Sanders 1997 68-69.

14E.g., Hultgren 1991 77-78; Kee 1992 241; J. Sanders 1997 83.
15See
Käsemann 1964; Kugel and Greer 1986 116, 120, et passim; Mack 1988 15-16;
Charlesworth (ap. Boccaccini 1991 xviii); Baukham 1993 141, 145.
 124

Judaism and Hellenism, first in Hellenistic Judaism, and then through Paul
directly in the confrontation with pagan polytheism. Thus, the earliest
version of 'Antiquity and Christianity' occurs as part of the Jewish conflict
with Hellenism and its imposition of Greek standards of culture and
religion.16

This is a telling quote. It contrasts "antiquity" with "Christianity",

"Judaism" with "Hellenism" and "paganism", and "Jewish" with "Greek",

applying what J.Z. Smith has called "a dichotomous agenda of division" to

the study of religion.17 As Smith explains,

in the classifications of religions, a dichotomous agenda of division has

been most frequently employed. However, unlike the biological system [of
taxonomy], there are usually normative implications or the assignment of
positive or negative valences which render the classifications useless.18

Smith goes on to list the most common dichotomies (e.g., true/false,

revealed/natural, universal/ethnic, spontaneous/habitual, religion/magic)

and asserts that "the perceived positive pole [is] identified with 'us' and the

negative with 'them'."19 It is important to notice that Smith's criticisms in

Imagining Religion are not leveled at dichotomous thinking per se, or at

evolutionary or taxonomic, either; rather he criticizes the identification of

one side of the dichotomy as normative (and therefore with "us") and the

other as deviant or defective (and therefore with "them").

16Betz 1998 7.
17See Smith's application of this criticism to the study of religion as a whole (1982 6-8).

18Ibid. 1982 6.
19Ibid.
 125

And even if one disagrees with Smith's conclusion that dichotomous

scholarship is "useless", its limitations are nevertheless clear.20 Taking

Smith's general assessment as sound, we must struggle to find alternative

approaches to the study of early Christianity—and to late Antiquity in

general—, approaches which do not simply utilize more diverse arrays of

dichotomies (e.g., combining Jewish-Christian, Jewish-Pagan, and

Palestinian-Hellenistic in a single study).21 The Italian scholar Gabriele

Boccaccini, in discussing the difficulties of studying late-Antique Judaism,

lays out in no uncertain terms just how limiting the biases Smith points to

can be:

Anyone critically approaching the phase of Judaism that falls between the
third centuries B.C.E. and the second century C.E. faces not only the
ordinary difficulties of any reconstructive work but also an impressive
array of prejudices, assumptions, clichés, passions, and emotions that have
accumulated through the centuries and now form an unfathomable tangle.
This period represents a crucial point for the two living faiths we are used
to calling "Judaism" and "Christianity." The fundamental roles played by
these two religions in our culture (particularly by Christianity, given its
demographic and political predominance) have assured the handing down
of both the riches of their traditions and their prejudicial paradigms.
Historical research, which was born of these religions, could not help but
be deeply shaped by their attitudes, even in terms of language.22

20So Barr 1966 16: "Contrary to much contemporary opinion, we shall not succeed if we
try to formulate the centre of the [Christian] tradition as an ‘event’ or series of events, which
can be spoken about as ‘acts of God in history’. This will not work either descriptively or
historically. It will not work descriptively, because the ‘acts’ cannot be isolated as the
supremely important content of the subject-matter as it stands, and the material other than
the description of ‘acts’ cannot be taken as subsidary in nature. It will not work historically,
for the material directly descriptive of the acts cannot be seen as an indication of a primitive
datum from which the rest of the narratives and other materials has been derived."

21E.g., Tcherikover 1959 7, 40-41; Hengel 1974 1-5; Hirschman 1996 20-22.
22Boccaccini 1991 7.
 126

What is needed in the place of refined or multiplied dichotomies are

theoretical models that increase both the breadth and the subtlety of our

understanding of late Antiquity, models which, far from invalidating

previous scholarship, will augment it and move the study of early

Christianity forward. As Rachel Laudan has observed for the development

of Enlightenment geology:

I want to lay to rest a problem that has bedeviled many discussions of the
role of theory and evidence—namely, too sharp a contrast between
"speculators" and "empiricists." All the geologists in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries expected theory or "system" to play a role in geology.
And they all demanded that theory should be warranted by evidence. The
point at issue was not whether to opt for theory or fact gathering. Rather, it
was the relationship between theory and facts.23

In order to sketch some of the problems historians of Christianity face in

establishing relationships between their theories and facts, I want to begin

with a survey of some recent critiques of the regnant approaches to the

study of late-antique Christianity and Judaism; then, I will present a review

of some of the most pertinent methodological solutions offered by scholars

in the last thirty years, moving from least to most successful.24 Having

thereby brought the main issues to the fore, I will close this chapter with a

sketch of my approach to the study of first- and second-century Christianity.

23Laudan 1987 8.
24All the authors I survey in this section make conscious attempts to remedy what they
feel are serious problems in the study of ancient Christianity and Judaism. While not all
succeed in moving their constructive work beyond the problems they identify, they all have
positive elements to contribute to my own approach. I have reserved my discussion of those
scholars who do not offer such conscious critiques for the notes of the chapter.
 127

C.L. Porter, in his "A New Paradigm for Reading Romans", pauses in his

analysis of Paul's attitude towards Jews and Gentiles to pose "the larger

question of the relation of the 'Christian' communities to Judaism in the first

century":

Did Christianity as a distinct, separate religious movement exist at all

before A.D. 70? Evidence points to the coexistence of early Christians with
other Jews within a common heritage. W.D. Davies is correct when he says,
"The hospitable, comprehensive, theological tolerance and fluidity of
Judaism before 70 C.E. allowed various groups to remain within its
ambiance. Among these were early Christians."25

Despite his ambivalence about drawing a sharp division between

Christianity and Judaism in Paul's time—and despite his placing

Christianity in quotation marks—Porter is clearly uncomfortable with

claiming that nothing separated the two before 70 AD. He tries to ease the

tension between these two potentially contradictory views by quoting from

Davies: early Christians remained within the fluid "ambience" of Judaism,

which tolerated the differences of Gentile Christians.26

This fluidity of first-century Jewish-Christian relations and

developments is also stressed in A.T. Kraabel's work. In "The Disappearance

of the God-Fearers", after arguing that the "God-fearers" were a literary

creation of the Lukan author, Kraabel suggests some implications for the

study of the History of Christianity raised by his findings:27

25Porter 1978 257-72, 267.

26Davies 1977 20.
27Kraabel 1981 113-26.
 128

The distance between Palestinian Jewish Christianity and Diaspora Jewish

Christianity has probably been over-stressed by earlier scholarship, for the
first century at least. They did not exist in sealed compartments...These
Jewish Christians spoke the religious language of the Diaspora well
because more and more they were Diaspora Jews...Acts' straight-line picture
of the expansion of Christianity runs: Jew — God-fearer — Gentile. But that
is a simplified version...Rather, Christianity expanded over a broad front; it
used several religious "languages" at the same time.28

Yet Porter and Kraabel, however much they chafe against a too-rigid

separation between first-century Judaism and Christianity, both uphold

such a separation in their constructive work. Kraabel, despite his sharp

criticisms of Acts and of those scholars who rely on it for accurate evidence

of the development of first-century Christianity from Judaism, still speaks of

the Jewish rejection of Christianity in Paul's time as the motivating force for

Luke's literary invention of the God-fearers.29 And Porter, in a similar vein,

concludes his re-assessment of Romans by saying that, "the 'conversion' that

is demanded [by Paul] is that of Christians."30 By so doing, both authors stop

short of thoroughly re-evaluating the distinction between Judaism and

Christianity in the early-first century.

Other scholars have, however, advanced their re-evaluations further,

sometimes pushing the beginnings of Jewish-Christian separation into the

late-first or even early-second century. James G. Dunn, in his "Intra-Jewish

28Ibid. 122.
29Kraabel 1981 120.
30Porter 1978 272.
 129

Polemic in Galatians", argues for an exclusively Jewish context for the

apostolic battle recorded in Paul's letter.31 He concludes:

To be noted is the fact that these fierce debates were not Jewish versus
Christian arguments. The were between Jews, Christian Jews to be sure, but
Jews nonetheless—including the disputes that feature in the letter to the
Galatians itself, where the real target of Paul's polemic is the other (Jewish)
missionaries. And the issues are not (yet) Jewish versus Christian issues.
They are about what it means to be a practicing Jew, what it means to be an
heir to Abraham, what differences the coming of the Messiah Jesus has
made for Israel's self-understanding and for Jewish relations with the
Gentiles. These "echoes of intra-Jewish polemic" are a clear indication of a
series of issues still thoroughly within the spectrum of Second Temple
Judaism.32

This is in sharp contrast to Porter and Kraabel, who see already in Paul's

time a parting of the ways between the two religions, although this parting

is described as "fluid" and as taking place over a "broad front."33

Yet we must note that even though Dunn sets Paul within a wholly

Jewish milieu, he introduces (as have others) the term "Christian Jews" to

refer to the members of the ekklesiai of Paul and his opponents. And

although he places them "thoroughly within the spectrum of Second Temple

Judaism," a tension remains between his strong critique of those who view

Paul outside of Judaism and his use of the term "Christian Jew" for Paul's

followers.34

31Dunn 1993 459-77.

32Ibid. 476.
33Porter 1978 267; Kraabel 1981 122.
34As Craffert has pointed out: "Notwithstanding Dunn's rejection of the majority view,
he shares the very same approach with Sanders and others who, in spite of the 'new
paradigm' (Porter 1978), continue within the confines of the Protestant legacy...[his]
sociological perspective is confined to one single aspect, the social function of the law,
whereas the rest of his analysis does not really differ from that in the Protestant view. Both
 130

Turning the work of P.F. Craffert, we find a thoroughgoing critique of

the accepted approaches to the study of early Christianity that is combined

with a rigorous application of it to his constructive work. In "The Pauline

Movement in First-Century Judaism: A Framework for Transforming the

Issues", he presents an extended, detailed criticism of the last fifty years of

scholarship on Paul, scholarship which he argues advances a Protestant

apologetic agenda.35 As he observes:

This, so-called, Protestant view on the relationship between Paul and

Judaism is the result of Lutheran interpretation of Paul and has served as a
paradigm for large segments of NT scholarship, especially on the Pauline
letters. According to this view, Judaism in Paul's time was a narrow,
legalistic religion...Paul (and Jesus) brought a law-free religion of
forgiveness and grace...Although this paradigm has not always been
explicit in the interpretation of Paul's letters, it has always been present.
Within this view, the position of Paul (or the Pauline movement) within
first-century Judaism has never been a problem: Paul rejected Judaism
because it was an inferior religion—incapable of salvation.36

After a thorough review and analysis of this tradition and the many

failed attempts at its rehabilitation (among others, he treats Stendahl, Dunn,

Loader, Sanders, Watson, Räisänen, Porter, and Meeks), Craffert argues that

the failure of these attempts has less to do with the merit of the attempts

themselves and everything to do with the inadequate theoretical and

methodological framework of most Pauline studies:

Pauline Christianity and Judaism are dealt with as disembodied theological or religious
systems. Introducing a single social aspect to the debate changes the scenario but not the
approach" (1993 239, 244).

35Craffert 1993 233-62.

36Ibid. 234.
 131

The way the question is posed, allows only certain answers. Whether the
Pauline movement...was still part of Judaism cannot be decided on the
basis of a comparison of patterns unless it can clearly be demonstrated that
a deviation from a specific pattern...would have disqualified a person or
group from being a part of Judaism.37

Craffert presents solid constructive work in the second section of the

article, work that builds uncompromisingly on his critiques. His focus is

more socio-historical than intellectual-historical, and he looks to the broader

context of the religious and social patterns of the Mediterranean

world—irrespective of religious affiliation—to find the proper context for

understanding Paul's Judaism.

The thesis in this part of the paper is that once the Pauline movement
groups and first-century Jewish groups are seen within their proper first-
century Mediterranean setting, the relationship between them can
adequately be described as the coexistence of Jewish groups, competing on
the same religious market for mediating the sacred and representing divine
power.38

Then, after a clear analysis of Paul as Mediterranean divine man and of the

household ekklesiai/sunagogai as locations of divine power, Craffert argues

that Paul was not attempting to undermine Judaism. Rather, he was

engaged in the brokering of divine authority to household congregations of

Jews.

It might well be that under different conditions Paul's words and actions
could be interpreted as a rejection of Judaism or a breaking away from it,
but given the socio-cultural and socio-religious conditions under which he
operated, it hardly was the case. Neither organizational separation nor

37Ibid. 236.
38Ibid. 243.
 132

differences in belief system could count as breaking away from or the

rejection of Judaism. Instead, Paul was probably in what he did and said as
mainstream as any other Jewish divine man of his time and place: he called
on the traditions and symbols of ancient Israel to legitimize the
establishment of messianic apocalyptic household communities.

Paul's apocalyptic brand of messianic Judaism was no rejection or breaking

away but rather a definition of the true Israel as he saw it.39

Although Craffert, like Jonathan Smith, strongly criticizes Protestant

approaches to Pauline interpretation, his more sociologically-oriented

approach is quite distinct from Smith's history of religions appraoch to the

problems of scholarship on early Christianity. We can, however, see

enormous overlap between Smith's awareness of the limitations of the

dichotomous approach and Samuel Sandmel's theoretical criticisms of the

study of Hellenistic Judaism. In his 1979 article, "Palestinian and Hellenistic

Judaism and Christianity: The Question of the Comfortable Theory", he asks

a number of rhetorical questions throughout, all of which point to his

suspicion that the distinctions between "Hellenistic" and "Palestinian", as

well as between "Jewish" and "pagan", serve apologetic ends, whether

conscious or not.40

Is the supposition of a Hellenistic Christianity and a Jewish Christianity

merely a "neat scholarly construct," anachronistically superimposed by
modern scholarship onto the ancient past?

Is there present some unconscious tacit value system by which the worth of
an idea or a doctrine is heightened if it is native Jewish and lowered, even
contaminated, if it is Grecian?...Possibly behind the expressed viewpoints
[there is] the anxiety that personal faith [is] directly affected by the answers
given to antiquarian matters.

39Ibid. 257-58, 256.

40Sandmel 1979b 333-36.
 133

Why should there be so great an effort to denominate some of the possibly

Hellenistic phenomena in the NT as Semitic? Is that a descriptive term, or
an evaluative term? Moving a step further, is it possible to set up criteria
objectively by which one can unmistakably delineate what is native
Palestinian Jewish and what is unmistakably Hellenistic? It is my opinion
that it is not.41

As Sandmel's article suggests, the study of the Judaisms of the

Hellenistic period is founded on a thoroughly dichotomous agenda of

division. For the most part, Palestinian, Hebraic Judaism based in Jerusalem

is thought to have been assaulted by Greek, pagan Hellenism of the ruling

empires beginning with Alexander. The particular, enclosed, homogeneous

culture of Israel is seen to have been penetrated by the universalist,

expansive, heterogeneous culture of Greece.42 The issue for Jews at the time

is expressed by scholars as one of assimilation versus isolation: that is, do Jews

maintain their ancestral laws and customs or do they accommodate and

adapt to the culture of the empire? 1 Maccabees has been viewed as the

record of such a struggle, and the literary works of Philo, Josephus, and

Aristeas, for example,—and practically the entire body of ancient Jewish

literature in Greek—have been characterized as intellectual activity on the

"front line" of this cultural battle.43 Furthermore, "authentic" or "normative"

Judaism was never, according to such scholarship, primarily in favor of

accommodation, and so those Jews who appear to modern scholars to have

41Ibid. 137, 138, 140.

42See Tcherikover 1959 7 et passim; Hengel 1974 3 et passim; and the survey in Boccaccini
1991 7-13.

43See Tcherikover 1957 169-93.

 134

done so—practically all those who spoke Greek rather than Hebrew or

Aramaic—are considered to a greater or lesser degree to not be "fully"

Jewish.44

Because the tensions underlying the study of Hellenistic-era Judaism are

so great, the scholars who have criticized it have gone further and

accomplished more than their colleagues in either New Testament or early

Christian studies have. Keeping Sandmel's critique in mind, I wish to turn to

the critiques and constructive solutions of two important scholars of ancient

Judaism, Elias Bickermann and Morton Smith, afterwards examining the

two most radical alternatives to the dominant approaches to the study of

ancient Christianities and Judaisms: Jonathan Smith's Drudgery Divine and

Gabriele Boccaccini's Middle Judaism.

Elias Bickermann's The God of the Maccabees was one of the first works to

challenge the dichotomous approach to the study of the Hellenistic period,

calling into question the adequacy of its strict opposition between Judaism

and Hellenism for understanding the complexity of ancient cultures.45 As a

Jewish intellectual living in Berlin in the late 1930s, his claim that 1 Macc.

was the product of intra-Jewish struggles about the definition of

44See Boccaccini's (1991) criticisms: 189-90, 213-16.

45Cf. e.g., his remarks on Philo (Bickermann 1937 86-87), on the intellectual interests of
Antiochus (ibid. 89-90), on the propaganda of the author of 1 Macc. (ibid. 18), as well as his
discussion of historical causality (ibid. 1-5).
 135

Judaism—rather than the product of what would have been the only known

religious persecution in pre-Christian antiquity—is particularly striking.

The religious persecution was neither an accident, nor did it arise out of the
spirit of paganism. It originated among the Jews themselves, or, to be more
exact, from a party among the Jews who aimed at a reform of the ancestral
faith. That reform was to lead to the rejection of the belief in the uniqueness
of God, without, however, a complete rejection of the God of the fathers
and without becoming entirely disloyal to Zion.

Even though, as I said, the detailed circumstances of the revolt may remain
unclear, its purely political character is obvious. This was not a struggle
between Hellenists and old believers, but it was rather an episode in the
rivalry between two houses and two ambitious city heads.46

For committed Jews and Christians, for whom the persecution of Antiochus

IV is the origin of Hanukkah and the martyrs, respectively, Bickermann's

theory was initially quite unappealing.47

The work of other scholars, however, would lend weight to

Bickermann's findings and would also further the revolution in theory and

method that it paved the way for in the study of Judaism and Christianity.

One of the most important of these was Morton Smith's Palestinian Parties

and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament.48 Smith's book attacks the same

kind of dichotomous assumptions as Bickermann's, but in this case they

46Ibid. xx, 46.

47See Bickermann's remarks in the preface to the English translation (ibid. xii-xiii) as
well as his insight about the importance of the Maccabees for Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam (ibid. 62).

48See also Goodenough 1968; Sandmel 1979a; and Charlesworth 1990.

 136

concern the study of ancient Israelite religion and culture.49 He says of the

regnant assumption governing studies of ancient Israel:

This interpretation supposes—and the Old Testament often declares—that

Israelite worship of gods other than Yahweh was frequent and important.
But it also supposes that already before the conquest of Palestine there was
one proper "religion of Israel"—the cult of Yahweh—and all other Israelite
worship was deviation from this.50

Whereas previously the Hebrew bible was viewed primarily as a record of

the monotheistic culture of the Israelites struggling against assimilation to

the polytheistic cultures without (Canaan, Babylon, Persia, Egypt), Smith

argued instead that it is a conflicted text born of an intra-Israelite struggle

between adherents of various local deities.

Accordingly, "Israel", before the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, seems

to have been about as distinct an entity as "Austria" is today. That is to say,
there was a common nucleus of persons united by common interest,
common language, common traditions, common religious feeling (loyalty
to local shrines and to the national god), and such ethnic uniformity as can
be produced by the amalgamation of many ethnic elements, but on every
side this nucleus blended into the surrounding populations.51

It so happened, Smith asserts, that the "Yahweh-alone party" won out, but

we can see evidence of the struggle even today in the patchwork text of the

Hebrew bible.52

49Smith also challenges the Hellenism-Judaism paradigm, e.g., his agreement with
Sellers: "There is no change in pottery forms or other objects at the coming of Alexander.
That conqueror did not introduce Greek culture into Palestine...he found...it there" (1987
46).

50Ibid. 13-14.
51Ibid. 13.
52See esp. chapters 4-7.
 137

The implications for method and theory raised by Smith and Bickermann

have been brought openly and aggressively to the fore in the most recent

work of Jonathan Z. Smith. In Drudgery Divine, beginning with an analysis

of the origins of the modern study of religion in the Jefferson-Adams

correspondence, he shows the inadequacy and inequality at the foundation

of the regnant approach to the study of early Christianity. By and large, he

identifies the problem as one of improperly-framed comparisons.

In the study of the relations of early Christianity to the religions of Late

Antiquity, the names have been altered from Herodotus's time, but the
relations remain the same [as those presented in his History]. Early
Christianity is primarily to be considered as autochthonous. If there is any
dependency, it is from a prestigious centre. In this model, Israel appears in
the role of the Herodotean Egypt. The Catholic Church, or in more recent
treatments, "Greco-Oriental syncretism", plays the part of Persia. This
requires that the enterprise of comparison focus on questions of borrowing
and diffusion. The use of comparison as a hermeneutic device, or as a
principle of discovery for the construction of theories or generic categories
plays no role. What rules, instead, is an overwhelming concern for
assigning value, rather than intellectual significance, to the results of
comparison.53

In the middle section of the book, Smith suggests what the proper and

fruitful aims of comparative work should be, contrasting it at every turn

with how comparison is presently undertaken in the study of Christianity

and antiquity.

It is axiomatic that comparison is never a matter of identity. Comparison

requires the acceptance of difference as the grounds of its being interesting,
and a methodical manipulation of that difference to achieve some stated
cognitive end. The questions of comparison are questions of judgment with
respect to difference: What differences are to be maintained in the interests
of comparative inquiry? What differences can be defensively relaxed and
relativized in light of the intellectual tasks at hand?54

53Smith 1990 46.

54Ibid. 47.
 138

The "poverty of conception" and "apologetic reasons" underlying the use of

dichotomous approaches to the study of early Christianity have issued in

problematical models—because they are confessionally biased—of the

"development" of earliest Christianity out of the Judaism of its time.

Gabriele Boccaccini, in Middle Judaism, takes Smith's critiques to heart in

the strongest possible manner. Following Smith, he uses metaphors of

biological taxonomy to discuss the relation between Judaism and

Christianity. But unlike Smith, Boccaccini applies his critique to the entire

sweep of Judaism and Christianity, from the Hellenistic era to the present.

His conclusions, furthermore, are the most radical of all the scholars

surveyed: for him, Judaism and Christianity (as we commonly refer to them)

are but two species of the same genus.

From the historical point of view...both of them are coherent developments

of ancient Judaism; both are in analogous lines of continuity and
discontinuity with ancient Judaism. The debate over which of them is the
more authentic development (i.e., the true Israel) belongs to confessional
polemics. Similarly, the frenzy with which both Christians and Jews argue
that Christianity is no longer a Judaism must be recognized as a
consequence of confessional bias. For a historian of religion, Rabbinism and
Christianity are simply different Judaisms.55

The "confessional bias" he points to cuts both ways: Christians as well as

Jews have a stake in keeping their religions separate. For Christians, nothing

less than the unique, privileged place of their religion's origins is the issue:

...a confessional notion imposes itself on history in the perception that

Christianity is an extraneous seed miraculously planted on the ground
destined for [it], not one of the many fruits brought forth by the same

55Boccaccini 1991 17-18.

 139

ground. The fact that the original ground of Christianity is now claimed to
have been "fertile" (intellectually creative) and not "sterile" (intellectually
and morally decadent) does not change the terms of the problem. The
internal dialectic of the Judaism of that age will continue to be deprived of
an important element until we recognize that historically Christianity is
only one of the many Judaisms then active—nothing more and nothing
else—and is as unique as each of its contemporary fellows.56

For Jews, Boccaccini argues, to accept early Christianity as one of many

Judaisms—rather than an outsider religion that rejected the Rabbinic

tradition—is to accept first- and second-century Christianity as a legitimate

part of their own history and culture. The heritage of Rabbinism, Boccaccini

claims, makes this distasteful—in part because of the bitter arguments that

the Rabbis and fourth-century Christians have bequeathed to us.

Addressing the question of when exactly Christianity parted from Judaism,

he states:

The question seems legitimate and the answer obvious: this happened
when Christians forsook the practice of the law and Christianity became
mostly a gentile movement. But the idea of "the" Judaism as a religion
linked to a defined people, absolutely free from any foreign cultural
influence, and rooted in the legal obedience of the law came to us from
Rabbinism—it is merely a Rabbinic interpretation of Judaism. 57

Although the radical nature and uncompromising conclusions of

Boccaccini's book have caused some to stop short of embracing his views,

his fundamental assessment of the confessional basis of scholarship on late-

antique religions is long overdue.58 Furthermore, many of the practical

accomplishments of his book (clarification of terminology, reexamination of

56Ibid. 23-24.
57Ibid. 16.
58See Charlesworth's list of reservations in his preface to Boccaccini 1991 (xviii).
 140

methods for framing comparisons, and the creation of a bibliography of the

study of Middle Judaism) have been the starting-points for much of my own

work in the next chapter. But before outlining the approach I adopt there, I

wish to recap and highlight the major issues at stake in the scholarly

literature I've surveyed above.

As we've seen, the Judaism of late antiquity is not a known quantity.

Scholars have identified a wide range of beliefs and practices, all of which

were held by Jews in one place or another. As Charlesworth remarks:

A new understanding of Early Judaism (c.a. 250 BCE to 200 CE) is now
appearing in scholarly publications. The old view of first-century (CE)
Judaism was simplistic: The Jewish religion was centered in Jerusalem,
with the Temple as the magnet of world Jewry. From this citadel emanated
the proper interpretation of the Torah (the embodiment of God's will, Law).
The Jewish religion was affirmed to be immune from pagan influences. It
was monolithic, orthodox, and normative; and diversity in the system was
expressed through four sects, two of which (the Sadducees and Pharisees)
belonged to 'normative Judaism.' Now this historical reconstruction has
collapsed.59

Furthermore, the textual evidence left to us, which surely represents only a

small portion of what was originally available, supports the judgment that

ancient Judaism was as diverse a phenomenon as Judaism is today. As

Craffert (citing M. Smith) points out:

If there was an orthodox or normative Judaism in the first century, "it must
have been that which is now almost unknown to us, the religion of the
average 'people of the land'" (Smith 1956 81). They had their own
synagogues and legal traditions. They were not outcasts and lowly classes
since their leaders "seem to have been well-to-do landholders and
businessmen who probably had more Greek education than the average

59Charlesworth 1990 36-37.

 141

Pharisee" (Smith 1963 172). That still does not cover the whole spectrum of
first-century Judaism. There were also the "worldly Jews—the Herodians,
tax gatherers, usurers, gamblers, shepherds, and robbers (by the
thousands) who fill the pages of the Gospels, the Talmuds, and Josephus"
(Smith 1956 74). Recent studies on the diaspora furthermore remind us that
there were vast differences among Jewish groups: not only from city to city
in western Asia Minor but also within specific circles.60

Increasingly, scholars of early Christianity have accepted, and in some

cases furthered, this view of a diversified Judaism and even begun to accept

as a matter of course a similar diversity within developing Christianity. This

diversity is not judged to be heretical or deviant—as diversity has been since

Irenaeus—but is understood rather as a natural by-product of the

development of a complex organization from an established matrix of

tradition and culture. And yet, as I have also tried to show, most scholars

who have helped the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity tend toward

an appreciation of the diversity of their objects of study have not always

reflected this adequately in their constructive work. As some scholars have

demonstrated in respect to the development of the natural and geological

sciences, constructive work only appropriates new theoretical approaches

gradually. There are often transitional periods in the development of a

discipline or sub-discipline, in which conflicts within a theoretical

structure—and between this structure and the task of

classification—abound.61 So it should not surprise us that the scholars I

60Craffert 1993 247.

61E.g., Ritvo 1997.
 142

survey have not yet fully integrated the new theories they endorse in their

studies of early Christianity.

If we turn to the linguistic evidence from the earliest texts usually

considered Christian to look for terms of self-designation, we find support

for the more radical conclusions of the scholars surveyed above, because the

terms "Christian" and "Christianity" only came into widespread usage as

terms of self-identification in the mid-second century. They were used

initially by outsiders as derisive terms.62 Paul is styled Christian,63 but he

himself does not use the term, at least not in the letters we have available to

us. Likewise, the terms are absent from the Gospel of Mark (c. AD 75).64 In 1

Peter (AD 85-95), xristianÒw does appear, but it is something for which a

person may suffer.65 By the turn of the second century, they are used by

some as self-designations,66 but not by others.67 Furthermore, not until the

rise of the Apologists in the 140s do the terms begin to occur widely as self-

62For other interpretations of the linguistic evidence presented here, see Gayford ND;
Wright 1892; Schmiedel 1899; Bigg 1901 [1978] 179-80; Banks 1916; Moffatt 1917; Dickie
1925; Piper 1963; Kittel 1974 576-80; and Conzelman 1987 88-89.

63Acts 11.26; 26.28.

64I follow Frend 1984 for all dates.
651 Pet 4.15-16; the variation xrhstianÒw, which appears in Codex Sinaiaticus for this
verse and Acts 28.26, is further indication that both verses are references to outsiders’ use of
the term (cp. Suetonius, Claudius 25).

66Didache 12.4; Ignatius (IMg 4.1, ITr 6.1, IRo 3.2-3, IPhld 6.1, IPol 7.3).
67Fourth Gospel, Revelation, Matthew, 1-2 John, 1 Clement.
 143

designations, although even then there are exceptions.68 Only by the time of

Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, and Tertullian do the terms

appear to be well on their way to the catholic usage they enjoyed from the

third century onwards.69

In the face of both this linguistic analysis and the theoretical and

methodological critiques offered by the scholars surveyed above, it becomes

clear that the standard project of the study of early Christianity, i.e., to

analyze the development—gradual or otherwise—of first-century

Christianity from first-century Judaism, faces seemingly insurmountable

problems of method and available data.70 In order to accomplish such a task,

68Two of the most important being Ptolemy's Letter to Flora (c.165) and the Martyrdom of
Polycarp (after 166). Although the latter merits fuller consideration than I can undertake in
this chapter, a few suggestive remarks are appropriate here.
The usage of the terms Christian and Christianity in the Martyrdom of Polycarp suggest
that, even as late as the writing of this account (Polycarp was martyred c.166), they were
primarily outsider distinctions for the author and audience of the letter. In the text, the only
time they are used is i) in describing the response of the crowd to the genoËw t«n
xristian«n (3.2); ii) in Polycarp's confession, with which he taunts the proconsul,
employing Christian boldly to express defiance: "If you vainly suppose that I will swear by
the genius of Caesar...listen carefully: I am a Christian" (10.1; Lake); and iii) in the herald's
announcement to the crowd that "Polycarp has confessed he is a Christian" (12.1; Lake).
Notice also that Christian only occurs in this section of the account (10-12), which is
concerned exclusively with the arrest and trial of Polycarp. In the rest of the text, in
contrast, the author uses a number of designations for his own community (brethren, holy
elect, catholic church throughout the world, disciples, church of God) but never Christians. This
seems to suggest that for the author, writing sometime after 166, the term Christian was still
considered unfit for self-designation by insiders.

69Clement fl. AD 180-200; Irenaeus' Ad. Haer. (c. AD 185); Athenagoras' Supplication for
the Christians (AD 177-180); Tertullian's Apol. (AD 197). For the close link between apology,
self-definition, and historiography, see Droge (1987 esp. 194-200).

70See Hennig's (1966) systematic remarks on biological allomorphism, esp. the

difficulties of analyzing and classifying contemporary—and the impossibility of so doing
for fossilized—larvae, pupae, and imagos (32-36).
 144

we would need to decide what constituted the Jewish background of nascent

Christianity: was it normative? A loosely organized plurality? A number of

sectarian groups amid a "common Judaism"? Further, did these adhere to

Torah, covenant, monotheism, observance of Temple sacrifice, or loyalty to

Jerusalem? Or was it perhaps a mixture of some or all of these?

The difficulties of deciding on any one of these (let alone a sufficient

number of them) are put nicely by Craffert:

...it should not mistakenly be assumed that there was any general
agreement as to any of these symbols [the Pentateuch, Temple, and the
body of ordinary Jews]. [They] were open...for debate: "Which Torah?
Consisting of how many books? In which translation? Interpreted from
what standpoint? Which temple? Run by which priesthood?" Furthermore,
evidence on a variety of temples with their own priesthoods within
Judaism is well attested (e.g., Stone 1980 77-82) while others, such as the
Pharisees, apparently had no need for the Temple in Jerusalem (cf.
Overman 1992 70).71

And as Saldarini points out:

Any intellectual construction of a normative Judaism, so convenient as a

foil to Christian theology, did violence to the lived reality of thousands of
Jewish communities throughout the diaspora, each of which had
developed its own grasp of the tradition and created its own
accommodations with the local communities and cultures.72

In addition, the scholar who wishes to use the accepted approach to

studying early Christianity, even if he were to overcome the difficulties

surrounding an analysis of the Jewish background of first-century

Christianity, would then need to decide what constituted a legitimate

development from this "background", such that one could speak of a "break" or

71Craffert 1993 248.

72Saldarini 1992 xvii.
 145

substantial differentiation: would this be a rejection of Moses? Of the

observance of the Law? A total rejection of the Law, both symbolic and

observant? A rejection or extreme allegorization of Torah? Of Temple

sacrifice? Or of the authoritative position of Jerusalem? An acceptance of

Jesus as messiah or Christ? Or was it a mixture of any or all of these?

The main problem with this particular task is that it is difficult to find a

consensus on the most basic points of Christian belief among the first-

century texts usually considered Christian by contemporary scholars. Not

even those of the New Testament itself express any real unanimity of

religious outlook or belief. As Käsemann has pointed out:

...[T]he New Testament contains an inexhaustible wealth of unsolved (and,

in part, probably insoluble) historical and theological problems. Only those
speak to us out of its pages, who were capable of writing, were obliged to
write and whose writings the Church of latter days, for whatever reasons,
thought it good to preserve. But they represent only a diminishing minority
over against the many who passed on the message without leaving behind
them a written deposit and therefore an abiding memorial. What entitles us
to assume that the speech and the writings of this vast majority would not
have differed from those of the New Testament authors? From time to time
we catch some echo of their voice which suggests the contrary, and indeed
the probability of this is already clear from the many-sidedness of the New
Testament itself. This in turn means, however, that only fragments of the
discussion within primitive Christianity have been preserved for us and
that the variability of the primitive Christian kerygma must have been very
much greater than a consideration of the state of affairs as revealed in the
canon would lead us to suppose.73

The end of this quote points to a further problem facing the standard

approach to early Christian history, one that is even more pressing than the

previous two: evaluating the scope and nature of the data—those

73Käsemann 1982 100.

 146

"fragments of the discussion within primitive Christianity"—available to us

today. Put simply, do we view the texts and inscriptions that we have as a

representative core sample or as a random sample? Are they a good, albeit

incomplete, overview of the cultural landscape of first- and second-century

Judaisms and Christianities, or do they present a foreshortened perspective

on the period, giving us clear and detailed views of certain groups,

incomplete views of some, and no view at all of others? How one decides

this question has a decisive impact on the conclusions one draws from the

evidence of the period.74

In struggling to answer questions about the nature and scope of our

data, we must remember that contemporary scholars of early Christianity

are heirs to the legacy of second- and third-century Christians who, in

reconstructing their past to justify their beliefs to themselves and the world,

appropriated certain texts, presenting them as their historical predecessors.75

As historians of early Christianity, in order to appreciate early Christian

materials in their own right, we must get behind a massive historical effort,

an all-pervasive reimagining of origins that was undertaken by self-styled

74As Craffert notes: "All scholars are subject to the same limitation of having relatively
few sources which originated in geographically diverse areas. This condition can, however,
no longer be an excuse for ideologically biased pictures of first-century Judaism. We should
rather admit the tentative nature of our attempts" (1993 245). See Gould 1977 281 on the
dangers of relying on enumerative evidence to support a theory; see also Hennig 1966 63 on
the difficulties of using the fossil record to support contemporary phylogenetic systematics,
which has instructive analogies to the problems scholars of Christianity and Judaism face in
the study of late antiquity.

75See Pagels 1975 3, 164.

 147

Christians in the last half of the second century. Pagels' judgment of post-

Refromation scholarship on Paul is applicable to the standard project of

scholarship on early Christianity I have described above:

Much of what passes for “historical” interpretation...and for “objective”

analysis...can be traced on to the second-century heresiologists.76

These “second-century heresiologists”, the apologists, and others crafted

a family tree that accounted for their existence and legitimized their beliefs,

while also accounting for the existence and illegitimizing the beliefs of rival

groups (pagans, Jews, heretics).77 These Christians accomplished this, to

varying degrees and in a number of different ways, by presenting historical

reconstructions of the growth of their movement. Some located their

beginnings in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth; others, most famously

Eusebios, located it in the Hebrew Scriptures, arguing that the lÒgow of the

Fourth Gospel was the lÒgow yeoË of Genesis 1.1f.78

And so we must always keep in mind that historical reconstruction was

an important theological task for second- and third-century Christians. They

did so, in part, because the earliest and most significant texts associated with

their movement, as we have seen, did not style themselves Christian. They

did so also because many groups in the second and third centuries called

themselves Christian, but deviated, according to the heresiologists, from the

76Ibid. 9.
77Cf. Droge 1987 17,19.
78Cf. Droge 1992 494-5.
 148

authentic, apostolic, or true practices and beliefs of the Christian church. It

therefore fell to theologians concerned with right-belief to decide which

texts were authentically Christian and which were not—even though few

texts deployed the term—and to decide which groups were authentically

Christian and which were not—even though many used the term. As

Irenaeus explains in Ad. Haer. 1.22.2:

Since, therefore, it is a complex and multiform task to detect and convict all
the heretics, and since our design is to reply to them all according to their
special characters, we have judged it necessary, first of all, to give an
account of their source and root, in order that, by getting a knowledge of
their most exalted Bythus, you may understand the nature of the tree
which has produced such fruits.79

We are left then, with the realization that our texts are neither a random

array nor a representative core sample of first-century documents. Instead,

we have a library left to us, a collection of texts that were deemed important

to later groups.80 Beginning in the mid-second century, people like Justin,

Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Athenagoras, who

understood themselves as Christians and not Jews, set limits, more or less

fixed, on the texts that were relevant and important for their religious

practices and beliefs. Subsequent generations either reinforced these earlier

limits or, as was the case in debates over texts like the Epistle of Barnabas, the

79Irenaeus 1925, tr. Roberts and Donaldson, slightly altered.

80So Boccaccini: "Thus, today we are faced with a series of corpora that are the fruit of a
long and complex process of gathering and selecting from an even greater amount of
material. Although a certain degree of randomness has been involved, this process has been
based substantially on a continual rereading and reinterpretation of the past according to
purely confessional criteria. Hence, originally extraneous documents have been grouped
together as units" (1991 10).
 149

Shepherd of Hermas, Revelation, and Susanna and the Elders, they adjusted

them, including previously excluded texts, excluding previously included

texts, or both.

In light of the many and serious problems of method and theory

sketched above, my basic approach to the study of early Christianity is

simply that, before the rise of the apologists (about 150 or so), we cannot

speak of "Christianity" as we can after this date (or especially beginning in

the third century). We "know" about first- and early second-century

Christianity because i) later Christians tell us about it (i.e., they identify texts

as "Christian" that lack such self-identification) and ii) recent scholars have

identified certain texts as "Christian" (often whether or not these texts

themselves do so). Furthermore, texts so-identified only seem "Christian" to

us, I submit, i) because later Christians incorporated them into—or later

Jews rejected them from—their body of important or sacred texts and ii)

because the differences in Judaisms and Christianities after the third century

seem to be rooted precisely in the kinds of issues raised by these texts. These

differences may well have been, but this does not change the status of these

texts after the fact. They are what they are, just as Abraham is what he is (a

Chaldean immigrant to Palestine), regardless of his later importance for

 150

Islam (prophet), Rabbinic Judaism (patriarch), and Christianity (a "type" of

Christian convert).81 Craffert warns us that

[t]he present state of research, together with the consequent history of

interpretation of Paul's letters, misleads us in that it causes us to believe
that Paul was, since he rejected Judaism in favour of Christianity, primarily
engaged in attacking Judaism as an inferior or inadequate religion.
However, the fact that Judaism and Christianity today exist as two separate
religious patterns should not be retrojected back onto Paul's setting.82

And so we must consider whether, if there were no Christianity, we would

stop to question the "Judaism" of such texts.

...we are used to discussing whether a certain document (for example, a

pseudepigraphon) is Christian or Jewish. While dealing with a real and
important problem—the ideological identification of this document—we
scarcely realize that we are incorrectly using the term "Jewish" as a
synonym for "non-Christian." More properly, we should discuss whether
this document is Christian or belongs to another Jewish group. Because
early Christianity, like Pharisaism or Essenism, was a first-century Judaism,
and even later Christianity is a species of Judaism, the Christian documents
are obviously Jewish. Nobody, whether scholar or student, would ask if a
certain document is Pharasaic or Jewish, Essene or Jewish—rather, if the
document is Pharasaic or apocalyptic, Essene or Sadducean. Why should
we not do the same when speaking of Christianity (even of early
Christianity) in relation with the other Judaisms?83

The pattern of development that an attention to self-designations has

suggested is not a movement born out of the explosive events of Jesus' or

Paul's life—or even of the works of the other apostles or their writings.

Rather, it has suggested that slowly, over a 150 year period, the wide array

of Judaisms present in the first century developed, both for internal and

81As Boccaccini remarks on the shared culture of "Middle Judaism" (300 BC - AD 200):
"Greater care is required of us when we speak of the first century of the Common Era. At
that time, the Jewish family was still roughly united...Both early Christianity and early
Rabbinism shared the same branch with many other Judaisms" (1991 21).

82Craffert 1993 257.

83Boccaccini 1991 21.
 151

external reasons, into constellations of communities that considered

themselves not-Jewish. In some cases, this began as a my Judaism is better

than others sentiment, which could become quite vitriolic (Epistle of Barnabas,

Fourth Gospel, Galatians). But even in these acerbic, polemical texts, the

self-designations "Christian" and "Christianity" do not appear even though it

would make sense that such texts would deploy terms to distinguish

themselves from the rest of Judaisms if they had them. Since they do not,

and since we lack a more convincing explanation, we must hold that they

did not use these terms to distinguish themselves because they were not

Christian.

In certain contexts, some groups came to a realization that they were a

new thing, that they were no longer a part of any of the Judaisms of their

time. Some do this for reasons that are obscure or inaccessible to the

historian at this time (Ignatius); others for more understandable reasons (the

Apologists). At the close of the second century, after six or seven

generations of mutual and often opposed development, the sentiment that

there was now some new religion arose both in the minds of self-styled

Christians as well as Jews.

And, as with biological species development and reproductive cleavage,

species that are now isolated from each other—despite their membership in

the same genus—have different environments, different every-day

challenges. For Judaisms (especially Rabbinic), things like political

 152

dislocation, exile, and the destruction of the temple were of primary import.

For Christianities in the late second and early third centuries, one central

problem was their relation to Judaism, both its present-day adherents and

its scriptures, many of which were now part of the Christian canon.

As I turn now to compare three texts from this trajectory (Epistle of

Barnabas, Letter to Flora, and Galatians), I want to bring the arguments and

observations from this chapter to bear on them, because when we leave

aside judgments about their Christian affiliations, I argue, we allow new

aspects of each—individually and in relation to the others—to come to light.

My analysis, then, examines Moses, the Law, and Israel in the three texts, as

well as ways that these shared themes are related to more idiosyncratic

topics (e.g., Abraham, angels, Savior, Jesus).

 CHAPTER FIVE

Angels, Intermediaries, and the Law:

Paul, Ps.-Barnabas, and Ptolemy

Not a different answer but different issues are at stake. If there is any value
in the framework presented here, it is worthwhile to reread our sources
(especially Paul's letters) in this light...Paul's attempts at selfdefinition and
identity need no longer be seen as attempts at separation or breaking away
from Judaism but can be reread as his attempt to define what he considered
to be the true Israel.1

In this chapter I approach three texts normally considered, in one way or

another, Christian: Galatians, Letter to Flora, and Epistle of Ps.-Barnabas.2 And,

leaving aside the dominant approaches to the study of early Christianity I

critiqued last chapter, I want to take Craffert's lead, asking not "what kinds

of Christians were these authors?" but "how do they each treat Moses, the

Law, and Israel?".

1 Craffert 1993 259.

2All
translations of Ptolemy and Paul are my own. I follow Lake's translation of EB (Ps.-
Barnabas 1912) with slight modifications.

153
 154

Before presenting the close text study, however, I need to make a few

remarks about these texts and authors, first about some general points of

comparison—connection to Israel, exegesis, and self-identification—and

then about the bibliographical, interpretive, and historical issues that

concern them individually.

As a group, all of them seek to explain their connection to the authority

and traditions of ancient Israelite religion and culture, while at the same

time denying the connection of other groups; Paul and Ptolemy identify the

other groups; 3 Ps.-Barnabas does not. Paul asserts his connection and his

communities' to Israel genealogically (he is a Jew by nature or birth [fÊsei],

and they are heirs through Abraham's seed, Jesus);4 Ps.-Barnabas uses

genealogy (his community is like the Patriarchs' younger sons who receive

the blessings of the first-born) but in conjunction with a default model: the

generation of Israelites who were originally to receive the Mosaic covenant

lost it by worshipping the calf, and so the Lord gave the covenant again, this

time directly to his people in the person of Jesus.5 Ptolemy, in contrast,

simply assumes a connection between the culture and religion of Israel and

him and his followers. He is concerned not to prove that they have such a

connection, but to elaborate its nature and scope.

3Gal. 2.4, 12; LTF 3.2-3.

4Gal. 2.15; 3.29.
5EB 13.1-7.
 155

In terms of the exegesis of each letter, all three are polemical to varying

degrees. They take on opposing interpretations of their subject matter

directly, presenting characterizations of their opponents' ideas and refuting

them.6 There are important differences, however. Paul counters two kinds of

arguments: ad hominem and exegetical. The beginning of Galatians is a

personal defense of his work as an apostle; the second half is an exegetical

refutation of his opponents' interpretation of Abraham. He does the latter

primarily by presenting a counter-reading of the general elements of the

story of Abraham, perhaps even the very elements used by his opponents.7

Ps.-Barnabas, for his part, argues thematically, moving from issue to issue

and providing exegesis of relevant passages from the Hebrew Bible.

Ptolemy, finally, proceeds more formally, first discussing the general

character of the Law and then the identity and nature of the lawgiver.

Furthermore, he uses what we would view as historical-critical and

sociological explanations for much of his exegesis, analyzing the

organizational patterns of leadership and power struggles in the desert

wanderings of Israel to interpret the text of the Hebrew Bible. Paul and Ps.-

Barnabas, in contrast to this approach, use more standard commentary

6Gal 3.6f.; EB 16.1-10; LTF 3.2.

7Cp. James 2.18-26.
 156

techniques, exploiting textual épor ai to argue that this really means that on

the basis of repetition, odd usage, contradictions, etc.8

Finally, none of these authors identifies himself as Christian: Paul calls

himself a Jew by fÊsei; Ps.-Barnabas, despite the hostile tone of his letter at

points, never uses either the term "Christian" or "Jew", only us and them, the

former and the latter, these people and those people;9 Ptolemy does not use any

terms of self-designation, but does refer to the "apostolic tradition which we

too have received."10

I now want to make some remarks about these texts individually,

because each of them raises their own set of important problems, whether

interpretive, bibliographical, or historical. Paul's letter to the Galatians needs

no introduction; my approach to it in this chapter, however, does. Let me

say a few words about my decision to draw almost exclusively on Galatians,

my thoughts on Paul's "Judaizing" opponents, and my approach to the hapax

in Galatians 4.24: éllhgoroÊmena.

Any study of Paul is undertaken in a long shadow of previous

interpretation, extending from Acts to the present. Furthermore, much of

8Cp. Gal 3.16 and EB 10.1-12.

9o tow/pr«tow or o tow/§ke now.
10LTF7.9: éjioum°nh t∞w épostolik∞w paradÒsevw, ∂n §k diadox∞w ka‹ ≤me›w
pareilÆfamen.
 157

this previous interpretation treats Paul's corpus as a whole, using all of the

undisputed letters to formulate a picture of "Paul's thought". In contrast, I

strongly believe that the first axiom of the Pauline scholar must be that the

letters do not form a "corpus" or "collection" in any viable sense. His letters

are part of a larger whole, but a whole the contours and extent of which are

not completely accessible to us. And so if one approaches them as a series of

documents that contain—no matter in how qualified or imperfect a

way—Paul's over-arching thought on exegesis, theology, preaching, or

ethics, one will be lead, on the one hand, to pay too much attention to issues

that are of little or no importance in some letters, and on the other to pay too

little attention to issues that are central in some or only one of them.11

Furthermore, and on a more practical note, since the Galatians received

only this letter and not any of the others, their understanding of it could not

depend on these documents: they did not have privilege of access to them,

and nor did Paul intend them to—or else presumably he would have

written similar sentiments in his letter to them. Therefore in struggling to

understand his letter to the Galatians, I will refrain from drawing

significantly on any other Pauline letters and use only internal evidence to

support my interpretation.

I wish to also say something about Paul’s opposition in Galatia. There is

a tendency to label them Judaizers, a label which, in light of the scholarship

11See Hennig 1966 32-36 on this problem in the study of biological morphology.
 158

surveyed in the previous chapter, is unwarranted and which, furthermore,

is unsupported by the specifics of the letter, as we will see below.12 What we

have in Galatians, I submit, is Paul, a Jew, espousing the authority of

Abraham, another Jew, against certain false-apostles, also Jews, who

espouse the authority of Moses, yet another Jew. In this situation, Judaizing

does not describe what is going on, unless of course Paul is also Judaizing.

Two assumptions underlie the scholarly use of this term to characterize the

opposition in Galatia.

First, that Paul had made a self-conscious break from Judaism by the time

Galatians was written.13 As he does not call himself anything other than a Jew,

I see no warrant for this.14 In respect to Paul’s statement in 1.13, ÉHkoÊsate

går tØn §mØn énastrofÆn pote §n t“ ÉIoudaÛsm“, it seems clear that

énastrofÆn can refer to a number of different things: in the LSJ, s.v.

"énastrof°v" the order of entries is: turning upside-down, upsetting,

overthrow, return, wheeling around, reversal, turning-back, repetition, conversion,

dwelling, haunt, mode of life, behavior, occupation, concern, return, and way back.

It also seems that pote modifies it. In contrast to the usual explanations of

this statement, however, I suggest that Paul is contrasting his former life,

12For recent use of the term, see e.g., Mason 1990; Wilson 1992; Verseput 1993.
13E.g., Sanders 1983 3; Mason 1990 204f.; Hultgren 1991 90-91.
14Gal 2.15.
 159

occupation, or behavior in Judaism to his present state, which is also in

Judaism.15

Second, it is assumed that Judaism in the first century consisted primarily of

the acceptance of Moses as an authoritative figure.16 This assumption is no more

certain than the first. At least as early as 1 Enoch there had been strains of

Judaism which were not centered on Moses, as can also be seen in the

Jewish opposition to the Maccabean revolt.17 In none of these cases do

scholars consider dissenting parties to be "founders" of new religions.18 I

argue that Paul's statements in Galatians should be viewed the same way.

What we findin Galatians, then, is better characterized, I submit, as an

Abrahamic Jew struggling against Mosaic Jews. Paul is not trying to found a

new religion, Christian or otherwise; he is merely stressing, as Jews had

done for at least three-centuries before him, elements of Jewish tradition

other than Moses.19 This is not to say that his emphasis on Abraham over

against Moses did not contribute signally to the development of Christian

15See also Craffert 1993 256.

16Ibid. 1993 234-37.
17See 1 Macc. 1.11-15; Bickermann 1937 76-92, esp. 88; and Hengel 1991 303-14, esp. 305.
18So Boccaccini on the study of early Christianity as something other than a dissenting,
first-century Judaism: "It is equally disturbing to see scholars discussing the relationship
between 'early Christianity' and 'early Judaism.'…How can we pretend to compare a part (a
species of Judaism) such as early Christianity to a whole (a set of many Judaisms—a set that
should include early Christianity)? No one has ever dreamed of comparing Essenism or
Pharisaism…to 'early Judaism'—it would immediately appear absurd. Separating early
Christianity from the other Jewish groups is an unconscious consequence of confessional
bias" (Boccaccini 1991 23).
19Cf. Droge 1987 23; cp.Craffert 1993.
 160

theology. On the contrary, it may have even given rise to it. But Paul himself

did not reject Judaism by turning his theology away from Moses; instead, he

was forging an énastrofÆn nun §n t“ ÉIoudaÛsm“, one which focused on

Abraham and his seed.

Finally, my analysis of Galatians 4.21-5.1 does not concern itself with the

exegetical issues that, since at least the third century, have been most

frequently addressed by scholars. As we saw in chapter three, this passage

was one focus of the exegetical conflicts between the Antiochenes and their

Alexandrian predecessors. And as we saw in chapter one, contemporary

scholars repeatedly struggle with this passage, both in their readings of Paul

as well as in their assessments of patristic exegesis. Far and away this is due

to the appearance of éllhgoroÊmena in 4.24, the only occurrence in any

form of either the verb éllhgore›n or noun éllhgor a in the New

Testament. For simplicity's sake, and because I discussed the intricacies of

both ancient and contemporary debates of this passage in chapters one and

three, I will beg the question of whether or what kind of allegory this is, the

historical dimension of Paul's reading, its intersection with typology, his

regard for the literal sense—all of these issues are ancillary to what I wish to

examine here, namely, the character of exegetical authority and the role of

Abraham in Paul's interpretation of the Law. Therefore, all that I take

éllhgoroÊmena to mean here is "figurative".

 161

Gilles Quispel, in the introduction to his 1966 edition of Ptolemy’s Letter

to Flora, called it “incontestably an important document.”20 This is especially

the case for the light it sheds on the general development of second-century

Christianity, particularly in respect to issues of self-definition. It has a

number of features that make it invaluable to the historian: a glimpse of the

content of an apostolic tradition,21 a mention of “the disciples of Paul”,22 the

first occurrence of the term Pentateuch,23 a summary of competing

exegetical positions,24 a discussion of the correlation between exegesis and

reality,25 and numerous explicit citations of scripture along with their

interpretation.26

In spite of this, Ptolemy’s letter has been all but ignored in contemporary

scholarship.27 Not since Quispel’s introduction to the Sources Chrétiennes

volume, quoted above, has there been a significant work specifically

20Ptolemy 1966 9; all translations from Quispel's introduction are my own.

21LTF 7.8-10.
22Ibid. 6.6.
23Ibid. 4.1.
24Ibid. 3.1-7.
25Ibid. 5.2, 8-9; 6.4-5.
26Ibid.3.5, 6; 4.13; 5.15; 6.3, 6. See Appendix: Figure 2.2 for a comparison of the Biblical
books cited in EB, LTF, and Gal.

27These bibliographic remarks are not meant to be exhaustive; they adequately convey,
however, that there is a significant gap in scholarship on the letter. The analysis in this
chapter, because it looks at Ptolemy’s letter in a new context, i.e., neither in comparison to
Ad. Haer. 1.8.5 nor to Valentinianism generally, is a first step towards fully acknowledging
the scholarly importance of Ptolemy’s letter.
 162

devoted to it.28 Most references to the letter appear in works on gnosticism

and early Christianity, in which it normally receives passing mention in a

section devoted to Valentinus. One exception is Elaine Pagels’ The Johannine

Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis, an analysis of Heracleon’s commentary on the

Fourth Gospel. In it, she deals with Ptolemy extensively; however, Pagels

tries to reconcile both of his extant works with one another and with the

systems of Heracleon and Valentinus, and the Letter to Flora receives

considerably less attention from her than Ptolemy’s more esoteric

commentary on the prologue to the Fourth Gospel29

There are several reasons for the lack of scholarship on the letter. First,

the discovery at Nag Hammadi, which has yielded texts that seem quite

esoteric, has made Ptolemy’s work appear tame by comparison—a “soft

pedaled” heresy.30 Second, Ptolemy’s commentary on the prologue of the

Fourth Gospel is similar both to finds at Nag Hammadi as well as to more

28See Layton's (1987) bibliography: it contains only Quispel's translation and Fallon
1976, which uses a summary of Ptolemy's letter as a foil for an in-depth analysis of Philo. I
have found one other article devoted primarily to the LTF, Löhr 1995. It argues that
Ptolemy's theology should be understood in opposition to Marcion rather than in
accordance with a general Valentinism. He does not, however, consider the exegesis of the
letter in any detail.

29Ap. Irenaeus Ad. Haer. 1.8.5; see Pagels 1973 18 for the marginal place LTF holds in the
analysis. Notice that LTF receives as little attention in her work The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic
Exegesis and the Pauline Letters (1975), which also deals with Ptolemy at length. Only six of
seventeen references to Ptolemy in the body of her analysis are to LTF; none occur in her
treatment of Galatians. Furthermore, on page 41, Pagels does not mention that Ptolemy’s
interpretation of Paul’s “leaven and lump” metaphor (LTF 5.15) directly contradicts the
interpretation of the same metaphor preserved in Ad. Haer. 1.8.3, namely, LTF: leaven = evil;
Ad. Haer.: leaven = Saviour.

30So Hembold 1967 41.

 163

so-called Valentinian texts. This furthers the perception that his Letter to

Flora is an “elementary exposition of gnosis”.31 Finally, the recipient of the

letter, Flora, is commonly held to be a wealthy patroness32—sometimes also

a Christian33—who is considering conversion to Ptolemy’s school.34 She is

supposed therefore to be a potential source of prestige and financial support

for Ptolemy, who would naturally have presented his theology, according to

some scholars, in whatever form was necessary to win her over.35 Yet even if

Ptolemy was not so unscrupulous as to alter the main thrust of his teaching

to convert Flora, the exoteric nature of the letter and the uninitiated status of

its recipient presuppose, according to some, a simplicity of expression that

makes the Letter to Flora a shallower example of Ptolemy’s theology than the

excerpt found in Irenaeus.36

These scholarly judgments of the letter presuppose first that Ptolemy's

most important surviving work is the one that seems most strange, that only

what is most unorthodox represents his authentic theology. Second, they

assume that if Ptolemy is addressing an outsider to introduce her to his

31So Perkins 1980 36.

32E.g., Haardt 1971 87.
33E.g., Bauer 1934 174; Grant 1961 162; Jonas 1963 192.
34E.g., Mansel 1875 197; Pagels 1973 22.
35E.g., Bauer 1971 174; Rudolph 1983 260.
36See also Pagels 1973 18; Filoramo 1990 118; Pétrement 1990 228, 192; and Perkins 1993
45. In contrast, for an excellent though brief treatment of the letter, see Frend 1984 208-210.
 164

theology and to gain financial support, that somehow the letter is not a

genuine expression of his thought—or at least is less genuine than the

excerpt preserved in Irenaeus. But if we were to adopt this line of reasoning

in Pauline studies, for example, Romans would cease to provide genuine or

authentic expressions of Paul's thought. In it, he writes by way of

introduction to an unfamiliar audience to ask them, among other things, to

be "sped on his way" financially to Spain. As for the merits of such an

approach, I think its shortcomings are clear.

As for the former assumption, it seems to stem from a desire to take

seriously only those heresies that appear most heretical to us.37 The

possibility that the similarities and differences between second-century

orthodoxy and heresy are different than we expect is understandably

disconcerting. But as will be evident from my analysis, Ptolemy's letter is

similar to and different from Galatians and the Epistle of Barnabas in ways

that chafe against our assumptions about second- and third-century

orthodoxy and heresy.

Turning to the Epistle of Barnabas, the main interpretive problem in any

analysis of the letter is the overwhelming misconception that it is anti-

Jewish and rejects, or at least diminishes, the authority of the Hebrew Bible.

37SeeSmith 1982 xii-xiii for a discussion of the formal aspects of this assumption and its
manifestation in the study of religion more generally.
 165

It is also consistently marginalized in dichotomous approaches to the study

of early Christianity: it is, variously, a prime example of the "Alexandrian"

allegorical method, of gnostic, Marcionite or quasi-Marcionite theologies,

and of a rationalistic approach to scripture. In this way, it is contrasted to

Palestinian literalism, Antiochene typology, orthodox theology, and other

such "spiritually genuine" readings of scripture.

For example, Bauer's opinion, which has remained accepted with only

minor changes over the last sixty years:

The basic thesis of the Epistle, that Judaism is an aberration with which
Christianity can have nothing to do, but which deserves only rejection,
remains gnostic—even if, by means of a thoroughly grotesque allegorization,
which turns the Old Testament topsy-turvy with respect to its literal meaning,
a condemnation of the Jewish Scripture ostensibly is still avoided. Actually,
the Valentinian Ptolemy has retained more of the Old Testament than has
Barnabas.38

Pelikan’s interpretation of the epistle, while seeming more reasonable than

Bauer’s, also compares it to a second-century heresy: he considers Ps.-

Barnabas to resemble Marcion.

The attitude of Marcion was a heretical instance of what may have been a
rather widespread resentment also among orthodox believers; for the
Epistle of Barnabas, while not going as far as Marcion in its rejection of the
Old Testament, did claim that the tables of the covenant of the Lord were
shattered at Sinai and that Israel never had an authentic covenant with
God.39

Koester, devoting more space to the letter than either Bauer or Pelikan, sees

it as concerned with gnosis, as containing a "radical rejection of the validity

38Bauer 1934 47, emphasis mine.

39Pelikan 1971 1.14.
 166

of the old covenant," and as adopting a "rationalistic and spiritual-allegorical

understanding of the ritual law."40

Finally, Lake, although he generally agrees with Bauer, Pelikan, and

Koester, refrains from associating EB with heresies. Instead, he relies on the

Alexandrian-Antiochene, literal-allegorical, and Christian-Jewish

dichotomous approaches outlined above (chs. 1, 2, and 4):

It is either a general treatise or was intended for some community in which

Alexandrian ideas prevailed, though it is not possible to define either its
destination, or the locality from which it was written, with any greater
accuracy. Its main object is to warn Christians against a Judaistic
conception of the Old Testament, and the writer carries a symbolical
exegesis as far as did Philo; indeed he goes farther and apparently denies
any literal significance at all to the commands of the law.41

In contrast to these judgments of the letter, in which Ps.-Barnabas

espouses what would later become the standard "Verus Israel" polemic used

by Christians to explain the fall of the Israelites in the desert, we can in fact

detect a high degree of subtlety in Ps.-Barnabas's account. Resisting the urge

to retroject Christian polemic onto the epistle, we must begin by refusing to

label it "Christian"—despite its canonicity for some ancient Christians (it

appears as a New Testament document in Codex Sinaiaticus) and its

important place for contemporary Christians as one of the texts collected

under the name "Apostolic Fathers"—and then read the letter without

immediately classifying it either as Jewish or as Christian.

40Koester 1987 1.227.

41Ps-Barnabas 1912 337.
 167

Returning to the epistle without the assumption that it is a virulent piece

of Christian polemic against Jews, we find that to call his interpretation of

the fall in the desert "anti-Jewish" rides roughshod over important

distinctions in the text. He presents a very complex and nuanced reading of

the fall, drawing on formal and linguistic parallels between the narration in

Exodus, the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life, and the contemporary situation of

his followers.

For Ps.-Barnabas, Moses was an exemplary mediator between the Lord

and Israel, in which respect he differs markedly from Paul, a we will see.42

Instead, Ps.-Barnabas concentrates his attention on the sins of Israel rather

than on the inadequacy of Moses. For him, the ritual laws are distinct from

the Law given to Moses on Sinai before Israel's fall: they are later additions,

the interpolations of an evil angel. The relationship between Moses and the

Lord, however, is blameless according to Ps.-Barnabas.

In addition to the intra-textual elements that lead us to question the anti-

Jewish characterization of EB, there are inter-textual parallels that make it

difficult to consider Ps.-Barnabas' interpretation anti-Jewish or even

nominally "Christian". In looking closely at Philo and the Rabbis (as well as

the text of Exodus itself), we find that in its main points, Ps.-Barnabas'

42Not only in Galatians but especially in 2 Corinthians, where Moses is portrayed as

deceiving the Israelites about his fading glory: "...we are very bold, not like Moses, who put
a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendor" (2 Cor
3.13).
 168

interpretation agrees with important and central traditions of Jewish

thought on the fall of Israel.43

First, to struggle to explain the enormity of Israel's betrayal of God even

as he was giving the Torah to them is eminently Jewish, as is Moses' harsh

judgment of that generation of Israel: the text of Exodus itself tells us that

Moses consolidated his position as leader of the Israelites by killing those

guilty of worshipping the golden calf;44 Philo tells us approvingly that

Moses cut down 3,000 of them;45 and some midrashim that he drowned

them.46

Second, that Ps.-Barnabas is concerned to justify Moses' reputation also

makes it difficult to consider his interpretation anti-Jewish, since Exodus,

Philo, and the Rabbis do the same: they claim that Moses begged God for

Israel's forgiveness and that God allowed some of Israel to survive rather

than eradicating all of them because of the sincerity of his apology.47

43The midrashim here reviewed are all later, much later, than Ps.-Barnabas. But if these
sentiments are not anti-Jewish in the fourth century AD, when Christianity was on its way
to being the religion of the empire, why should they be in the second, when it is not at all
certain that Christianity, in any Mediterranean-wide, general sense, existed at all? Further,
the fact that we find harsh judgments of Israel in Philo and the Rabbis alongside the
exaltation of Moses (he stands openly before God, studies the Torah with him, and
successfully intercedes on behalf of Israel) makes it even more difficult to continue to view
EB as a Christian, anti-Jewish rejection of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible.

44Ex 32.21-35.
45De Vita Moses 2.172.
46Ginzberg 1911 3.128-130.
47Exodus 32.11-14; De Vita Moses 2.166; Ginzberg 1911 3.131-132.
 169

Third, the interpolation of evil angels into the story has precedents in the

text itself, as well as continuity with later Jewish thought: in Exodus, angels

appear frequently;48 in some midrashim, a great many of these angels

attempt to prevent Moses going both up to and down from Heaven, and

Satan (apparently just another angel in some midrashim) is partially

responsible for leading the Israelites astray.49

Finally, the problems associated with Moses-as-mediator are treated at

length in the midrashim: Israel at first begs for Moses to intervene, but then

later regrets this decision, as they long for direct contact. Moses tells them

that only the Messiah will restore such direct contact and only in the end

times.50 Their reliance on Moses as a mediator, the midrashim explain, is

partially responsible for their failure to take the whole of the ten

commandments to heart: because Moses ascended Mt. Sinai, they only

heard the first two commandments from God himself.51

In all of this, my point is not to claim that the Epistle of Barnabas was

influential on the Rabbis, to uphold the Alexandrian provenance of the text,

or to illustrate Ps.-Barnabas' dependence on Philo. I simply wish to point out

that we should refuse to consider it "anti-Jewish", because similar

interpretations appear in texts that unquestionably identify themselves as

48Exodus 14.19; 27.20; 32.34; 33.2.

49Ginzberg 1911 3.109-114, 118.
50Ibid. 3.106-109.
51Ibid. 3.108.
 170

Jewish. Since Ps.-Barnabas never tells us that he is Christian, and since we

can find similar interpretations of the Law, Israel, and Moses a century

before and two centuries after in self-consciously Jewish texts, I see no

warrant for considering the epistle a virulent example of anti-Jewish

polemic. It is more properly viewed as a late-antique text that questions, as

strongly as Jews, Christians, and others had done before and would do after,

the theological implications of Israel's fall in the wilderness.

Having addressed the most pertinent difficulties associated with these

texts individually and as a group, I want to begin my close text-study. I

analyze the interpretations of the Law found in each of them by first

comparing the most relevant elements of each text's treatment.52 A number

of these appear in all three (Moses, Law, Intermediary) or in only two

(Israel/Elders, Angels, Covenant, Jesus); a few appear in one only

(Saviour/Son, Abraham). After beginning with the most common elements,

the larger significance of those that figure in only one of them will become

clear, and I can present a full discussion of the most important similarities

and differences of the three texts.

52See Appendix: Figure 2.1 for the complete list of these.

 171

MOSES

As we would expect, Moses is central to all three interpretations of the

Law, although they do not treat him in the same detail. In the Letter to Flora,

he figures most prominently. Ptolemy thoroughly examines Moses as a real-

life leader and gives us insight into how the power struggles and difficult

circumstances of the desert wanderings influenced his lawmaking activity.

He is responsible, Ptolemy tells us, for the second division of the Law.

...this lawgiving is to be divided into three parts. First into the part of God
himself and his legislation; second into the part of Moses—not in the sense
that God himself legislated through Moses, but rather that Moses began
from his own reflection and legislated certain things.53

He is careful here to point out that Moses did not in any way act as an

intermediary for God in his law-making, but generated only mundane

legislation from his own reflection. Throughout his discussion, Ptolemy's

aim is to discover the "intention" or "reasoning" (gn«mh) behind his laws,

which he claims is motivated by necessity (énãgkh). The difficult situation in

the desert and the sins of the Israelites, who would have been utterly

destroyed had they continued in their disobedience and incontinence, forced

Moses to take action.

So, being a thoroughly capable leader, he circumvents their destruction

by legislating "contrary to God":

53LTF 4.2.
 172

Moses, wishing to make an end of this unpleasant affair of theirs, legislated

by himself [éf' •autoË] something further [deÊterÒn tina]...thereby
choosing the lesser of two evils in accordance with his tumultuous
situation. He did this in order that, if they were not able to observe the first,
they would certainly observe the second and not turn aside to injustice and
evil.54

To illustrate Moses' "lesser of two evils" approach, Ptolemy describes his

ruling on divorce.

The Law of Moses...because of hardheartedness permits [a married couple]

to be separated. And certainly Moses legislates in this manner contrary to
God, for to divorce is the opposite of not to divorce. And indeed if we
should examine closely the reasoning [gn≈mhn ] of Moses...we shall find
that it was not done according to his own deliberate course of action, but
by necessity [katå énãgkhn] on account of the moral weakness of the ones
furnished with the Law.55

As we can see in this quote, for Ptolemy, Moses is a troubled leader who, in

response to the errant ways of his people, invents his own laws—contrary to

God's—in order to deliver them from destruction.

Ps.-Barnabas also highlights the difficulties Moses faced in the

wilderness as the leader of Israel. While on Mt. Sinai with God, Moses is

urged to go witness the disobedience of the Israelites,

and [he] perceived that they had made themselves again molten images,
and he cast [the tablets] out of his hands, and the tables of the covenant
were broken. Moses received it, but they were not worthy.56

In contrast to Ptolemy, however, he sees Moses as a conduit or spokesman

for God, not just as a troubled leader.

54Ibid. 4.8-9.
55Ibid. 4.5-6.
56EB 14.3-4.
 173

For example, when discussing the proper understanding of the dietary

restrictions, Ps.-Barnabas states that "the ordinance of God is not abstinence

from eating, but Moses spoke in the spirit. He mentioned the swine for this

reason: you shall not consort, he means, with men who are like swine."57 Not

only in this case, but throughout the wanderings in the wilderness, Moses

channeled the divine will by means of the spirit. For example, in the war

against "strangers",

the spirit speaks to the heart of Moses to make a representation of the cross
and of him who should suffer, because, he says, unless they put their trust
in him, they shall suffer war forever.58

And again in fashioning the talisman of the snakes, Moses is inspired to

show the Israelites truths about Jesus. Although he commanded them to

make no graven or molten images, "yet he makes one himself to show a type

of Jesus."59 Moses is, for Ps.-Barnabas, a man of God who correctly

apprehended the spiritual significance of all he did, trying, however

unsuccessfully, to show the Israelites the glory of the one who was to suffer

for them, Jesus. But for Ps.-Barnabas, his ultimate failure is a product of

Israel's weakness, not Moses' own.

57Ibid. 10.2-3; see also 10.9, 11: "Moses received three doctrines concerning food and
thus spoke of them in the spirit...see how well Moses legislated."

58Ibid. 12.2.
59Ibid. 12.6.
 174

In Paul, Moses figures least prominently. We must not, however, see the

lack of space devoted to Moses—or Israel and the elders, for that matter—as

an indication that he is extraneous to Paul's interpretation. Quite the

contrary, within Paul's twin-genealogy of Sarah and Hagar, Moses is

structurally central to his interpretation of the Law and Abraham.60 In light

of this, there are some important things to notice in his brief treatment of

Moses. Because the Law was "given by angels through the hand of an

intermediary," Moses is reduced to the level of a scribe, one who simply

commits to writing the dictates of others.61 In this we see a kind of middle

position between Ptolemy and Ps.-Barnabas: on the one hand, Moses

transmitted the ideas of a higher power to the people of Israel (as in EB), but

on the other, what he transmitted is not from the true source of divine Law,

God (as in LTF).62

60We will see this more fully below (pp. 181f. and 201f.).
61Gal 3.19b.
62As we will see below in his treatment of the Law and the covenant, Paul appreciates
the possible opposition to his view, as can be seen in his question "is then the Law against
God?" (Ibid. 4.19b).
 175

ISRAEL

Paul also treats Israel cursorily.63 There is only one allusion to them in

the three chapters dealing with the Law: "Why then the Law? It was added

because of transgressions."64 As was the case with Moses, we will see the

role this minor allusion plays in Paul's interpretation when we turn to the

sections on the Law and Jesus.65

For Ps.-Barnabas, the people of Israel were favored by God: he showed

them signs and wonders in the desert, and they enjoyed the privilege of

direct communication with him: "while teaching Israel and doing such great

signs and wonders [God] preached to them and loved them greatly."66

Despite all of this, Israel did not prove themselves worthy of divine favor.

They repeatedly sinned in the wilderness, angering God and eventually

causing him to abandon any hope of redeeming them.

And consider this also, my brethren, when you see that after such great
signs and wonders were wrought in Israel they were even then finally
abandoned;—let us take heed lest as it was written we be found "many
called but few chosen."67

63Although elsewhere he treats them at length (1 and 2 Corinthians), his discussion

there does not contradict the allusion here to their sins. In 1 Corinthians, especially, his
view is much like Ps.-Barnabas': they sinned despite their preferential treatment by God
and they are given to us as a warning to hold fast to God and not be cast away (1 Cor
10.1f.).

64Gal 3.19a.
65See below, pp. 181f. and 190f.
66EB 5.8-9.
67Ibid. 4.14.
 176

Ptolemy, while in agreement with Ps.-Barnabas about the sinfulness of

the general populace of Israel, draws a distinction between the main body of

the Israelites and their superiors, the elders. In discussing their role, Ptolemy

completes his portrait of the political and social conditions of the nation of

Israel in the desert. The elders are like cabinet members or bureaucratic

underlings of Moses, who, despite their inferior position, have as profound

an effect on the legal process as Moses himself. They interweave their own

ideas both with the imperfect but eminently reasonable laws of Moses as

well as with the law of God himself.

...the elders of the nation are discovered to be engrafting certain of their

own commandments [§ntolãw] from the start...this too the Saviour has
made clear, saying, "For God said, 'Honor your father and mother, so that it
be well with you.' But you," he continued, "have spoken to the elders,
saying, 'Present to God what you are due from me,' and you reject the Law
of God because of the traditions" of your elders.68

Ptolemy specifically points out, however, that they are not evil as the

common people of Israel are. Rather, like Moses, they acted out of necessity

in order to effectively govern those under them. When discussing a concrete

example of the "interwoven" laws of the elders—"an eye for an eye"—he

says that:

otherwise this command both was and is just, since it was established in
consequence of the weakness of those being legislated through their
deviation from the pure law...Now perhaps this could be the result of a
plan, but more likely it was the result of necessity [Íp' énãgkhw].69

68LTF 4.2, 11-12.

69Ibid. 5.5-6.
 177

In these passages and in those on Moses, we see the concern for

historical detail with which Ptolemy analyzes the text of the Hebrew Bible.

He presents an every-day picture of the wandering Israeli government, with

Moses as its leader. In governing, he acts as liaison between God and the

people, sometimes creating legislation antithetical to God in order to

consolidate his power and protect his constituents. Beneath him is a body of

followers, the elders, who carry out his decisions and also help create

legislation during the difficult period in the wilderness. And despite the fact

that their legislative work was undone by the Saviour (as we will see

below), Ptolemy does not condemn them: like all political leaders, they acted

in response to concrete, sometimes tumultuous, circumstances and were

thereby prevented from legislating perfectly, as only God can.

INTERMEDIARY

In both Galatians and EB, Moses is an intermediary figure. For Paul, as

we have seen, he is the equivalent of a scribe. He transmits the laws given

by angels to the people of Israel simply by writing them down. For Ps.-

Barnabas, Moses' intermediary capacity is more divine, because tÚ pneËma

 178

speaks efiw tØn kard an Mv#s°vw.70 He thereby can provide Israel with

"images" or "types" of salvific importance.71

And as we have also seen for Ptolemy, Moses is not an intermediary

figure, but rather, in contrast to Paul and Ps.-Barnabas, a political leader. His

legislation, along with the elders', is opposed to divine legislation rather

than an extension of it.

Ptolemy's intermediary figure, in contrast to Paul's and Ps.-Barnabas', is

thoroughly divine:

This one is the demiurge and maker of this whole cosmos and the things in
it. It is contrary to the natures of the other two [God the Father and the
devil] and is set between them [m°sow] and might rightly bear the name of
the Middle Principle [t∞w mesÒthtow].72

Ptolemy spends little time on this figure in comparison to the Saviour, as we

will see, but he is important nonetheless. He functions as a theological

insulator to keep the imperfection of this world separate from God the

Father of All. And since the mesÒthw is divine, Ptolemy can also insulate the

Law from the evil of the Adversary, since it does not come from him in any

way. We will now see a similar strategy of theological insulation as we turn

to consider the role of angel(s) in each.

70EB 12.2.
71See, e.g., EB 6.11; 7.3, 7, 10; 8.1; 12.2.
72LTF 7.4.
 179

ANGEL(S)

In Galatians, Paul tells us that the Law was given "by angels" and

nothing more.73 As with Moses and the sins of Israel, however, this should

not lead us to believe that they are only a superficial part of his

interpretation. Quite the contrary, for Paul the angels insulate God from the

theological problems he finds in the Law. Paul, as we will see in the sections

on the Law and Jesus, claims that the Mosaic covenant is lesser than the

Abrahamic and is invalid now that Jesus has come. But since Moses' Law

was commonly considered divine, Paul needs to explain how God—the

ultimate good—could have sanctioned flawed legislation. By introducing

the angels as the authors of the Law and Moses as their scribe, he exempts

God from his criticism of the Mosaic Law and Sinaitic covenant; but his

reply to the question of 3.19b—"by no means!"—suggests that he was

conscious of the opposition his strategy would encounter.74

73Gal3.19a. The use of the genitive here [di' égg°lvn] stresses the agency of the
égg°lloi: “d a with gen. is used of direct, d a with accus. of indirect, agency” (Smyth 1920
§1685d).

74This will be dealt with at length in the section on the Law below (p. 181f.).
 180

Angels do not appear in the Letter to Flora, but Ptolemy shares Paul's

impulse to shield the divinity from theological criticisms of the Law.75 He,

however, does so with his historical-critical interpretation: God gave laws,

but not all the laws in the Torah are his. In the day-to-day governing of the

wandering Israel, Moses and the elders made necessary additions to the law

of God, and these are recorded side-by-side in the text of the Hebrew Bible.76

Ps.-Barnabas addresses this same problem in two ways: with the sins of

Israel and with the evil angelic exegete. We have already seen the first

above: Israel's sins, rather than Moses' or God's inadequacies, cause the

tablets to be broken. The second operates much as Moses and the elders do

for Ptolemy, but with different cosmological implications. Ps.-Barnabas says

of the continued practice of circumcision:

But moreover the circumcision in which they trusted has been abolished.
For he declared that circumcision was not of the flesh, but they erred
because an evil angel [êggellow ponhrÚw] was misleading them.77

By tracing certain interpolations in the Law to this angel, Ps.-Barnabas

effectively insulates God from any theological shortcomings in the Law,

while simultaneously demonizing those who still believe the interpretation

75As we just saw, this god (Middle Principle), whom Ptolemy insulates from impure
legislation, himself insulates God the Father of All from the imperfection of direct
involvement in this world.

76We will see this below (p. 181f.).

77EB 9.4.
 181

of the evil angel. In the Letter to Flora, as we have seen, the interpolations

Ptolemy finds, while not divine, nonetheless have merit as the efforts of

human leaders to keep their people from destruction. For Ps.-Barnabas, the

interpolations are more sinister, and he sees them as evidence that there are

nefarious divine beings who mislead unwary humans.78

LAW

Ps.-Barnabas remedies the misunderstanding caused by the

interpolations of the evil angel with legal exegesis of his own. To this end,

he presents a sustained and detailed interpretation of the Mosaic law. He

deals in turn with blood sacrifice, fasting, circumcision, dietary laws,

Sabbath observance, and the temple.79 His strategy is to find spiritual

significance in the laws and institutions of the Sinaitic covenant. For

example, in dealing with blood sacrifice:

For [God] has made plain to us through all the prophets that he needs
neither sacrifices nor burnt-offerings nor oblations, saying in one
place..."Did I command your fathers when they came out of...Egypt to offer
me...sacrifices? No, but rather did I command them: Let none of you
cherish any evil in his heart against his neighbor"...We ought then to
understand...how we may make our offering to him.80

78Inthis, we can see later parallels in the midrashim on Exodus (e.g., Ginzberg 1911
3.109-114, 118). Also, by way of contrast, notice the complete inactivity of the Adversary in
LTF. He is briefly described, but has no role—benevolent or malevolent—in the giving of
the law or the Saviour's three-fold interpretation of it.

79EB chs. 2, 3, 9, 10, 15, and 16.

80Ibid. 2.4, 7-9.
 182

Or with circumcision:

For [God] speaks again concerning the ears, how he circumcised our hearts;
for the Lord says in the prophet..."Circumcise your hearts, says the
Lord"...so then he circumcised our hearing in order that we should hear the
word and believe.81

In presenting these interpretations, Ps.-Barnabas does not wish to

invalidate the whole Law or reject the authority of the Torah. On the

contrary, his goal is to rehabilitate the Law and the Torah through

interpretation. He does so using the same kind of symbolic readings that the

Letter of Aristeas does, for example.82 In addition, the fact that Ps.-Barnabas

generally uses citations from the Prophets to support his symbolic

reading—rather than from NT texts— further illustrates his concern to

uphold the authority of established or venerable Jewish tradition while at

the same time correcting what he and others perceive as pressing difficulties

found in it.83

Ptolemy also presents a symbolic reading of certain ritual and dietary

laws, but this reading occurs within the wider context of his historical-

critical unraveling of the various strands of "the Law given through

Moses."84 The general outlines of Ptolemy's division of the law (the three-

81Ibid. 9.1, 3.
82Aristeas 121-171.
83A complete list of these texts can be found in Appendix: Figure 2.2.
84LTF 3.7.
 183

fold lÒgow of the Saviour) are straightforward. In brief, there are three

divisions of the law: those laws from Moses, those from the elders, and

those from the Middle Principle. The first two are of no import; only the last

has any value. The last, in turn, is further divided into three parts: the

perfect law, the law mixed with injustice, and the symbolic legislation. We

have already seen Ptolemy's descriptions of the law from Moses and the

elders.85 I want to say a few things now about the three divisions of law

from the Middle Principle, although I will return to them in more detail in

the discussion of the Saviour, who for Ptolemy has made these gradations in

the law known to us.

First, there is the law mixed with injustice—"an eye for an eye"; this the

Saviour utterly destroys. Then there are the ten commandments, "divided

by two stone tablets into, on one, the prohibition of things one must abstain

from and, on the other, the commands of things one must do;"86 these the

Saviour came to "complete", because "although they contained pure

legislation...they did not have perfection" (tÚ t°leion).87 Ptolemy does not

provide a fuller explanation of just what he means here by "to complete"

(plhre›n). What the Saviour does to the third part of the law, however,

Ptolemy goes to great lengths to explain.

85See above, pp. 181-87.

86LTF 5.3.
87Ibid.
 184

Finally there is the part of it that conforms to a pattern [tupikÒn], which is

laid down as an image [efikÒna] of spiritual and enduring things. I speak
of...offerings, circumcision, the Sabbath, [etc]. In fact all these things,
because they are images [efikÒnew] and symbols [sÊmbola], once the reality
[to which they pointed] had been made manifest, were transposed.88

This transposition is not merely semantic, i.e., the word "circumcision" is

not now simply to be taken metaphorically. Instead, the semantic shift that

the Saviour effects (because he shows that the ritual laws actually refer to

something other than sacrifice, circumcision, fasting, etc.) is paralleled by an

ontological shift. As he says,

on the one hand, those [which were images] according to the bodily and
visible were taken away to be brought to an end; those, on the other hand,
[which were images] according to the spiritual were repaired—although
the names remain the same, nevertheless the concrete reality has
undergone a change.89

As a result of this change in "concrete reality", this part of the law must

be seen for what it is, the symbol of a higher reality. But since this reality has

been made manifest in the world—not just in the semantic meaning of the

words on the page—we must bring our behavior in line with our renewed

understanding.

For the images, since they are even symbols that point to different, concrete
entities, were well and good as long as the reality was not present. But once
the reality is present, it is necessary to do the things of reality, not the
things of the image.90

This is the same conclusion reached by Ps.-Barnabas, but through quite

different exegetical methods. Ptolemy presents his interpretation of the law

88Ibid. 5.8-9.
89Ibid. 5.9.
90Ibid. 6.5.
 185

by way of a historical-critical investigation of the wanderings of Israel, while

Ps.-Barnabas uses a straightforward exegesis of the Hebrew Bible,

interpreting one section of the text (the ritual law) by comparing it to others

(primarily the Prophets). Furthermore, their respective explanations for the

origin of the symbolic meanings of the Law are somewhat different. Ps.-

Barnabas presents Moses, as we have seen, as an inspired prophet whose

words were theological tÊpoi: the patriarch illustrated divine truths

through mundane means, showing the generations before the coming of

Jesus—and also to those living after—what those of Jesus' generation could

apprehend directly from him.91 For Ptolemy, the Saviour's importance was

ontological and semantic, as well as pedagogical. By changing the meaning

of certain laws, on the one hand, and, on the other, by manifesting the truths

to which the images of the ritual laws pointed, the Saviour allowed us to

understand the Torah correctly and observe its laws in the proper fashion.

In contrast, Paul—at least in Galatians—finds no symbolic or higher

significance whatsoever in the Law. Because of this, his explanation is quite

different in character from either Ps.-Barnabas' or Ptolemy's. Rather than

finding deeper meanings to justify it, he uses a number of metaphors to

reject it: the Law is variously a paidagogos, a coterie of regents, and a family

line. The main thrust of Paul's interpretation, despite this wide array of

91See above, p. 171f.

 186

metaphors, is that the Law is a temporary measure. He begins with the

image of a paidagogos:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under
restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the Law was the slave who
escorted us to and from school until Christ came...but now that faith has
come, we are no longer under this paidagogos.92

According to this metaphor, the Law has restrained and escorted humans

until the coming of faith and Christ. The after-effect of the arrival of faith

and Christ is strikingly similar to the ontological effects of the Saviour in the

LTF.

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There
is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male
and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.93

For both Ptolemy and Paul, the coming of the Christ or Saviour,

respectively, causes a change in concrete reality, so that the ontological

status of things (ritual observances and ethnic, social, and gender

distinctions) changes while their names remain the same.

The next metaphor, the coterie of regents, builds on the idea of the Law as

servant; but instead of a mere slave who escorts us to and from school, Paul

here portrays the law as an array of surrogate rulers who protect us until we

can claim our full inheritance.

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different than a slave,

although he is lord of all; but he is under the guardians and house-
stewards until the appointed time of the father. So with us.94

92Gal 3.23-25.
93Ibid. 3.27-28.
94Ibid. 4.1-3.
 187

Furthermore, Paul tells us, the "appointed time of the father" has already

come, and so we must no longer act as if we were under trustees but rather

should carry ourselves as befits those ready to receive the full inheritance

given by God.

Paul expands the idea of inheritance in this metaphor in his discussion of

the family line of Abraham. In it, he likens the Law to the unsavory,

enslaved, and enslaving "seed" of Hagar. He contrasts this with the free

"seed" of Sarah: Isaac. With this metaphor, Paul portrays the Law as an

illegitimate line of development, a deviation from the descent of Abraham's

true offspring, Isaac.95

COVENANT

Although Ptolemy does not discuss the covenant in the Letter to Flora, it

figures prominently in both Galatians and the Epistle of Barnabas. For Paul,

the idea of a covenant (diay∞kh, also "contract" or "inheritance") is central to

his interpretation of the Law. It has two aspects: "human" and "allegorical".96

As for the human, Paul says

95We will see Paul's negative judgment more fully in the discussions of Jesus and
Abraham, below (pp. 190f. and 201f.).

96Gal 3.15; 4.24.

 188

no one denies or adds to a man’s will [diay∞kh] that has [already] been
validated. And I say this: the Law coming after four hundred and thirty
years does not invalidate the covenant [diay∞kh] ratified by God to make
the promise of none effect. For if the inheritance is a consequence of the
Law, it is no longer a consequence of a promise. But God offered willingly
to Abraham by means of a promise.97

This is a somewhat common-sense discussion of how contracts work: a

previous contract with a certain party is not nullified by later agreements

with that party. For Paul, since the Law was a result of Israel's transgression

in the wilderness, it does not invalidate the freely-given contract between

God and Abraham ratified four centuries beforehand.

The allegorical side of Paul's discussion is the much-studied

interpretation of Sarah and Hagar. I will treat this passage in detail in my

analysis of Abraham, as without a full understanding of the patriarch's

function, Paul's ideas remain obscure. For now, suffice it to say that in this

passage Paul equates the two wives of the patriarch with two covenants,

thereby exalting the Abrahamic and disparaging the Mosaic/Sinaitic:

the one coming from Mt. Sinai [is] a slave, which is Hagar. And the Hagar-
Mt. Sinai is in Arabia. It corresponds to the present-day Jerusalem, for she
is a slave with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, which is our
mother.98

For Ps.-Barnabas, there is only one covenant and one inheritance, and he

understands it to encompass all of the "contracts" between God and the

patriarchs, including the Sinaitic. In section thirteen, in which Ps.-Barnabas

97Ibid. 3.15-18.
98Ibid. 4.24-26.
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asks "whether this people or the former people is the heir, and whether the

covenant is for us or for them," he lists Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and

Ephraim, and Abraham as examples of God's promise to give the covenant

to his chosen people.99

The culmination of these "contracts" between God and the patriarchs is

the giving of the Law at Sinai. It was here that God was obligated to make

good on his promises to Isaac, Jacob, and Abraham.

But let us see whether the covenant which he swore to the fathers to give to
the people—whether he has given it. He has given it. But they were not
worthy to receive it because of their sins.100

As we saw above, the sinfulness of Israel is responsible for the loss of the

covenant in the wilderness, not the inadequacy of Moses or the

capriciousness of God.

There is a great deal of overlap between Ps.-Barnabas and Paul on the

issue of covenant: both speak of it in terms of inheritance (klhronome›n);

both see a continuous line of inheritance from Abraham to Jesus; and both

acknowledge the withdrawl of divine approval because of events at Sinai.

The differences between them, as we have partially seen above, have to do

with their respective explanations for the withdrawl at Sinai: for Ps.-

Barnabas, it is the result of the sins of Israel, nothing more; for Paul,

although it has in part to do with the sins of Israel, it also has to do with the

99EB 13.1.
100Ibid. 14.1.
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fact that angels gave the Law to Israel; and so the resulting contract is

separate from and subordinate to Abraham's. Furthermore, now that the

"seed" has come to whom the Abrahamic inheritance is due, the Sinaitic

"contract" is no longer binding.

JESUS

Both Ps.-Barnabas and Paul also place great emphasis on the figure of

Jesus in their interpretations. For Ps.-Barnabas, because Jesus is called ı

kÊriow, he is synonymous with the "Lord" found in the LXX. From this

linguistic parallel between the New Testament and Septuagint, he draws an

interesting interpretive one, one which accounts for the relations between

YHWH, Jesus, Moses, Israel, and "us" (the author and audience of the letter).

For the prophet says..."Moses received from the Lord [parå kur ou] the
two tablets, written by the finger of the hand of the Lord...Moses received
it, but they were not worthy. But learn how we received it. Moses received
it when he was a servant [yerãpvn], but the Lord himself [aÈtÚw d¢ ı
kÊriow] gave it to us, as the people of the inheritance, by suffering for our
sakes.101

Ps.-Barnabas here correlates YHWH with Jesus and Moses with "us": in each

case (Sinai and the crucifixion), ı kÊriow agrees to a "contract" with

someone. We can chart the relation between "the lord" Jesus and "us" as

follows:

101Ibid. 14.2, 4.
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LORD

US

Comparing this to the relation between YHWH, Moses, and Israel, we see

that Ps.-Barnabas not only moves “us” up a notch, he knocks Israel down

one:

LXX EB

LORD LORD

MOSES "US"

ISRAEL

With this interpretive move, Ps.-Barnabas elevates his audience to the level

of Moses. Both received the covenant directly from the Lord: Jesus is not

simply a connection to the divine—as Moses had been for Israel—but

divinity itself. He thereby allows "us" to circumvent any and all

intermediaries. Such an interpretive move calls into question neither the

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source or origin of the Law, nor the one who gave it, but, as we have seen

with Ps.-Barnabas' negative judgment of Israel, those who received the Law.

Paul's interpretation of Jesus, in contrast, calls into question strongly

both the source of the Law (angels) as well the one who gave it (Moses). As

we saw above, Paul considers the Law to be a competing contract to

Abraham's, one that is subordinate and inferior because it came 430 years

after God's original promise. Through that earlier promise and Abraham's

trust in it, God counted Abraham righteous.102 But Paul also understands

Abraham's contract as a will (diay∞kh means both in Greek), and a will

transfers benefits to an heir. For Paul, this heir is Jesus, the "seed" of

Abraham.

“And the promises flowed with Abraham and his seed.” It does not say,
“and his seeds,” as if in many, but as if in one: “And with his seed,” which
is Christ.103

The role of Jesus in Paul's interpretation, therefore, is as a conduit:

through him the benefits of Abraham's diay∞kh are conferred upon "all the

nations."104 Consequently, if we are "of Christ," Paul claims, "then [we] are

seeds of Abraham, heirs in accordance with the promise."105 It is important

to notice that the blessing of Abraham reaches the nations independently of

102Gal 3.6.
103Ibid. 3.16.
104Ibid. 3.8.
105Ibid. 3.29.
 193

the Sinaitic covenant: "if the inheritance is a consequence of the Law, it is no

longer a consequence of a promise. But God offered willingly to Abraham

by means of a promise."106

Paul further contrasts the Sinaitic Law and the promises to Abraham

through Jesus' role in the paidagogos and regents metaphors. Both as an

escort and a guardian, the Law Moses wrote down from the angels is no

longer needed now that Jesus has helped us to mature from schoolchildren

and adolescents to full adults. As adults, we can receive Abraham's

inheritance along with Jesus and become sons of God through him, no

longer needing childish things, i.e., the Sinaitic contract.107

Paul, through his establishment of a line of divine favor separate from

and prior to the one established at Sinai, his emphasis on Abraham's

contract as separate from and superior to Moses', and his attribution of the

Law to angels and a mediator, drastically undermines the Sinaitic covenant,

although he never out-and-out rejects it. He instead calls the Law into

question obliquely, often in the form of incomplete if-then equations, e.g., if

inheritance is legal, then it is not freely given; God's promise is freely given. The

assumed conclusion in this example is that the Law is not part of the

promise of God to Abraham. Or again, as in verses 3.19b-20: the Law was

given by the hand of an intermediary; and the intermediary is not one, but God is

106Ibid. 3.18.
107Ibid. 3.29, 26.
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one.108 The assumed conclusion here is that the intermediary (and therefore

the Law he helped to give) is unrelated to God.

Paul is clearly aware of the opposition his position might provoke.

Notice his anticipation of counter argument in 3.21: "therefore, is the Law

contrary to the promises? By no means!" His brief explanation in 3.21b of

how the Law and the promises are in harmony—"for if a Law that was able

to make alive had been given, righteousness would in truth have been a

consequence of the Law"—is not very strong, especially in light of his many

statements to the contrary.109 This is another example of his elided if-then

equations, except this time it is deployed to fend off criticism. 3.21b,

however much it seems at first glance to answer the question of 21a

negatively, actually affirms it: since a life-giving Law has not in fact been

given, righteousness "in truth" is not through the Law, but through the

contract with Abraham. This is not evidence of contradictions in Paul's

arguments or the acknowledgment of his own doubts about his judgment of

the Law, but rather an ironic jab at his opponents: The question in 21a

108This sentence is obscure. I have tried in my rendering to preserve the directness of

the original, i.e., God = eÂw, the intermediary ≠ eÂw (ı d¢ mes thw •nÚw oÈk ¶stin, ı d¢ yeÚw eÂw
§stin), and therefore the intermediary ≠ God. Betz 1979 171-173 suggests that in this verse
Paul is primarily concerned to oppose the intermediary with God, rather than to make a
statement about the specifics of negotiation. For examples of the latter reading of this verse,
see Burton 1920 190-192.

109Gal 3.9-10, 11, 18, 19b-20, 24-25.

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characatures their outrage, and the response in 21b is his thinly-veiled

mockery of them.110

But whether one takes 3.21 as ironic—in which case it presents only the

reservations of Paul's opponents—or as sincere—in which case Paul himself

was torn between the positions represented in 21a and 21b—a few things

are clear: Paul sees the contract at Sinai as opposed to the contract between

Abraham and God; Jesus is contrasted with the Law and aligned with

Abraham; furthermore, Abraham's contract and Jesus' inheritance of it bring

blessings to "all the nations" while the Sinaitic contract does not; in

addition, Paul does not find any symbolic or deeper meanings in the Law in

Galatians;111 and finally, the Law had a positive function only for a limited

period of time (from Moses to Jesus)—now that this period is over, the Law

has only detrimental effects: those who take on its yoke are under a curse.112

110In light of this reading of verse 21, we can better appreciate Paul's hyperbolic rebuke
of the Galatians in chapter one: "I am amazed that you turn yourselves so quickly from the
one who called you in accordance with grace to a different gospel—which is no other;
unless there are certain ones stirring you up and who wish to pervert the gospel of Christ.
But even if we or an angel from the skies should preach to you contrary to what we have
preached, let him be cursed" (Gal 1.6-8). My analysis suggests that we take it in conjunction
with 3.19, that is, the "angel from the skies," who preaches, "contrary to what we have
preached," in Paul's rebuke can be taken as a reference to the angels who gave the Law and
the scribe who wrote it down, Moses.

111As we have seen, both Ptolemy and Ps.-Barnabas, in contrast, allow the Law to
remain central in their interpretations—despite its obvious shortcomings—by reading it
figuratively (above, p. 181f.).

112Gal 3.10.
 196

In the Letter to Flora, Ptolemy never mentions Jesus, although the figure

of the Saviour is central to his interpretation. That the Saviour is not

precisely equivalent to the figure of "Jesus" in the Epistle of Barnabas and

Galatians is suggested by Ptolemy's reference to the prologue of the Fourth

Gospel.

And...the apostle, stealing away the groundless wisdom of the false-

proclaimers, says that there is a distinct demiurge of [this] cosmos, that “all
things have been made through him” and that “nothing has been made
apart from him.” [He does not say this] of the God who makes destruction,
but of the just [God] who hates reprobates.113

Here, he sees the lÒgow of the Fourth Gospel as the Middle Principle, not as

either the Saviour or Jesus, which indicates that Ptolemy has exegetically

"unraveled" strands of the Fourth Gospel just as he has of the Torah. What

the scriptures present as unified (the Law given to Moses, on the one hand,

and, on the other, the lÒgow that "pitches its tent" in the person of Jesus)

Ptolemy analyzes into different parts (the three-fold division of the Law and

the Middle Principle, Saviour, and Jesus). This, along with his reluctance to use

the names Jesus or Christ in the letter suggests that the Jesus of Paul and Ps.-

Barnabas is not the same as his Saviour. This is not to say that, if Ptolemy

had presented a full explanation of these points, there would be no overlap

or even general agreement between the Saviour and the Jesus of the Epistle

of Barnabas and Galatians; but since Ptolemy never fully addresses this issue,

I feel that it is more prudent to follow his usage and distinguish the two.

113LTF 3.6.
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SAVIOUR

The Saviour is perhaps the most important element in the Letter to Flora,

as ultimately all of Ptolemy's interpretation is grounded in his activity. In it,

he has two functions: he makes actual changes in the Law and he offers

teachings (lÒgoi) on its content and meaning. As for the first, Ptolemy

describes his changes in a number of ways: he "completes" or "fulfills" the

Decalogue (plhre›n);114 he "does away with" and "abolishes" or "destroys"

the parts from Moses and the Elders (énaire›n, diaire›n);115 and he

"transposes", "exchanges", and "brings to an end" the ritual and dietary laws

(diafere›n, metatiy°nai, §nallasse›n).116 What Ptolemy means by plhre›n is

never explained; énaire›n, diaire›n, and §nallasse›n are themselves clear

enough; as for diafere›n and metatiy°nai, we saw above that they have to

do with interrelated semantic and ontological shifts: the Saviour changes the

reality behind words and thereby also the meaning of the words themselves.

The form of the words, however, he has allowed to remain the same.

114Ibid. 5.1, 6.1.

115Ibid. 5.1, 7, 6.2.
116Ibid. 5.2, 8, 6.4.
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In this way, Ptolemy accounts for the different meaning the ritual and

dietary laws have come to have in the second century AD. We saw that Ps.-

Barnabas makes a similar move, claiming that Moses legislated "in" or "by"

the spirit.117 His capacity as a divine conduit allowed his words to convey

not only more meanings than ordinary speech, but also deeper ones.

Ptolemy—and here we see just how central the Saviour is for his

interpretation—sees the Saviour, rather than any OT figure, as the

justification for the deeper significance of the Law.

As for the second function of the Saviour, his lÒgoi both comprise his

legal theory and are the justification for his practical activities. They are also,

as the following quote shows, the foundation for Ptolemy's own analysis of

the Law:

We present the proofs of what we shall say from the lÒgoi of our Saviour,
by which alone one is guided inevitably on one's way to the direct
apprehension of reality.118

From this point, Ptolemy presents the divisions of the Law sketched above,

at every step acknowledging that his interpretations are not his, but rather

come from the Saviour.119 As with his practical activity, the Saviour's lÒgoi

are the inspired interpretation for Ptolemy rather than, as in the Epistle of

Barnabas, that of any OT figure: he analyzed the Torah to find its three-fold

117EB 2.12.
118LTF 3.8.
119E.g., Ibid. 4.1, 3, 5, 11; 5.7, 10f.; 7.9.
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divisions; he spoke with Jews and explained to them the internal structure

of their Law as well as the stages of its historical development; and, as the

close of the letter suggests, his lÒgoi speak to even the most difficult points

of theology, philosophy, and cosmology.

But now let this not trouble you who wish to learn these things: how from
the one beginning of all, being ungenerated, incorruptible, and good—as it
has been believed and is agreed upon by us—, even these natures came
into existence, both of the corrupter and of the Middle Principle, which
have become different in being although it is natural for the good to beget
and bring forth things like itself and of the same being. For, if God should
allow, you shall learn next by study both the origin and birth of them, if
you are found worthy of the apostolic tradition which we too have received
by means of succession, along with the judgment of all the sayings by
means of the teaching of our Saviour.120

The figure of the Saviour is therefore of special interest to the historian of

exegesis because he provides one of the most interesting points of

comparison between these texts: location of exegetical authority. In the

Epistle of Barnabas and Galatians, exegetical authority rests with the authors

of the texts. Both Paul and Ps.-Barnabas themselves explain the scriptures,

interpret difficult or obscure passages, and cross-reference other texts.

Ptolemy, in contrast, portrays himself as merely explaining interpretations

that the Saviour has already accomplished. He nowhere presents any

interpretation in the letter as his own, but tells us that he stands "in an

apostolic succession" from the Saviour, through which he has received the

three-fold division of the Law as well as all his other knowledge.

120Ibid. 7.8-9.
 200

But Ptolemy goes even further than this in locating exegetical authority

in the Saviour. For him, there can be no new exegesis because the Saviour

has already accomplished it all. This is evident in his references to "Paul and

his followers". Unlike Origen, for example, who uses Paul to generate

hermeneutical principles for reading scripture, Ptolemy sees Paul simply as

one in a line of adherents to the Saviour's exegetical methods and

conclusions.121 Nowhere does Ptolemy claim either that he has derived his

exegetical principles from Paul or that Paul has understood the Law

correctly apart from the Saviour. For example, in discussing the symbolic

meaning of the ritual and dietary laws, Ptolemy tells us that

these things both the apostle Paul and his disciples have also shown. First,
they have shown for us the things of the images through the Passover and
the unleavened bread, as we have just now said; second, they showed the
things of the Law interwoven with injustice by saying that “the Law of
commandments is made of none effect by belief;” last, they have shown the
part of the Law unconnected with inferiority by saying that “certainly the
Law is just and the commandment is holy and just and good.”122

Ptolemy's only other reference to Paul portrays him in the same way, as one

who reiterates the Saviour's interpretations rather than one who presents his

own.

That [the Passover and unleavened bread] are images, even Paul the
apostle shows. “And Christ has been sacrificed,” he says, “as our
Passover,” and he continues, “in order that you may be unleavened, let you
not partake of leaven—but here leaven he calls evil—rather let you be fresh
dough.”123

121E.g., in the prologue to his Commentary on Song of Songs and in Hom. Num. 27.
122LTF 6.6.
123Ibid. 5.15.
 201

We will see in the final section of the chapter that Paul's interpretation in

Galatians contrasts sharply with Ptolemy's, because there Paul himself is the

locus of exegetical authority rather than some prior historical figure. Now,

of course, we are not to take Ptolemy at his word that he is nothing more

than a reporter of the Saviour's interpretation. He in fact wields as much

authority over the texts he interprets as Paul or Ps.-Barnabas. But what is of

critical importance for the historian of exegesis is his claim that he does not

wield such authority, that it is the Saviour who interprets, while "we"

simply learn what he has said.

ABRAHAM

I want to turn now to Paul's interpretation of Abraham, in which we can

see more fully the contrast of the internal authority claimed by Paul (and

Ps.-Barnabas) with the external authority Ptolemy claims.

As we have seen above, for Paul, Abraham is party to a contract with

God that predates Moses'; his contract, furthermore, is superior to Moses'

insofar as it is based on God's promise rather than the fulfillment of legal

requirements; finally, the benefits of Abraham's contract "flow" through his

offspring (Isaac, Jacob, et al.), culminating in the "seed" through whom "all

the nations would be blessed": Jesus. What I want to examine in detail here
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is 4.21f., where Paul explicitly presents the exegetical justification for his

interpretation of the Law in the letter.

As I mentioned above, in this passage Paul is concerned to construct a

twin-genealogy from Abraham's two wives: Sarah and Hagar. As we saw in

Ps.-Barnabas—and as is the case in many later exegetes—Paul assigns

interpretive significance to each of the patriarch's sons.

[I]t has been written that Abraham had two sons, one from the slave-
woman and one from the free-woman. But the son of the slave was born
according to the flesh, and the son of the free by means of the promise.
These things are allegorized. For they are two covenants [diay∞kai]; the one
coming from Mt. Sinai as a slave, which is Hagar. And the Hagar-Mt. Sinai
is in Arabia. It corresponds to the present-day Jerusalem, for she is a slave
with her children. But the Jerusalem above [ênv] is free, which is our
mother...And you, brothers, are children in accordance with the promise of
Isaac.124

Here, however, their significance is not due to the younger taking

precedence over the older—as in EB 13.1f.—, but rather that they embody

opposed pairs of attributes that Paul correlates to two groups: his followers

and the false apostles who are opposing him in Galatia (and have opposed

him, he tells us, since his first trip to Jerusalem). Further, these opposed

attributes correspond to the specific behavior of each line of descendants.

But just as then the one born according to the flesh hunted the one born
according to the spirit, thus even is it now. But what does the scripture say?
“Cast out the slave-woman and her son; for the son of the slave-woman
will not inherit with the son of the free.” Wherefore, brothers, we are not
children of the slave-woman, but of the free-woman. Christ set you free by
means of freedom; accordingly, stand fast and do not again be caught by a
yoke of slavery.125

124Gal 4.22-26, 28.

125Ibid. 4.28-5.1.
 203

Abraham, therefore, is the origin of two possible modes of being Jewish

for Paul: free and enslaved. The latter culminates in Moses' contract at Sinai,

which, unlike Abraham's, is with angels rather than God. The former

culminates in Jesus, the seed who inherits the divine blessings promised by

God. Abraham is also, more generally, an authoritative figure in Jewish

tradition that Paul can draw on in order to critique the Mosaic traditions. As

I discussed in part one of this chapter, this is not a rejection of Judaism per

se, but rather the endorsement of one kind of Judaism (Abrahamic) over

another (Mosaic). If we want to speak of this as a conversion, which we

could do based on Galatians 1.13-15, we would do better to say that is a

conversion from a Judaism centered on ritual law ("the traditions of my

fathers"), in which Paul outstripped all his contemporaries, to one that

rejected ritual laws and the Mosaic covenant to wholly embrace what was

for Paul an earlier—and therefore more authentic—mode of Judaism:

Abrahamic. Paul undertook his analysis of the "wrong turn" Judaism had

followed after Israel's transgressions in the wilderness by crafting a mode of

being Jewish that pre-dated those events. Abraham was the first person

called by God to be Jewish from the wholly gentile world of the ancient

Mediterranean and near-east. Paul therefore found in him a suitable basis

from which to criticize the "enslaved" Judaisms he saw around him and also

to craft an alternative mode, one that, although novel in some of its

particulars (especially the importance of Abraham), had been explored by

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Jews in the two centuries before him. ("Hellenists" in 1 Macc., Letter to

Aristeas, 1 Enoch).

I want to close the chapter by exploring in detail the issue that I raised in

examining the Saviour in Ptolemy: the location of exegetical authority.

When viewed in light of Paul's autobiographical remarks on his early career

as an apostle, the issues of exegetical authority in 4.21-5.1 become apparent.

In chapter two, he presents a map of his formative experiences following his

"call", and geography is as central as in his discussion of Jerusalem, Sinai,

and Arabia in chapter four.

And when he who cast me out from my mother’s womb and called me by
means of his grace was so pleased as to reveal his son in me, in order that I
might preach him in the nations, immediately I did not take counsel with
flesh and blood; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were called
before I was; rather I went out into Arabia and returned back to Damascus.
Then within three years I went up to Jerusalem to examine Cephas and I
remained with him fifteen days...Next I went to the region of Syria and
Cilicia; and I was not known by face to the assemblies of Christ in Judea.

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he
had been found out.126

Jerusalem, Arabia, Damascus, Syria, Cilicia, and Antioch all have powerful

associations as places of spiritual withdrawal, missionary conflict, or

ideological resolution throughout these chapters. Further, the backroom

intrigues alluded to in his account of the summit with "those reputed to be

pillars" fills out his exhortations about the "children of the flesh" in the

126Ibid. 1.15-18; 2.11.

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above passage, providing one example of how the "children of the slave-

woman" try to again enslave us to the Law.

Then, after fourteen years I went back up to Jerusalem, taking along with
me Barnabas and Titus, but I went up in accordance with revelation. And I
offered up to them the gospel which I proclaim in the nations, privately,
that is, to those who seem to be something, to see if I was running or had
run in vain. But Titus, who was with me, although he was a Hellene, was
not compelled by argument to be circumcised. Yet, owing to the false
brothers introduced privately, certain persons entered to spy-out our
freedom which we have in Christ Jesus, in order that they might reduce
you to slavery.127

The resonances between the opening chapters and 4.21-5.1 are not

coincidental. The latter are Paul's attempt to establish exegetical authority,

the former to establish apostolic authority. In recounting his CV in chapters

one and two, Paul is concerned to counter the preaching and exegesis of the

false apostles (men from James; circumcision party) who have come to the

Galatian church to stir up trouble. Furthermore, Paul tells us, this trouble is

not new. He has been facing it since the earliest days of his ministry.

A more direct relation between the biographical section of the letter and

the Sarah-Hagar allegory can be seen in Paul's seamless shift from his

narration of the events at Antioch to his theological and exegetical analysis.

He begins with a stern rebuke of Cephas' hypocrisy:

I said to Cephas before all: If you, a Jew, are devoted to the ways of the
nations and do not live as a Jew, how do you compel the nations to live in
accordance with Judaism? We are by nature [fÊsei] Jews and not sinners
from the nations. We know that a person is not set right as a consequence
of doing the Law, except by means of the faith of Jesus Christ; and we have
believed in the manner of Christ Jesus, so that we might be set right as a
consequence of the faith of Christ and not as a consequence of doing the
Law, because no flesh will be set right as a consequence of doing the Law.

127Ibid. 2.1-5.
 206

And if, although seeking to be set right by Christ, we ourselves are

discovered to be also sinners, is Christ therefore the servant of sin? By no
means!128

The passage now opens out from the situation being narrated and slowly

becomes a general discourse, directed toward the audience of the letter,

about the Law. Notice that Paul shifts in verse 18 to the first person singular,

dropping the plural that remained from the retelling of his rebuke in

Antioch.

For if I should build again that which I destroyed, I am allied with the
transgressor, that is, me. For I myself died by means of the Law through the
Law, in order that I should live by means of God. I am crucified with
Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And that which I now
live in the flesh, I live in faith by means of the son of God who loved me
and gave himself on my behalf. I do not deny the grace of God, for if justice
is by means of the Law, then Christ died in vain.129

By the close of the speech, Paul has moved from a specific rebuke of Cephas

to general theological pronouncements, pronouncements which introduce

the ideas that we have seen him develop at length in the rest of the letter (if

justice is from the Law, it is not from God; faith is given through Christ, not

the Law).

The effect of "blending" these sections is even clearer when read aloud

because, in general, when a reader comes upon dialogue in a passage, he

naturally changes his tone, pacing, and inflection in order more effectively

to convey to the listeners the conversation in the text. In a passage like the

end of chapter two, however, the reader's pacing, tone, and inflection would

128Ibid. 2.14-17.
129Gal 2.18-21.
 207

gradually shift from those chosen to convey dialogue to those used to

convey non-dialogic prose, because Paul presents no cue that the speech to

Cephas has definitely ended until "O foolish Galatians!". The rhetorical

effect this would have after his long rebuke of Cephas has drifted into

general theological reflection on the Law is not hard to imagine. The gradual

softening of the rebuke in Antioch sets the stage for the virulent, first-hand

rebuke of the Galatians that Paul delivers at the close of this section to have

maximum impact on the listeners.

Paul's effort to re-establish authority in the Galatian church is his

primary concern. So it is no surprise that both his apostolic CV (1-2) as well

as the more exegetical sections (3-5) would have been composed as

counterparts, both in terms of structure (shift from 2.21 to 3.1) as well as

content (e.g., angels in 1.8 and 3.19b). But even in a text not explicitly

concerned to defend the personal authority of the interpreter, like EB for

example, the exegetical authority of the interpreter is always at stake. The

interpretations in any exegetical work stand or fall based on whether or not

the interpreter can gain the trust and assent of the audience, can get them to

cede him the right to say what the text really means. And this is the case

whether, as in Galatians, the exegete uses the details of his life (education,

values, commitment to the cause of interpretation, struggles, successes, and

failures), or whether, as in EB, the exegete simply takes authority roughly in

hand, casting forth pronouncements of inner meanings and bullying the

 208

audience with persistent and rapid questioning, thereby justifying himself

by the very fact that he so naturally and commandingly takes up his

reading.130

And this is also the case even in the LTF, in which Ptolemy, unlike Paul

and Ps.-Barnabas, refuses to take up the exegetical mantle himself and

instead drapes it on the shoulders of the Saviour. Ptolemy's strategy,

therefore, should not lead us to think that he's writing in a conflict-free

environment. As the opening of the letter tells us,

My good sister Flora, not many have apprehended previously the Law
given through Moses—they have not understood with any precision either
the one himself who gave it or its commands. Because of this, I will lead
you in this matter, which will be easily taken in after you have learned the
dissonant opinions concerning it. But [these views are] of unexamined
people, who do not understand for themselves the cause of the demiurge’s
providence and who have been blinded not only in respect to the eye of the
soul, but even the eye of the body.131

Ptolemy simply chooses one strategy for establishing exegetical authority

from the many open to him, which include the one adopted by Paul and Ps.-

Barnabas: grounding exegesis in the personal authority of the exegete. Being

a scholar rather than a preacher, however, Ptolemy feels more comfortable

grounding his authority in historical scholarship and the work of an earlier

exegete: the Saviour. Furthermore, his presentation and analysis of

competing positions—the only interpretation or analysis he admits as his

own in the letter—adds to the authority he gained from the Saviour because

130On casting forth, see EB 2.4-10; 5.1-3; 9.1-5; on bullying, 6.1-12; 7.8-11.
131LTF 3.1, 6.
 209

it shows him to be someone well-versed in current debates on the subject of

the Law, even though the Saviour settled these matters more than a century

earlier.

Paul (and to a lesser degree Ps.-Barnabas) established his ekklesiai not on

careful scholarship ("words of wisdom") but on the strength of his character,

through what he calls elsewhere "works of power" or "the spirit".132 And so

it is fitting that the locus of exegetical authority in Galatians and the Epistle

of Barnabas is thoroughly different than that found in the Letter to Flora.

1321 Cor. 2.1-5.

 EPILOGUE

Dantès uttered a cry of surprise and joy. His legs trembled so violently
and his heart beat so wildly that he was obliged to stop for a moment. Then
he put his lever through the iron ring and lifted vigorously, displacing the
square stone. Beneath it he saw a steep staircase leading down into the
dark depths of a cave.

Anyone else would have rushed forward with a shout of joy; Dantès
stopped doubtfully and turned pale. "I mustn't let myself be shattered by
disappointment," he said to himself, "or else all my suffering will have been
in vain." He then began to climb down into the cave with a smile of doubt
on his lips, murmuring that ultimate word of human wisdom: "Perhaps!"1

It is with a similar trepidation that I bring this study to a close. I have

taken up a number of problems for examination; while I have not solved

them, I hope that I have suggested directions from which solutions might

emerge. I have also offered two text studies in an attempt both to revise our

understandings of well-known works as well as to kindle interest in lesser-

known ones; while I have not said the last word on any of them, I hope that

my analysis here encourages others to turn to these texts and give them

consideration, whether out of curiosity about—or frustration with—my

ideas.

1Dumas 1844 75-76.

210
 211

As I stated in my introduction, the project began as an attempt to

address concerns raised by Jonathan Smith in Imagining Religion:

I look forward to the day when courses and monographs will exist in both
comparative exegesis and comparative theology, comparing not so much
conclusions as strategies through which the exegete seeks to interpret and
translate his received tradition to his contemporaries.2

Smith's challenge touches on the most important issue facing the

contemporary study of exegesis if it is to become fully a discipline in its own

right: its distinction from the study of historical and practical theology.

More often than not, as we saw in chapter one, the study of exegesis is one

method among many used by theologians and historians of theology to ask

their own particular questions of the data of late antiquity. In contrast, my

project has been an attempt to apply the study of exegesis to questions more

frequently asked by literary critics, historians of Judaism, historians of

religion, philosophers of language, and novelists.

It is my belief that the study of exegesis and the historical study of

Christianity can substantially enrich one another if each is allowed to

operate without being subordinated to the other. I have tried to facilitate this

in my project by approaching exegesis as an independent phenomenon with

methods and mechanisms all its own, rather than as a repository of

theological information which happens to be in the form of scriptural

commentary.

2Smith 1982 52.

 212

The words of Karl Barth are a fitting end for my study, as he states with

passion and elegance the importance of the study of exegesis for the pursuit

of human knowledge in general:

I cannot prevent myself from asking what commentary and interpretation

really mean...Can scientific investigation ever really triumph so long as
men refuse to busy themselves with this question, or so long as they are
content to engage themselves with amazing energy upon the work of
interpretation with the most superficial understanding of what
interpretation really is? For me, at any rate, the question of the true nature
of interpretation is the supreme question.3

3Barth 1968 9
 FIGURE 1.1

Shifting Relations of flstor a, mËyow, and plãsma

Allegorical interpreters (up to and including Origen)

flstor a mËyow /plãsma

"what happened" "what did not happen"

no figurative reading figurative reading/éllhgor a

Theodore of Mospsuestia

flstor a mËyow /plãsma

"what happened" "what did not happen"

figurative reading/yevr a figurative reading/éllhgor a

Porphyry

flstor a / plãsma mËyow

"what could have happened" "what could not have happened"

figurative reading of cave figurative reading/ éllhgor a

episode

213
 FIGURE 2.1

Elements related to giving of Law in Letter to Flora,

Epistle of Barnabas, and Galatians

LTF EB GAL

Moses positive positive negative

Israel negative negative neutral

Elders negative ambiguous absent

Intermediary mesÒthw (a god) Moses + Angels Moses + Angels

Angels absent negative negative

Law positive and negative positive negative

Covenant absent one covenant two covenants

Jesus absent positive positive

-≈ Moses -≈ Abraham
-covenant-bringer -covenant-inheritor

Savior positive absent absent

-not equated w/
anyone
- = exegete

Son positive and negative absent absent

-Son = Jesus
-holds to some
obsolete principles

Abraham absent absent positive

214
 FIGURE 2.2

Texts cited in Letter to Flora, Epistle of Barnabas, and Galatians

LTF (AD 160s) EB (AD 130s) GAL (AD 50s)

Matt Matt
4G Mk
Luke

1 Cor
Eph
Rom

1 Tim
2 Tim
1 Pet

Gen Gen
Ex Ex
Lev Lev Lev
Deut

Is Is Is
Ez
Dan
Wis
Hab

4 Esdr

1 Enoch

215
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 A NOTE ON THE TYPE

This book has been set in Willemson Elite 11 point. Designed in 1748 by Joaquin
Willemson, it is a distant second cousin to the sturdy family of Dutch typefaces known
today as Garamond (Old Dutch, Gurmontt). Willemson was born in Schlassdorft, a
small harbor town in what is today eastern Denmark, to a family of displaced
Schwabisch merchants. After initially training as an ecclesiastical woodworker, he is
recorded as a “hochtesten journaemann” in the rolls of the typesetters guild in Flanders,
12 October 1730. How or why he left woodworking behind to become a printer is
unknown. Other than the typeface named for him, Willemson is remembered today
mostly for a small number of derivative, clumsy typographic experiments (Brunkgno
Wide, LBrummlersk Small Caps, and Gdnak New Roman), although at the end of
his life he was responsible for a variation on Bookman Antiqua Light Italic which
gained him some renown in the guild and, for a time, bore his initials: Bookman
Antiqua JW Light Italic. With the advent of hot metal type in the nineteenth century,
however, the labile strength of the lead used to shape the letters made most of
Willemson’s structural innovations—which he introduced to enhance the ability of
wooden type to render the font’s delicate ligatures—obsolete.