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Today, I read my friend's notes on New Testament interpretation. He talks about Richard Longenecker's book, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, as well as Leonhard Goppelt's Typos.
What shines through my friend's notes is the notion of typology: that a historical event can foreshadow something later and greater. Abraham leaving Egypt with wealth, for instance, is viewed by certain rabbis to foreshadow the Exodus. The Exodus is treated as a type of God's future deliverance of Israel from her oppressors, in both the Hebrew Bible and also in other Jewish literature. Many Christians have believed that the Old Testament contains types of Christ.
I'm open to typology, for who's to say that God can't foreshadow later events? But I'm not sure if the existence of typology in the ancient world absolves the New Testament authors of the charge that they took Old Testament texts out of context when they applied them to Jesus. I doubt they were trying to be deceptive, mind you, for they viewed Jesus as so wonderful that all of the Old Testament had to relate to him. But the Hebrew Bible is the Hebrew Bible, with its own message; and the New Testament is the New Testament, with its own message. When the New Testament authors applied Old Testament passages to Jesus by lifting them out of their contexts, they're not letting the Hebrew Bible be the Hebrew Bible. They're making it something Christian.
Or are they? Something typologists have said is that they actually respect the original historical contexts of the Old Testament writings: they're just treating the events in those contexts as types of Christ.
Still, I think that's forcing the Hebrew Bible into a Christian mold.
Is there a way to let the Hebrew Bible to be the Hebrew Bible, while also allowing it to function as a type of Christ? Maybe we can make sense of Jesus in light of the messages of the Hebrew Bible, on their own terms.
