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- [00:01]
Melvin Bragg
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.
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Miri Rubin
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In the 5th century AD, St. Augustine wrote that the New Testament is hidden in the Old. The Old is made clear by the New. This idea that the Hebrew Bible is a prediction of the New Testament became known as typology. Old Testament figures like Moses, Jonah and King David were regarded by Christians as being types or symbols of Jesus. It provided literature and art with a rich tradition of pairings and parallels. And it influenced attitudes towards reality to time and history. And as a way of thinking, typology became hugely influential for good and evil from medieval Europe to the Renaissance and into the 20th century. With me to discuss typology are Miri Rubin, professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London, Harris Bilane Mundby, professor in Bibliography at Cambridge and Research Fellow at Darwin College, and Sophie Lunn Rockliffe, Associate professor in Patristics at Cambridge. Miri Mary Rubin. What is typology and how did the term emerge?
- [01:27]
Harris Bilane Mundby
So typology comes from the word type, which is a Greek word that arises from the verb of actually to strike, like striking a coin or marking the shape of a cookie, that is to say, producing a whole lot from one original and thereby already is quite an interesting meaning of the word, that is to say, a type that is endlessly repeatable, as it were, but also in some sense ideal, because the cookie cutter is the ideal from which others will follow. And we see it used already amongst the Greeks, Greek writers, dramatists like Aeschylus, historians like Herodotus, that is, identifying in whatever their subject matter was, certain recurrent human types or human behaviors that it was interesting to reproduce or to imagine.
- [02:17]
Miri Rubin
The key is the recurrent types.
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Harris Bilane Mundby
Exactly. Identifiably recurrent and in some sense also an ideal idea type. So in literature this is exploited mightily, but also in art in terms of reproductions of types. Yes.
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Miri Rubin
Thank you. When was it first practiced?
- [02:34]
Harris Bilane Mundby
The practice of typology, you might even say, is already there in the Hebrew Bible. When you think the Hebrew Bible is about 300,000 words and many different books written over a long period of time. So later prophets, for example, will refer back to Moses as the archetype of a national leader, for example, or to David as the God's chosen king, and speak about them even in later periods. So even within the Hebrew Bible, there is this sense of a rich typology. And then of course, when Christianity emerges out of Judaism, there is that added meaning of actually seeking not just types, but types that foretell and therefore speak the truth of the new emergent religion of Christianity.
- [03:21]
Miri Rubin
Can we talk about the connection with Hellenism for a moment? It was first practiced in the Hellenistic Jewish community centered in Alexandria, and in foreshadowing, a Greek literary device also linked to Platonism. Can you follow that through a little more?
- [03:38]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Of course, yes. It's really interesting. So Platonism is a type of philosophy that believes that in the world there are some forms that are God made, that are ideal, that are eternal and that can be perceived by reason. But in fact, in our own lives, we just practice certain versions of them. So a very important first century before the common era commentator, Jewish commentator, Philo of Alexandria, applied that sort of philosophy in his own reading of his own, that is his own as a Jew, his own Bible, as it were. He was reading it in Greek and he try to identify in the Hebrew Bible not so much the events and the occurrences, but to try and identify in it, as it were, those very Platonic forms and ideals for moral improvement and thus to marry the Hellenistic philosophy with his own scriptural heritage as a Jew. So he belongs to a certain type of Jewish intellectual at the time that our Hellenized Jews, Jews who really were as immersed in their Jewish tradition as they were in this Greek and in his case, Platonic philosophy.
- [04:53]
Miri Rubin
It's a dynamic combination, isn't it?
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Harris Bilane Mundby
Really, really dynamic. So he will take for example, Cain and Abel, not to say Cain was bad and rejected by God, Abel was the victim, he was loved by God. But rather to say, in each human there is a combination of good and bad. Let us reflect upon them in order to try and improve our towards a greater closeness to God. It is that sort of philosophical moral desire from the scripture that he had in front of him.
- [05:24]
Miri Rubin
Can we continue with examples? Harry Harris Bilan how does biblical typology relate to earlier repetition of stories and characters such as, say, the flood of Noah and the flood of Gilgamesh?
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Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, I think that's one of the most obvious examples in that the flood we're all familiar with, with Noah and the ark and animals parading on two by two maps very closely onto the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian story in which the protagonist there, Utnapishtim, mirrors Noah very nicely. He too is instructed that a flood will be coming and that animals should be gathered and the. The story parallels in all sorts of ways. In, in each case, birds are sent off to test for land, and specifically in each, at least one dove. And yet there are major differences. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood, is less than a week, whereas we know that Noah is the. The 40 days and 40 nights. And that in itself sort of foreshadow years of exile of the Jewish people, or the 40 days and 40 nights that Jesus spends in the wilderness.
- [06:23]
Miri Rubin
So it's as specific as that, is it?
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Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
In that case? It is. And in that case, we can have a sense that actually the Epic of Gilgamesh is likely to have fed into those sorts of Noah narratives. In other cases, there are occurrences that are less, less obviously linked. I mean, one obvious one perhaps might be Cain and Abel and fratricide. And that throughout the Bible there are lots of examples of brothers turning on each other. Think of Joseph and his brothers turning against him. And those sorts of narratives are evident in the traditions of many cultures, I suppose. Think of Romulus and Remus in the Roman tradition. But there, it's much harder to see a link. But with Gilgamesh and Noah, we can see kind of geographic and temporal links.
- [07:03]
Miri Rubin
Paul to the Romans called Adam, quote, a type of the one who was to come, I. E. Christ. Can you develop that?
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Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, Paul is very clearly saying that right from the start of the biblical narrative, Christ is there.
- [07:18]
Miri Rubin
And, sorry, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Testament or the New Testament?
- [07:22]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, the Hebrew Bible right at the start of Genesis, by that definition. And I suppose what's so important about that is that in the New Testament, in John, we're told that in the beginning was the Word, and therefore we're being told in multiple ways throughout both the Old Testament and the New Testament, that Jesus is, in a sense, there from the beginning.
- [07:41]
Miri Rubin
In what way are we being told is there by that phrase? In the beginning was the Word, so.
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Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
The Word represents the Son. So in this case, the Son of God being Jesus.
- [07:49]
Miri Rubin
Right. In the Book of Hebrews, a description of Mosaic law is quote, but a shadow of good things to come instead of the true form of these realities. What would you say about that?
- [08:02]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, we've spoken about types, but actually typology takes on lots of different names over the centuries. And the idea of shadows and foreshadowing is a really lovely one. The idea.
- [08:11]
Miri Rubin
That's Platonic as well, isn't it?
- [08:12]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Yes, yes. And the idea that, you know, in the Old Testament, there are things dimly lit that come to be fulfilled And Paul also talks of figures and so we also talk about figuralism.
- [08:23]
Miri Rubin
Why does that. Where did it get them to? What were they seeking by employing this method, let's call it of typology.
- [08:29]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, I think we have to see that when in the New Testament, when in the Gospels, people, Jesus and others are talking of the Scriptures, by definition, they're talking of what we would now call the Old Testament, but but at the time is just Scripture. And so these are people who have to make sense of the fact that a tradition they have grown up in, Paul is a Jew and has to make sense of the changing world and of this new news that has been brought to them.
- [08:54]
Miri Rubin
Sophie, how did Christians use typology to respond to the Hebrew Bible of the Old Testament, whatever you want to call it?
- [09:02]
Melvin Bragg
Well, partly to respond to criticisms by non Christians and non Jews that the stories that they had adopted in the Old Testament were somehow ridiculous, fantastical, mythologically implausible. So one way of making sense of the Scriptures that they had incorporated into their own was to say talking snakes in Eden or an erotic poem about the love of A Song of Songs, a lover for his bride are not necessarily to be read on the page literally, but to be read allegorically as indicating some kind of hidden truth.
- [09:39]
Miri Rubin
Who decides that they should be read like that?
- [09:41]
Melvin Bragg
Well, there's a great deal of debate in the Church, first of all, about what should constitute Scripture. So not all Christians agree that the Hebrew Bible should in fact be part of the canon of Scripture. Someone like Marcion in the second century argues very strongly that it should be ditched altogether. There are also debates about how to read the particular types that Christians agree are types of something in the Hebrew Bible, but how to make sense of them. So debates in North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries about how to read Noah's Ark as a type of the Church. Rigorous Donatists who want to argue for a very narrow definition of the Church only containing the pure emphasise there were only eight people inside the ark. It was caulked with pitch on the inside and the outside. No one gets in, no one gets out. Whereas someone like Augustine, who wants to argue for a very broad idea of the Church, emphasises that the ark contained clean animals and unclean animals, so it can have the sinners and the pure, and interprets the eight humans in a rather different way. So it's not a straightforward case of every type that's identified in the Hebrew Bible being read out in one way. There's actually a great deal of debate about it.
- [10:45]
Miri Rubin
What does typology reveal about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism at that time?
- [10:53]
Melvin Bragg
I mean, my colleagues have already sort of alluded to the fact that this is in fact a very close relationship from the beginning. So Jesus is a Jew, his first followers are Jews, Christianity is Jewish in its origins. And there is again I would say a great deal of anxiety among certainly gentile Christians from really. Well, you can see this expressed quite strongly in Christian texts written in the second century, arguing that where are these texts? Oh, someone like Melito writing in Sardis in Asia Minor, who preaches an entire homily on the coincidence of Passover and Easter where he starts by saying that the, the type of Passover has acted like an artist's model for Easter, but now that the type has been fulfilled in Christ, the type can be abolished. So he uses the kind of the metaphor of the artist's model like a sketch or a kind of little wax.
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Harris Bilane Mundby
That's so tricky, isn't it?
- [11:54]
Melvin Bragg
It's very tricky. And there's a long tradition of Christians from the second century, third, fourth century, like John Chrysostom, saying that the Jews really deserve to have and own and use and read their own scriptures because their failure to worship Christ and indeed some writers accusations of deicide that they killed Jesus mean that they forfeited the right to their own scriptures. I would say that despite a lot of the hostility, there is probably a much closer on the ground relationship between Jewish and Christian communities. And it helps to explain why there is so much anxiety by preachers to draw the lines very firmly about whose scripture is his mir.
- [12:35]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Proximity is just the right word. Because literally when the all important Christian biblical commentator origin in the third century, he's working from Caesarea, which is on the, on the, on the coast of then Roman Palestine in a city that has Jews, that has pagans, that has obviously some, some Christians. And he is absolutely aware not just of the Hebrew Bible of course, but of the comments that are being made on the commentaries written by the rabbis themselves. He's actually an interlocut with them in order better to sharpen the difference, the uniqueness and the deep truth of Christianity. So there is this real closeness.
- [13:15]
Melvin Bragg
I would say that there's a lot of evidence that Christians are making heavy use of not just Hellenistic Jewish exegesis like Philo, but also rabbinic exegesis. The problem is because we have so little evidence from the Jewish point of view beyond the rabbis. And the rabbis don't tend to say very much explicit about Christianity, but show some Awareness of psychological exegesis. We have a very one sided of Jewish Christian relations in this period.
- [13:40]
Miri Rubin
Can I just follow up what you were saying, Mary? How is typology applied to festivals and events and customs?
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Harris Bilane Mundby
This is so interesting. So if we were to talk about liturgy, the liturgy of the Church as it emerges. The liturgy is always a combination of readings from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible and reading from the Gospels in really interesting correspondences. Now, the festival of festivals is of course the Passover already mentioned the Passover, which is the Jewish festival. Jesus was a Jew, so he was celebrating Passover. And as he celebrated it, he also turned it into something new in a token and a ritual for remembrance. As he took the bread, the Passover bread, and he presented it to the apostles to be the vehicle of remembrance of him. And the church then creates another layer which is of course the ritual of the Eucharist itself, which means that here and now, in medieval Europe and Renaissance Europe, wherever, you can actually be one with Christ's body. So you have the Hebrew past and Passover, the emergent Christian Christ's lifetime moment, which is the institution of the Eucharist. And then you have every time a Christian celebrates it yet another time.
- [14:59]
Miri Rubin
Harry, can you come in on this?
- [15:00]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Yes, and I mean, I think the relationship between the Old and New Testament is cemented in liturgy. I mean, when Protestants are coming up with new types of liturgy, one of the first things they tend to do in, in the case of the Church of England anyway, is to come up with an article that says you must not put the Old Testament to one side, that the two must be seen together. And I think a really nice ritual example of this is the ashing of four heads on Ash Wednesday, in which many Christians will have a cross made of ash, burnt palm leaves put onto their forehead in the shape of a cross. And they'll be told, you are dust and to dust you shall return. And throughout the Old Testament, there are many, many examples of people putting ashes, dust, mud, even upon their face as a sign of repentance. But now that is happening in the sign of a cross. It's a very visual, performative example of how Christians are latching onto and adapting and sort of re performing many of these rituals in a Christian way.
- [15:53]
Miri Rubin
Can you give us some examples here, Harry, from how it applies to particular figures? Jonah, Joseph, Isaac, for instance?
- [16:01]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, I mean, Jonah's a great example of perhaps I suppose the most famous story of spending three days in the belly of a fish or whale. And this is seen in all Sorts of ways as prefiguring as a type for Christ in the tomb, spending three days there before resurrection.
- [16:16]
Miri Rubin
What does it matter that they correspond? Couldn't people say, well, that's the way it is. But you. What is the significance you're drawing for that?
- [16:24]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
The significance is that Jesus is there and that people are being told throughout the Old Testament that these things are pointing to you towards something which is to come. So they are read variously as prophecies or as signs.
- [16:36]
Harris Bilane Mundby
All these scriptures are God's word and God's plan, and God is above it all and within it all. And the fact that there are all these fantastic correspondences that thousands of brilliant men studied over centuries to recover, is just a sign of God's presence within them and thus their utter truth.
- [16:56]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
And the correspondences of numbers is something that is so evident, but also, of course, from a critical point of view, very easy to say, oh, well, is this just coincidence? So we have, you know, 12 apostles, but we also have 12 sons of Abraham, 12 tribes, 12 gates of the new Israel in the, in the vision of Revelation. Well, is this coincidence or is this pointing us?
- [17:15]
Miri Rubin
What do you think?
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Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, I think we, we only have to look to figures in scripture themselves to see that they are talking about them in that way and making purposeful remarks that circle back onto those.
- [17:26]
Miri Rubin
What's the significance?
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Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Well, I suppose the significance, for instance, in the, in the twelve gates of, of the new Jerusalem is that there are beneath them the twelve tribes of Israel named. So this is the vision that. That redemption has now come.
- [17:38]
Miri Rubin
Sophie, how does typology influence visual imagery and art?
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Melvin Bragg
It's absolutely essential to the development of early Christian art. So the earliest art that survives from the catacombs, before the Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity, which sort of marks the explosion, I suppose, of popularity of Christianity as religion, we actually have quite a lot of imagery, mostly funerary imagery, both from frescoes on the walls of catacombs, but also carvings on sarcophagi and graffiti, where you will frequently find juxtaposed images of really key scenes of salvation, sacrifice, piety, from Jonah being vomited out the whale's mouth to Noah in his ark to Daniel in the lion's den, Job sitting on his dunghill, and then obviously Christological scenes of most deep healing, miracles of healing, interestingly, no crucifixions. And one of the things that is absolutely fascinating about this is that it provides particularly the pre Constantinian art, provides us with a key to thinking. So Constantine is the first Roman emperor to convert. We Think to Christianity in the early 4th century, in about 312. And his toleration of Christianity is one of the things that allows for it to grow and spread throughout the Roman Empire. But art is a really good example that shows us something about the kinds of sense making that Christian preachers and teachers must have been making of Scripture through the juxtaposition of these scenes of sacrifice and salvation. Another interesting sort of problem, I suppose, for modern art historians is that quite a lot of the iconography of these earliest images is actually drawn from a classical repertoire. And so you have a really interesting infusion of images that actually have very odd associations in a Christian context. So a good example of that would be the depiction of Jonah at rest under the gourd tree after he's been vomited up by the whale. And this is often presented with him naked, sort of languorously asleep, in the pose of Endymion, who was a shepherd, who was much lusted after by Selene, goddess, moon goddess. And Selene condemned Endymion to be asleep forever and to be visited in his sleep by her for an erotic encounter. So you get the depiction of Jonah in the guise of a classical figure, the associations of which were perhaps a rather remote from this important figure of a prophet and someone whose piety and faith were the sort of key messages of the book of Jonah.
- [20:21]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Of course, typology is at the very heart of medieval art, and we see it in all our museums. So so many different ways of presenting it. There develops in the early 13th century a particularly interesting way of connecting the old and the new. It's called the Bible moralise, the moralized Bible, as it were, where on a page, these luxury books, you would get depicted in a medallion, the Old Testament scene and its explanation for Christians, as it were, its typological interpretation, but often also a lesson to the Christians in the here and the now. And what's important about the topology that develops in the Middle Ages, that it also develops a polemical edge. That is to say, it's not just saying, oh, King David prefigures Jesus, great for all the reasons we've already discussed. But it's also to say, for example, there was Sarah and Hagar. Hagar is the slave wife of Abraham. She's like the Jews, who are lowly and not beloved by Abraham. And Sarah is the Church, who is beloved of God. A lot of this work of typology is not simply saying there were prophecies, they are fulfilled, there were types, and we decode them and see them happening in the Gospels. It is also a sort of polemical edge to say that Judaism is over, Jews are not beloved, Jews are rejected. One example that I think many listeners will know either from visiting or from seeing on their screens is of course, King's College chapel, which was started in the 15th century, finished off with by Henry VIII. Henry VIII, Cambridge, King's College, Cambridge. Yes, indeed. Henry VIII in the 1530s brought over the best glaziers in Europe from the Low Countries. And they created these two strips, one above the other, the lower one, the New Testament, the upper one, the corresponding scenes, 25 pairs of that type. How much people could see and identify is difficult to say. But that was a statement, a Protestant statement of that enduring correspondence.
- [22:44]
Miri Rubin
Do you want to take this up, Harry?
- [22:45]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
I guess for Protestants, imagery, for many Protestants at least, is problematic. And typology allows a way of avoiding some of the problems of idolatry. And so, you know, these people find in typology a way of sort of pointing towards all the things they want to depict but feel uncomfortable with. And so by the 16th century, rather than huge displays of multiple imageries in comparison, we just have the Old Testament figure. And that is almost enough for people to see what they want to see and to understand the broader message. And many of these end up being absorbed into printed images within the period. So the Lutheran tradition has this very rich law and Gospel set of images, images. So you, you divide the page in two and you contrast an Old Testament and a New Testament scene. Again, as you say, to say that actually Judaism and that understanding has passed.
- [23:36]
Miri Rubin
What's the thinking behind this? Why is this being done?
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Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
This is being done in, in the Reformation period, throughout the early modern period, in order to teach people a new way of thinking about the Bible, which is that it's something that they should interpret. So Miri said that you have these wonderful stained glass windows, but how many people can actually see and read them? And now suddenly these things are put before you and they're being explained to you on the printed page.
- [24:00]
Miri Rubin
Mary, how does typology rise to the new occasion of the Reformation?
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Harris Bilane Mundby
Think of the Puritans who went to North America and who settled there. For them, building a new society. What will be their model but the Bible, but the Old Testament with all that it tells about how a society should be organized. Just think in America, of all the communities of called Salem or Paradise or Goshen or Bethel, they literally also name themselves in Old Testament names. So while the Gospels and the Acts tell of certain types of Obviously, the life of Christ and his followers. The Hebrew Bible tells you in various genres, how societies lived, kingdoms, families, tribes, communities. There is everything there. There are all the narratives you need to imagine a new society. So obviously it's in the light of Christ. And yet practically, it's just so, so useful to have that Old Testament there, that Hebrew Bible, as a model for the new Jerusalem, the city on the hill that they want to build.
- [25:11]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
And Miri has said that they're modeling based on the Bible and the copies of the Bible they tend to have on the front cover. The image is very often Moses crossing the river sea. They see themselves as a people going into exile, as new Israelites destined to build something new.
- [25:25]
Miri Rubin
Again, how far are they using the King James version of the Bible in this context?
- [25:30]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Totally, yes.
- [25:32]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
And the title page to the King James Bible in its first edition is a wealth of typology. Moses and Aaron representing the new priesthood, the twelve tribes of Israel paralyzed with the disciples, and a very lovely image of the sacrificial lamb contrasted to the pelican feeding its young from its own blood. A very old way of. A very Catholic way of showing the Eucharist.
- [25:54]
Miri Rubin
Supi, can I come back to you again? How would you say typology was used in the Christian liturgy?
- [26:00]
Melvin Bragg
We've already talked a little bit about the Eucharist, obviously very important in the early church. I'd say one of the places where typology is most insistently hammered home is actually at baptism. And that's partly because in the New Testament, Peter, the baptism is related to Noah's Ark. It's also something that's related to, obviously, the Israelites crossing through the Red Sea. It's something that informs both word and ritual action. So we see it in the words of the prayers at baptism. We see it in the readings that take place as part of the liturgy, mirroring just then, so also now. But you also see it working in interesting ways when thinking about explanations that are offered for particular bits of the liturgical action. So there's an amazing passage in Ambrose of Milan, who's a bishop in the fourth century, where he talks about the fact that because in Eden, when Adam was bitten by the serpent, venom spilled on his feet. So today, as part of baptism, we wash the feet of those who are going to be baptized as a way of cleansing the venom of the serpent, who is Satan, off them. So there are ways in which typology is not just used to explain, as in the Hebrew Bible, as Mary explained, also fulfilled in Christ, but also now the liturgy is being repeated on at least an annual basis. So the kind of hammer blows or the cuttings of the cookie cutter are kind of infinitely replicable.
- [27:21]
Harris Bilane Mundby
But also it's the issue of the Jewish and Christian relations. What's really important that baptism replaces, as it were, circumcision as the ritual of entering into life. And it's a sort of spiritual circumcision.
- [27:35]
Miri Rubin
As why did they want to replace that?
- [27:37]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Because circumcision is so identified with the old law, with the Jews and their ways. And this is one of the ways in which that separation occurs over the first centuries.
- [27:48]
Miri Rubin
Do you want to follow this, Sir Harry?
- [27:49]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
I suppose that in many liturgies you see the sort of pairing up of the Ten Commandments with the Lord's Prayer, and that that happens across liturgies in many Christian denominations. And again, it's the way in which there are profound links between the two, but also different differences. And liturgy is enhancing and showing those to people who partake in it.
- [28:07]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah, that's actually really important. I think that the idea that liturgy makes visible what can't be seen. So it's not just a preaching event. It's something which makes something really important happen in terms of cleansing of sin and establishing a new covenant between the believer and God. But these are things that are very difficult to see. So the ritual actions, as underpinned by prayer and. And preaching, which explains the significance of what has just happened, is a kind of allegorical unveiling. And actually it's funny because before we went on air, Mary and I were talking about making sense of things allegorically as being a process of getting at veiled truth. And actually, early Christian exegetes are very interested in undressing as being a way of talking about reading scripture allegorically. So getting hidden meaning is a form of stripping away the outer of clothes. And of course, that's what people do before baptism in the early church anyway, certainly strip off.
- [29:01]
Harris Bilane Mundby
And the Jews, of course, are understood as just not seeing what's in front of them. They read stuff so literally is the claim so lacking in spirit, not touched by grace, that they cannot see what's in front of them. They can see only the word, and therefore they circumcise. They cannot see the elevated meaning, which is the Christian meaning that is now the at upon them. And some of them see and they be. They become followers of Christ, and a lot don't. And those are the ones that are, as it were, the remnant.
- [29:30]
Miri Rubin
Can I come to you again, Harry? Let's stick with the 17th century, with Milton and the civil war on Protestants who went to America, You've touched on that. It became the conversation, didn't it?
- [29:40]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Typology in the 17th century becomes at both a scholarly and a popular level, of enormous interest and significance. The 17th century is a period of flux and chaos. I mean, historians will say that about many periods, but in England, it really is, you know, killings of kings, religious persecution, rise and fall of republics, great fires and plagues and so on. And people believe, as Christians have in generations before, that this is heralding the end of times. And therefore, this literature is aimed at trying to work out what types are listed by the Bible and what types have been interpreted in generations thereafter. And for Protestants, that's an important distinction. There are types that the Bible says, this is a type, and then there are things that have come into tradition over time, and Protestants are keen to tell people that difference. And I suppose one way in which it becomes very obvious is that these kinds of texts are telling people how to integrate typology into their prayer and their own reflection as they go about their spiritual lives. The 17th century is an enormous period of Hebrew scholarship. Milton learns Hebrew, is translating Psalms himself, and his Paradise Lost is full of typology, typology, which tries to make sense of this impending doom, this world around, which seems to be ending.
- [30:58]
Miri Rubin
Is there any sense in which the ideas are being taken forward by the Protestants, or are they going back to irrigate and amplify the past?
- [31:07]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Well, I mean, Pilgrim's Progress is a sort of creative way of thinking of a symbol that's already there, of the sojourner and the traveler, and taking it into an extremely intense spiritual exploration very much of its time, I suppose.
- [31:21]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
And I think the 17th century is a reminder that typology is about the relationship between the Old and the New Testament, but it's also about the relationship of both of those things to your own lived experience and making sense of your own life. Why have we killed a king? Why. Why are we being punished? What is going on around us? Might we turn to these texts and find an answer that points us towards our own situation and what is to come?
- [31:43]
Miri Rubin
So looking for an answer. So are you still one of the predominating factors?
- [31:47]
Melvin Bragg
I'm wondering also whether or not there's a link right back to where Mary started us off thinking about Philo and thinking about the kind of personal, moral sort of.
- [31:55]
Miri Rubin
In Alexandria.
- [31:56]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah, the idea that script scripture, I mean, if you think about the way that tupos is used in the New Testament, it's actually more often used to talk about a kind of moral example, something that was done in the past in order to show us how to live, rather than necessarily always as a pattern for something that was going to be fulfilled in Christ.
- [32:14]
Harris Bilane Mundby
And remember that some of these types that we've identified, like King David, is being used also in totally secular, but sort of more secular settings, like talking about what is the ideal king, what is the ideal ruler, what is the ideal father of a family. Looking to the Bible for all of those, for models for all of those.
- [32:35]
Miri Rubin
The idea of the overriding plan is that still very uppermost in people's thinking.
- [32:41]
Melvin Bragg
I think typology as providing a kind of mode of thinking about the sweep of not just salvation history, but history of creation is really one of the things you see from the earliest Christian historians. I mean, when Eusebius of Caesarea writes, you know, the first version of an ecclesiastical history, and his sort of chronological coverage is really from after Christ down to his own day in the early fourth century, but the beginning of the first book, he spends a lot of time doing a whistle stop tour of the Hebrew Bible and is absolutely explicit, repeatedly that we find in this, in the prophets and kings of the Hebrew Bible, Christ. So what is supposedly a sort of relatively recent bit of, you know, 300 years of Roman and Christian history is actually framed by this much bigger story. I mean, a typological kind of history which is underpinned by the idea that history itself is overseen by and managed and underpinned by God's providence, but also that texts about that history can also indicate other kinds of truth. So there's a kind of negotiation between the event itself and the text that describes it. And it's something that I think is crucial to Christian writing of history. And then that bleeds over into all sorts of other literary genres as well.
- [33:57]
Miri Rubin
Harry does the Oxford tradition figured in this at all? Cardinal Newman.
- [34:02]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
So for the Oxford century, for the Oxford movement, typology is incredibly important. Newman talks about the Old Testament as a pregnant text that's waiting to give birth to new meaning. And John Keeble talks about it as being veiled. Pusey, Edward Pusey says that everything is a type if only we knew how to read it, and gives a whole series of lectures on typology. For these churchmen, it's their understanding that the English church has done away with too much of its tradition, too much of its ritual and custom, and for them engaging with the Old Testament, sifting through what is and what is not. Helpful and usable is so important to making sense of what should come back. And it trickles out into poetry. Christina Rossetti's Good Friday finishes with such a lovely image of Christ as the rock that Moses strikes to bring forth water. And at the same time that this Oxford High Church movement is happening, we have the wider Gothic revival, the interest in medieval art and architecture. We mentioned King's College Chapel and its fantastic stained glass earlier. Well, George Hedgeland, who works restoring that stained glass in the Victorian period, goes about producing typological stained glass windows afresh at Jesus College in Oxford, at Norwich Cathedral, these fantastic displays of typology in a way that really hadn't been seen for decades, if not centuries. So, yes, in the Victorian period, there is within, I suppose, a small church tradition, but much more wide in art and architecture, a very much renewed interest in typology.
- [35:33]
Miri Rubin
Thank you. Can we turn to the impact of typology on literature, particularly right up to Toni Morrison?
- [35:41]
Harris Bilane Mundby
No, I think this is so important. I've been thinking about it and it's going back to the Hebrew Bible as possessing all these dramas of human life in families and communities and personal lives as well, very much like ancient mythology did as well, dealing with weaknesses, with aspirations, with desires. But it really, really struck me how so many great authors of the 20th century, like east of Eden, John Steinbeck, now, why call it that? For him, that mattered. He also knew it would resonate immediately with his readers in terms of the very great drama of fratricide. And I was. And with Toni Morrison in particular, Everything about Toni Morrison is creating a new language to speak about slavery and its legacy, and to speak somehow of love within all that pain. And think of her works. Sula, the Shulamite from the Song of Songs and Beloved. And she actually cites the Song of Songs in there. She also has a book called paradise about a utopian community of African Americans. And this is such an extraordinary resource. And at the very same time, the great Marilynne Robinson again, who sold millions of copies about Calvinist communities in the United states in the 19th and 20th century. But again, speaking about some of the most fundamental issues, not only about faith, but our relationship, families in marriage and so on. And I think it works by inspiring. And then the author goes and does what they have to say in their here and the now. But it offers that sort of constant conversation with the riches of the Hebrew Bible. And the question, what will happen when the readers out there will not have such access to or knowledge of these resources of the Hebrew Bible, of Gospels, even except in certain parts of the world, perhaps. Will that be lost? Will people be able to read these novels in the same way as perhaps it was still possible in the 20th and the early 21st?
- [37:53]
Miri Rubin
Sophie, what do you think the legacy of typology is now?
- [37:58]
Melvin Bragg
I would say we haven't perhaps talked very much about the negative side of all of this, which is the danger that typology always runs of super possessionism. And I suppose one place to look for that is in the 20th century study of typology. I did some digging. One of the famous theological works of biblical criticism on typology was published after the war in the 1960s by a German scholar called Leonhard Goppelt. But that was actually published first in 1939 as a dissertation in Erlangen. And it was produced in a context where obviously there was a huge wave, if you like, of Christian anti Judaism, which was mobilized by National Socialists in Germany. And that one of the effects of this was to, at its most extreme, lead to German Christians trying to erase the Old Testament from the biblical canon altogether as a way of removing the Jewish element. Now, Goppelt is not doing that at all. He's very much. There's a very elusive footnote which suggests that he is interested in restoring typology to its proper place as a way of engaging the Old Testament as a valid part of the Christian message. But it seems to me that the whole endeavour of late 19th and indeed 20th century, particularly German theological musings on typology is embedded in a context where Christian, anti Judaism, anti Semitism is absolutely crucial. And we lose something if we don't think about the danger of talking about fulfilment as in some sense replacement.
- [39:33]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Something very interesting happens in the 20th century, after the Holocaust, and in, of course, in the Vatican II Council, which took place in a way for Catholics to reflect upon and to act in the light of its lessons. And that is because typology so often is not just emphasizing the truth value of the Hebrew Bible as prophesying the coming of Christianity, but also this supersession, the way in which Christianity comes to replace, to sit upon that Judaism and to be now the new chosen Israel, because that is one of the ways in which typology serves a sort of anti Jewish moment in Christianity. It was obviously revisited in Vatican ii. How do we talk? How do we think about our art? How do we think about the legacy of interpretation, which is so rich? So there's a real awareness that these two can come together in powerful ways. But what's really interesting is people are experimenting. I saw a work of art that represents the traditional medieval representation of Synagoga and Ecclesia. Synagogue as a sad young woman, veiled, doesn't see the truth, and church Ecclesia as a triumphant, beautiful one. And these emerge in the Middle Ages, these figures, and they were usually on the fronts of cathedrals and in all works of art, every possibilities. I saw one that was done very recently in a Catholic college in Pennsylvania. And there those two figures are there denoting there are two traditions. They're equal in size. They're sitting side by side like sisters, each reading her own book. So there are ways in which the typology tinged by anti Judaism can be rethought by reflective people in new ways. And I think that's the really positive and optimistic direction of where typology is going today.
- [41:33]
Miri Rubin
Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Mary Rubin Harris Bell and Sophie Lynn Rockliffe. Next week, we'll be talking about Moliere, the great French playwright and actor who thrived at the court of Louis xiv. Thank you for listening.
- [41:46]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [41:53]
Miri Rubin
What would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say, Mary?
- [41:57]
Harris Bilane Mundby
So many interesting aspects to quality.
- [42:00]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
Yeah.
- [42:00]
Harris Bilane Mundby
I mean, just to say that there is a moment in the Middle ages, around the 11th and 12th century, when there's all of a sudden typology is not just for theologians. It becomes something that a preacher can pick up, a book that tells them how to do it. There is a whole. There's production of reference books of such usefulness and such pervasive use so that a preacher can have a guide, you know, can't know everything, but they have sort of guides to how to interpret. There are glosses, the ordinary gloss, as it's called, from the early 12th century. There is, in the 13th century, the creation of the Paris Bible. There's in one place everything that you need to make your sermons from. So there are real aids that promote this in the medieval period, and from then on, it can be much, much more widely recognized and more widely used.
- [42:55]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
And that wonderful Pictor manuscript that lists every possible type that can be thought of to help an artist. There's no pictures in the book. It's just an extensive list encouraging people to use a wider array of things. My sense is by the 14th century, there is an attempt to broaden the types being used beyond just Adam and Moses and to engage much more deeply with those more subtle ones, it's true.
- [43:17]
Harris Bilane Mundby
And also in the Renaissance, when you think of the fascination with books of emblems, which. The way. So it's not just in reading the Bible. The whole issue of typological reading carries over to the vast revival of reading of the classics and so on, as it were, in the secular literature. Although. And of course you cannot open, you cannot literally the first line in Dante is a reference to Isaiah hidden away. Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita. You know, it's literally somebody who knows the Bible and knows that the life is meant to be 70 years old and he is in the middle of his way immediately would pick this up, although it would be lost to most readers at other times.
- [44:03]
Melvin Bragg
Sophie, that's very interesting what Harry was saying at the end about, you know, whether or not we've lost the key to typology. And I was thinking about the other end of it, which is where the key is delivered. So I'm always struck when I read texts from late antiquity, in the early Middle Ages, where preachers and teachers are trying to instruct new Christians in the content of Scripture and its meaning. How although on the one hand they acknowledge that some people, particularly the less educated, might find some of this quite hard work, there is nonetheless a fairly comprehensive effort to both outline what the relationship is between Hebrew Bible and New Testament and the provision of some really obscure examples and drilling down into details, which, I mean, I've been reading Augustine on Noah's Ark as a figure of the church. And you know, he'll tell you that the door of the ark is the wound that's created in Christ's side and, you know, which animals go where in the ark. I mean, he really goes into an enormous quantity of detail. And I think part of my sort of general question about all of this is whether or not actually the capacity for pre moderns, first of all to amass a huge quantity of data is much greater than ours, right? So we are, because we're glued to our phones, we don't have to remember any of this stuff. So the numerological things we were talking about earlier, it's possible to hold in your mind lots of complicated things simultaneously and indeed learn how to have meaning made of them. So that was one thing I was worried about. The other thing is actually again, thinking about who gets to hear all of this beyond Christian communities, because I think there's an increasing trend in scholarship now to show that rabbis are aware of Christian doctrine, Christian debates about doctrine, Christian typological readings of Scripture and That they're actually making rather clever use of these very fleeting, allusive, often putting opinions into the mouth of a Jewish heretic that would actually belong more properly in a Christian mouth. Sometimes typological readings of Scripture are in there. So we should be thinking of this as something that is in part derived from Jewish practices of reading their scriptures, but also something that Christian practice also influences, ongoing Jewish practices of reading. It's a kind of conversation.
- [46:27]
Harris Bilane Mundby
You asked what I would have liked to say, and it really connects well with what you're saying. That is to say, people in the past, their capacity to think typologically, because look at the figure of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is a type of the church. Now, what does it mean for a youngish woman to be a type of the church? And yet that is accepted because of her identification with her son, because she was the tool, the mode. I mean, through her, the incarnation occurred because she was chosen by her son, because she never died, but she was assumed to heaven. But still, the fact that you could do that, that you could just move from Mary to the church with ease, and this would not seem like bamboozling. Bamboozling, exactly. I think shows that this capacity for typological reading was sort of about, around, and people did not question it, and particularly when it was enfolded in a sort of experience of preaching and guidance, etc.
- [47:31]
Melvin Bragg
And actually that, I mean, ties back to thinking about the Song of Songs and the way in which, you know, extraordinary ways of de. Eroticizing a text by saying, this isn't really about a lover and his wife. It's actually about the church and Christ and we should read it.
- [47:48]
Harris Bilane Mundby
The rabbis and the theologians both agreed that it's definitely not to be read literally.
- [47:54]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
I wonder also if it's about the capacity to see layers within just one type. I mean, you know, Isaac being sacrificed, to add insult to injury, has to carry his own firewood up in order to sacrifice. And you know, that is meant to be read, that Isaac is in himself a type for Jesus being crucified, but the wood is the type for the cross and the carry. I mean, these layers are so rich and so deep in a way that, as I think you say, we're talking about people who had a capacity to hold such a huge amount of information in their mind at once.
- [48:24]
Harris Bilane Mundby
But also this was the job of tens of generations of the smartest people in Europe and elsewhere in the whole Christian world. This was the. The most important work they did, the most prestigious work, biblical commentary. And even if you were just a monk in your monastery with no great ambitions to do your prayers, to understand your texts that you're reading, be they Old or New Testament. There were in your library commentary books to help you understand them right.
- [48:58]
Melvin Bragg
And you're reading the Bible on a cycle. So, you know, you might not have understood the correspondence in the lectionary the first time around, but maybe the 20th or 30th time you would.
- [49:06]
Sophie Lunn Rockliffe
The cycle links to what I didn't think we maybe touched on, which is how this just relates to time in general, to understanding time. Because on the one hand, Christians want to think quite linearly about time and there is something we're working towards some fulfilment. And yet typology seems to say the complete reverse. This is circular. Or there are recurring patterns. And I think, think typology opens up many more questions for Christians than it answers about how you exist in. In a temporal world.
- [49:36]
Miri Rubin
Well, I think you have delighted us for long enough. You can go now. I want a cup of tea. Elian will come in. Eliana. I can see her on the way.
- [49:49]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Would you like tea or coffee?
- [49:51]
Miri Rubin
I think I might. Tea be great. Tea.
- [49:59]
Melvin Bragg
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg.
- [50:00]
Harris Bilane Mundby
Was produced by Eliane Glaser and It is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.
- [50:05]
E
Hi, we're the Van Tulleken, the identical twin Dr. Van Tulliken's Chris and Zand in what's Up Docs. We're diving into the messy, complicated world of health and well being. We are living in the middle of what I would call a therapeutic revolution. But it can sometimes be hard to know what's really best for us. Do I need to take a testosterone supplement? How can I fix my creaky knees? Why do I get hangry? Is organic food actually better for me? We are going to be your guides through the confusion. We'll talk to experts in the field and argue about what we've learned and share what we've learned and maybe disagree.
- [50:38]
Harris Bilane Mundby
A fair bit too.
- [50:38]
E
No, we won't. What's up? Docs from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.