richard2

Hi,

First, I'm not a biblical expert, so be nice. I was wondering about this 'typology', though. I was reading through Glenn Miller's article that supposedly refutes Jim Lippard's 'Fabulous Prophecies of the Messiah'. In the article, Miller keeps explaining away prophecies cited in the New Testament which appear to have been stripped out of their original contexts and fit around the Jesus' story as being 'typological'. Is this a legimate explanation for prophecies that seem to have been taken totally out of context or is this 'typology' a Christian invention that attempts to explain the New Testament prophecy difficulties?

Glenn Miller's article is here:

http://www.christian-thinktank.com/fabprof1.html



thanks,

richard

Diogenes the Cynic

I can't find any content in that article but from what I know of how apologists use the word "typology," it's basically just a dual prophecy argument...i.e. it's an invented method of reading a priori conclusions into OT non-prophecies. It's completely without any objective merit.

exapologist

I believe it was a common form of rabbinic argument around the time of Jesus -- it's known as 'pesher'. Geza Vermes goes into this in, most recently, The Changing Faces of Jesus and The Authentic Gospel of Jesus.

Interestingly, he points out that the early Jewish church used this argument style with their fellow Jews, who saw the arguments as pathetic and rejected them. However, when used on some hellenistic Jews and Gentiles, it was effective, since they were often unfamiliar with the OT (at least the non-greek version)


In any case, it's sort of devastating to Christianity if they put too much force on this sort of typological interpretation. For if the Jews of Jesus' time habitually saw every event as a type of an earlier one in the OT -- which they did -- then this made them especially gullible in seeing events as fulfillments of prophecy. The historian Michael Grant makes this point in Jesus: a Historian's View of the Gospels.