The Twentieth-century Legacy of Farrar and Fairbairn


I’m in the middle of a series of posts that look closely at the literary-critical distinction between type and allegory commonly used in the study of Christian exegesis. If you haven’t already, you should start with the first post, but the main outlines of my argument are as follows:

  • The strict opposition between type and allegory is a modern product, owing its birth to the polemical debates between Protestant reformers and Catholics in the sixteenth century
  • 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
  • Such a definition of typology and its strict separation from allegory addressed specific theological problems, i.e., the interrelation of the Old and 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
  • 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.

In the last two posts, we gave close consideration to the two most important scholars for the study of Christian exegesis: Patrick Fairbairn and Frederick Farrar. I argued that they are primarily Christian exegetes (rather than historians or literary critics) who naturally (and rightly) ask theological questions of the textual legacy of their Christian faith—just as Christian exegetes had been doing for the 1700 years before them. Accordingly, and not surprisingly, Farrar and Fairbairn arrive at conclusions that, while justified and appropriate in the sphere of theology, are wholly out of place in the domains of history and literary criticism.

As we’ll see in this post, Farrar and Fairbairn’s work, despite its stated theological orientation, became the foundation for the historical study of Christian exegesis in the twentieth century, which, on the whole, is motivated by concerns other than theology—most importantly, history and literary-critical theory. As we’ll also see, however, the work of those scholars who rely on Fairbairn and Farrar’s conclusions about Christian and Jewish exegesis (which, as we’ll also see, is the overwhelming majority of work in this field) has not been able to move past their underlying theological orientation to produce any significant body of analysis that could be rightly considered historical or literary critical in either sense of the word.

In general, the ideas of Farrar and Fairbairn have been adopted by later scholars in three ways:

  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.

Leonard Goppelt

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.

Typology and the 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 typos as a term for the prefiguring of the future in prior history…It cannot be demonstrated that the word had zthis meaning prior to Paul…The meaning originated in biblical thought.[1]

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.[2]

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.[3]

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.

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.[4]

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.[5]

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.”[6]

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 it.[7] 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.”[8] 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.”[9]

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.[10]

Lampe and Wollcombe

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, 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.[11]

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 noeta.[12]

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.[13]

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.[14]

Having looked at two historical 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.[15] On the whole, their work has been more influential on the study of early Christian exegesis—especially in Anglo-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

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 or 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 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.[16]

These tropes, as he defines them, are as non-literary 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 logos 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. 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. [17]

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. [18]

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 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.[19]

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.[20]

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).

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 Jewish culture[21]. 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.[22]

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.[23] 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.

Rowan Greer

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.[24] Greer often cites Hanson 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.[25]

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.”[26] Greer portrays the exegesis of 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.

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.[27]

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.[28]

The Wider Legacy of Farrar and Fairbairn

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.

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.[29]

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.”[30] 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.[31]

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.[32]

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.[33]

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.[34]

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.[35] I want to turn now to two scholars, one English and one French, who stridently attempt to revise the approaches I critique in this chapter, but who, for different reasons, fail to move their work beyond them.

Jean Daniélou

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.[36]

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.[37]

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.

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.[38]

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.[39]

We can see a similar approach in Daniélou’s study of Origen, but as his 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;[40] on Philo/”culture of [Origen’s] times” as insulator;[41] and on the distinction between allegory/unsound and typology/sound.[42]

Francis Young

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’.[43]

Further, her criticisms are not divorced from detailed historical and textual analysis, and she makes an effort to integrate them at every turn, whether 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. [44]

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”).[45] 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.

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.[46]

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.[47] Both place emphasis on the results of interpretation rather than on its strategies, the “mechanisms employed to extract meaning.”[48]

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 “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.[49]

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 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. 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.[50]

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 an overwhelming concern for assigning value, rather than intellectual significance, to the results of comparison.”[51]

End Notes
1. Goppelt 1939 4.
2. Ibid. 5.
3. Ibid. 135, 162; see also 58, 177, 202, 223.
4. Ibid. 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.”
5. Ibid. 6.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. 7; see esp. 8-15.
10. Ibid. 13.
11. Lampe and Woolcombe 1957 40.
12. Ibid. 72.
13. Ibid. 32.
14. Ibid. 75.
15. Interested 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.
16. Hanson 1959 7.
17. Ibid. 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.
18. Fairbairn 1855 2-4.
19. The 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)
20. Marsh 1810 18.114.
21. I treat the more philosophical reasons for Hanson’s “inappropriateness” in chapter two, below.
22. Hanson 1959 368.
23. Ibid. 374.
24. Theodore of Mopsuestia: Exegete and Theologian (1961).
25. Greer 1961 86.
26. Ibid. 93.
27. Ibid. 92, 93.
28. Ibid. 94.
29. Bright 1967 79.
30. Ibid. 79, n. 51.
31. Ibid. 91-92.
32. Galdon 1975 33.
33. Ibid. 34.
34. Charity 1966 161-62; for his debt to other “typologists”, see, e.g., 7, 22, 31.
35. E.g., Buttrick 1953 1.109-111; Lampe 1969 379-80, 413-26; Kepple 1976/7 248; Barker 1983; Perriman 1993; Cross 1997.
36. Daniélou 1960 vii.
37. Ibid. viii.
38. Ibid. 57-58.
39. Ibid. 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.”
40. Daniélou 1955 viii-ix, 139, 148, 174.
41. Ibid. 139-40, 161, 165, 179.
42. Ibid. 165, 174, 184-85, 189, 199.
43. Young 1997 2, 202.
44. Ibid. 99.
45. Allegory: 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).
46. Ibid. 122, 128.
47. E.g., Ibid. 2,4-5,165-6, 162, 211.
48. Ibid. 202.
49. Ibid. 184, 191, 200, emph. mine.
50. Ibid. 3, 7; emph. mine.
51. Smith 1990 46.

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