Typology and Its Limits

The standard definition runs like this. Typology traces a correspondence between real persons, events or institutions in the history of God's dealings with Israel and their counterpart in Christ and the church, where the later reality is greater than the earlier in the same respect. Allegory, by contrast, finds a second meaning in the words of a text, and is characteristically indifferent to whether the events described happened at all. Typology needs the history; allegory can do without it. Leonhard Goppelt's Typos, written in German in 1939 and published in English in 1982, set out this account and added the third element most people now include: escalation, Steigerung in his German, the insistence that the type is not merely similar to the antitype but is surpassed by it.

That definition does real work, and you should learn it. It explains why the New Testament can say the law had a shadow of the good things to come while insisting that the exodus happened. It explains why Christian readers have generally been more comfortable with Hebrews on the priesthood than with Philo on the tabernacle. And it gives you a first question to ask of any proposed reading: is the correspondence between two histories, or between two sets of words?

Now the honest admission, which most textbooks bury in a footnote. The line does not stay drawn. Paul's argument in Galatians 4 rests on real persons and a real history, which makes it typology on the definition above, and Paul calls it allegoroumena, which makes it allegory on the label. Hebrews 7:3 says of Melchizedek: 'Without father or mother or genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life, like the Son of God, he remains a priest for all time.' That is an argument from what Genesis does not say. Melchizedek had parents; Genesis simply does not mention them. The writer of Hebrews is reasoning from the silence of a text, which is a move out of the allegorist's repertoire, not the historian's.

The ancients felt the pressure too. The Antiochene writers, Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia in the fourth century, attacked Alexandrian allegory and coined their own term, theoria, for a reading that perceives more than the letter without abandoning the history. That they needed a third word tells you the two-word scheme was already too tidy. And in modern scholarship the neat opposition has itself been challenged: Frances Young and Andrew Louth have both argued that the typology-good, allegory-bad contrast is partly a modern construction, used to license the figural readings we want and condemn the ones we do not, and Henri de Lubac's Histoire et Esprit in 1950 argued that the standard caricature of Origen does not survive reading him.

So hold the distinction as a working tool and not as a wall. It will catch some bad readings. It will not catch all of them, and it will occasionally embarrass you by ruling out something an apostle does.

Begin where the ground is firm. The Greek noun typos occurs in the New Testament about fifteen times, and in most of them it means nothing more technical than a model or example: Paul tells the Philippians to keep their eyes on those who walk according to the typos they have in him, and tells Timothy to be a typos to the believers. Three places use it for the relation between an Old Testament reality and a Christian one, and one compound does the same work.

Romans 5:14 says of Adam, 'He is a pattern of the One to come.' The Greek word behind 'pattern' is typos, the word this lesson is about. Notice what Paul does with it in the verses that follow, because it is the model of a controlled typology. The correspondence is structural: one man's act determines the standing of many. And it is immediately qualified. Verses 15 and 16 say that the gift is not like the trespass or like the result of the one man's sin, and verses 15 and 17 each ask how much more God's grace and the gift will abound. Paul establishes the parallel and then spends more words breaking it than making it. Escalation, in Paul's hands, is not a decorative extra; it is the argument.

1 Corinthians 10:6 says the wilderness events 'took place as examples to keep us from craving evil things as they did', and the word is typoi. Verse 11 says they happened to them 'as examples' in the BSB, but the BSB's plural hides a difference in the Greek: here the critical Greek text has an adverb, typikos, where the Byzantine tradition has the noun typoi; the sense is not materially affected, but it is worth knowing when someone tells you Paul used a technical noun twice. What Paul draws from the correspondence is also worth noticing. He does not build a doctrine. He builds a warning: they had the cloud and the sea and the food and the drink, and they still fell, so do not be confident. And on the way he says something that would get a modern preacher into trouble, that the rock that accompanied them was Christ. Even the apostle's controlled case has a clause in it that nobody has fully explained.

1 Peter 3:20-21 sets Noah's flood beside baptism, and the exact word matters. Peter does not call the flood a typos. He uses the compound antitypon, which the BSB folds into a verb: 'this water symbolizes the baptism that now saves you also'. Baptism is the antitype, the flood the pattern. (Look up 1 Peter 3:21 on Bible Hub to see how other translations carry the antitype word; the Greek is more compact than any of them.) Peter then immediately restricts what he means, denying that the water removes dirt from the body and defining the thing that saves as the pledge of a clear conscience toward God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The BSB's 'pledge' is a choice: the Greek noun eperotema can also mean an appeal to God for a clear conscience, as many translations have it, and scholars disagree which sense Peter intends. The point about qualification holds on either reading. Once again the apostle qualifies his own correspondence in the same breath.

To this you can add the cases where no technical word appears but the operation plainly does: Melchizedek in Hebrews 7, the bronze serpent in John 3:14, Jonah in Matthew 12:40, the Passover lamb in 1 Corinthians 5:7, the manna in John 6, the Sabbath rest in Hebrews 4, and the whole tabernacle and priesthood system in Hebrews 8 to 10. That is a substantial list, and it has a shape. The named types are load-bearing institutions and turning points in Israel's story, not incidental details, and in almost every case the New Testament writer states the disanalogy as carefully as the analogy.

Every Christian preacher you have heard has gone beyond the list. Joseph rejected by his brothers and raised to save them, Boaz the redeemer, David and Goliath, the bronze basin, the cities of refuge: none of these is identified as a type anywhere in the New Testament. Is that legitimate? The question has a long history and two settled camps.

The restrictive answer is associated with Herbert Marsh, an English bishop and biblical scholar of the early nineteenth century, who laid down the rule in his lectures on the interpretation of scripture: we are not at liberty to call anything a type unless the New Testament expressly designates it as one. The reasoning is straightforward and not easily dismissed. Typology is a claim about divine intention in history. Nobody can read divine intention off an event by inspection. The only access we have to God's stated intention in these matters is revelation, and revelation names a limited set. Beyond that set we are guessing, and our guesses will be shaped by what we already want the text to say. Modern writers in this tradition add a pastoral argument: the restrictive rule is the only one that a congregation can check.

The broad answer is associated with Patrick Fairbairn, whose Typology of Scripture in the 1840s argued directly against Marsh. His case is that the New Testament's examples are specimens rather than an inventory. The apostles tell us that Israel's history was written for our instruction and that the law had a shadow of the good things to come; if that is true of the history and the law as such, then it is not true only of the dozen items that happen to be cited. Restrict typology to the named cases and you end up saying that most of the Old Testament has no Christian significance beyond moral example, which is not what the New Testament says about it. Sidney Greidanus, in Preaching Christ from the Old Testament in 1999, works in this tradition and usefully points out that typology is only one of several legitimate routes from an Old Testament text to Christ, alongside redemptive-historical progression, promise and fulfilment, analogy, longitudinal themes, contrast, and explicit New Testament reference. Part of the trouble with bad typological preaching is that it uses typology where one of the other six would have been both truer and easier to demonstrate.

A middle position, which is where a good deal of current work sits, accepts unnamed types but requires that the trajectory already be running inside the Old Testament. Israel's own prophets reuse the exodus as the shape of a coming deliverance, most obviously in Isaiah 40 to 55; the Davidic promise is developed by later texts into the expectation of a greater son; the temple is described in terms that outrun any building. On this view the apostolic examples teach you the grammar rather than supply the whole vocabulary, and a proposed type earns its keep by showing that the Old Testament itself was already pressing in that direction. This has the advantage of being arguable from the text. It has the disadvantage of being harder work than the alternative, which is why it is less popular in practice than in print.

Take Joshua 2 and work the scarlet cord all the way, because a principle without a worked case teaches nothing. The reading goes like this. Rahab hangs a scarlet cord in her window. Scarlet is the colour of blood. Everyone inside the marked house is spared when judgement falls on the city, exactly as Israel's houses were spared when the blood was on the doorposts in Exodus 12. Therefore the cord is a type of the blood of Christ, and the house is the church, and Rahab the Gentile prostitute is the sinner saved by faith.

This is not a modern invention by a careless preacher. Clement of Rome makes the connection around AD 96, in the letter usually called 1 Clement, at chapter 12, where he says the scarlet thread showed that through the blood of the Lord there would be redemption for all who believe and hope in God. Both 1 Clement and the Epistle of Barnabas, used below, are short and are free to read in English at earlychristianwritings.com, so you can check every claim in this section yourself. The reading has been preached in every century since. And parts of it are defensible: a household marked and spared while a city is destroyed really is the structure of the Passover, and Rahab really is a Canaanite outsider brought inside the covenant people, which Matthew 1:5 thinks is worth putting in the genealogy.

Now apply pressure. Joshua 2 never mentions blood. It never says the colour signified anything; the spies want a marker they can see from outside, and a bright one is practical. Scarlet in Israel's ritual law is not primarily a blood symbol at all: in Leviticus 14 and Numbers 19 scarlet yarn or wool belongs to rites of cleansing, so an argument from the colour could as easily run towards purification as towards atonement, which means the colour is not carrying the argument, the preacher is. And there is a harder check available. The New Testament comments on Rahab twice, and tells us in both places what it found significant about her. Hebrews 11:31 says, in full, 'By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies in peace, did not perish with those who were disobedient.' James 2:25 asks whether she was not justified by her actions 'when she welcomed the spies and sent them off on another route'. Quote Hebrews whole rather than only the clause about welcoming the spies, because the opening words 'By faith' and the closing words about the disobedient are the part that supports the half of the reading defended above: Rahab is an outsider spared by faith while a city under judgement is not. What neither writer mentions is the cord.

The wilder version shows you the machinery. The Hebrew phrase in Joshua 2:18 for the cord uses the word tiqvah, which in most of the Bible means hope. So preachers have offered the cord of hope, hanging in the window of the doomed city. It is a lovely line and it is a pun. Hebrew has two words spelled alike here, both from a root meaning to twist or stretch; one gave a rope, the other gave hope in the sense of expectation stretched forward. Joshua 2 means a rope. A reading that depends on an English or Hebrew coincidence of sound has stopped reading the text and started reading the dictionary.

The second classic case is the tabernacle. Philo allegorised the whole structure in the first century, assigning cosmic meanings to the lampstand, the curtains and the colours. Christian writers from Origen onwards did the Christian version, and nineteenth-century typological preaching pressed it down to the sockets and pins: every board a believer, every pin a promise. Here the internal check is remarkable, and it is the single most useful thing in this lesson. Hebrews is the one New Testament book that works the tabernacle hard. It lists the furniture in 9:2-5, the lampstand, the table, the ark, the golden altar of incense, the jar of manna, Aaron's staff, the cherubim, and then stops: 'But we cannot discuss these things in detail now.' The writer names the objects and declines to expound them. What he does expound is the structure, an outer tent and an inner one, a curtain, a single annual entry, blood, a priest who dies and must be replaced. He takes what the text itself makes significant and passes over what it does not.

The limit case, kept for the end because it is funny until it is frightening, is in the Epistle of Barnabas at chapter 9, a Christian work of the late first or early second century. Genesis 14:14 says Abraham had 318 trained men. Barnabas reports this as the number Abraham circumcised, which fuses the 318 of Genesis 14 with the circumcision of Genesis 17, and that fusion is already a defect in the argument before the arithmetic starts. He then takes the number in the order his Greek text gives it, eighteen first and after an interval three hundred: in the eighteen, iota stands for ten and eta for eight, and there you have the first two letters of the name Jesus; and because the cross was to have grace in the tau, the text says three hundred as well. Therefore, says Barnabas, Abraham's household reveals Jesus and the cross. The argument is impeccable within its own rules. It is also nonsense, and it is nonsense for exactly the reason the scarlet cord reading is weak: the connection is made by a feature of the words that has nothing to do with what the passage is about, and the same technique would prove anything the interpreter had already decided to find.

So how does a student tell a rich reading from an invented one? The honest answer has two parts, and the first part is unwelcome: there is no formula, and there cannot be one. Judgement in interpretation is like judgement in argument or in medicine. It is trained by working many cases under someone who will tell you when you are wrong, and it does not reduce to a checklist you could hand to someone who had never read the Bible. Anyone who sells you a five-step test for typology is selling you a device that will pass the readings he likes.

The second part is that controls exist, they are public, and they will catch most of the damage. Six of them are worth memorising. First, the type must be a person, event or institution in the text's own world, not a detail of wording or a coincidence of sound; that alone disposes of tiqvah and of Barnabas. Second, the correspondence must lie in something the Old Testament passage itself treats as significant; Joshua 2 makes the oath and the marking significant and says nothing about the colour. Third, there must be escalation in the same respect, not mere resemblance, which is what turns a parallel into a fulfilment and is why Paul spends three verses on how the gift is unlike the trespass. Fourth, the trajectory should already be running in the Old Testament and be shown to be running, not asserted. Fifth, nothing necessary to faith may rest on a type alone. That rule is not a Protestant invention: Thomas Aquinas states it in the first question of the Summa Theologiae, that nothing necessary to faith is contained in the spiritual sense which scripture does not elsewhere put forward plainly in the literal sense. Sixth, the reading must be arguable in public, step by step, to someone who does not already agree with your conclusion.

Add a seventh that is a weight rather than a veto. Where the New Testament comments on a passage and tells you what it found significant there, that is evidence about the passage. It does not forbid you from seeing more, and Fairbairn is right that the apostles were not compiling an inventory. But if your reading of Rahab centres on something both writers who mention Rahab passed over, you owe your hearers an account of why.

Two habits will do more for you than the list. Say your steps out loud, so that your hearers can see where the weight is falling and can disagree with you at the right point; a reading presented as a discovery cannot be examined, while a reading presented as an argument can. And distinguish a claim you are prepared to defend from an illustration you find beautiful. There is nothing wrong with saying that the scarlet cord in the window puts you in mind of blood on a doorpost. There is a great deal wrong with saying that this is what Joshua 2 means, because the second claim asserts something about God's intention in the text that you cannot show, and your students will eventually notice that you could not show it.

What you should take away is not suspicion of typology. The New Testament does it, and refusing it would leave you with an Old Testament that is only moral example and ancient history, which is not how the apostles read it. What you should take away is that typology is an argument, subject to evidence, capable of being done badly, and that the mark of a teacher worth following is that you can see the joints in the reasoning and could, if the evidence went the other way, tell him he is wrong.