RE: There are no answers in Genesis
December 5, 2022 at 6:59 am
(This post was last modified: December 8, 2023 at 6:01 am by arewethereyet.)
Splendid essay in this book by Erich Auerbach:
Really an incredible depth of scholarship, such as you seldom see any more. He wrote it in Istanbul, while fleeing the Nazis.
He shows beyond doubt that allegorical interpretation is at the heart of Christianity, from the very beginning. What he calls "figural interpretation" takes the events of the Old Testament as "types" or foreshadowings of their true (for the Christians) spiritual meanings. So the author of the Book of Acts, and Paul, in his letters, accept (or at least don't question) the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, but put all the importance on an allegorical reading. So according to these Christians, right at the beginning, a literal-only reading of the Old Testament would entirely miss the point.
Of course this is polemical. They intend to show Jews that the message of their own holy book has only later been revealed. And to show Gentiles that a book of laws and history for an unimportant tribe in the Middle East is in fact an allegorical message for the whole world.
But it's clear that allegory is what the first Christians valued in reading scripture.
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Really an incredible depth of scholarship, such as you seldom see any more. He wrote it in Istanbul, while fleeing the Nazis.
He shows beyond doubt that allegorical interpretation is at the heart of Christianity, from the very beginning. What he calls "figural interpretation" takes the events of the Old Testament as "types" or foreshadowings of their true (for the Christians) spiritual meanings. So the author of the Book of Acts, and Paul, in his letters, accept (or at least don't question) the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, but put all the importance on an allegorical reading. So according to these Christians, right at the beginning, a literal-only reading of the Old Testament would entirely miss the point.
Of course this is polemical. They intend to show Jews that the message of their own holy book has only later been revealed. And to show Gentiles that a book of laws and history for an unimportant tribe in the Middle East is in fact an allegorical message for the whole world.
But it's clear that allegory is what the first Christians valued in reading scripture.
