Beyond the distortion of particular verses, Paul created a systematic method of interpretation known as typology. Under it, figures, events or laws in the Torah are treated as shadows (typos, τύπος) of the Christian teaching he claimed as their fulfillment (plērōma, πλήρωμα).1
Modern study confirms that this symbolic reading began with Paul and became one of the earliest and most influential foundations of the Christian tradition.2 Examples of Paul’s typology include:
1. Adam as a shadow of Christ. In Romans 5:14 Paul claims that Ādam (ʿalayhi al-salām) is “the figure of him that was to come.”
The interpretation became the basis of the doctrine of Original Sin and the need for redemption through crucifixion, which no prophet ever taught. Through the analogy Paul introduced the idea that the fall of humanity began with one individual and salvation comes through one new individual, Christ. Adam brings death, Christ brings life: the basic structure of Paul’s soteriology, which ties spiritual salvation to figurative history.
2. Hagar and Sarah as symbols of two covenants. In Galatians 4:24–26 Paul reads the story of Hagar and Sarah as an allegory of two covenants: one from Mount Sinai, bearing children into bondage, the other from “Jerusalem which is above,” bearing children into freedom.
Hagar stands for the old covenant bound to the law, Sarah for the new covenant in Christ. By casting Hagar as bondage and Sarah as spiritual freedom, Paul frames the whole of scriptural history as a narrative that ends in the supremacy of the gospel. Historical figures are reread allegorically to support the theological shift from law to faith, from rule to grace.
3. The rock in the wilderness as Christ. In 1 Corinthians 10:4 he claims that the rock that gave water during the wandering of the Children of Israel3 was a symbol of Christ: “that Rock was Christ.”
The event is read directly as a manifestation of Christ’s presence with the people in the distant past. The interpretation is exegesis ex post: the conclusion is fixed, the presence of Christ before his incarnation is assumed, and the text is read until it yields it. Paul plants the pre-existence of Christ into the history of Israel, so that the whole past becomes a shadow of Christ’s role in the history of salvation, a reading that depends on a theological narrative fixed in advance, and on none of the original context.
4. The Passover lamb as a redeeming sacrifice. In 1 Corinthians 5:7 Paul equates Jesus with the Passover lamb: “Christ our passover (Christos to pascha hēmōn, Χριστὸς τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν) is sacrificed (etuthē, ἐτύθη) for us.”
With that statement he made the sacrificial law of the Torah the basis of a doctrine of redemption from sin through human blood. He ties the death of Christ to the annual sacrifice of Jewish tradition and makes the Passover a symbolic prelude to the crucifixion. That allows Paul to construct a unity between the ritual law of the Torah and the new dogma of salvation, with Christ replacing the whole system of animal sacrifice.
The death of Christ is then the fulfillment of a divine script (to thelēma tou Theou, τὸ θέλημα τοῦ Θεοῦ) fixed from the beginning.
5. The crossing of the Red Sea as Christian baptism. In 1 Corinthians 10:2 Paul reads the crossing of the Red Sea by the Children of Israel as a symbol of Christian baptism.
A collective historical experience is reread as a figure of the rite of baptism (baptisma, βάπτισμα) into the new covenant. The interpretation aims to show continuity, or more precisely a transfer of meaning, from God’s saving acts in history to the rites of the church, and it lends legitimacy to Christian practice by attaching it to an earlier narrative whose original meaning was different. It reflects a consistent interpretive strategy in Paul’s writings: rearranging history so that it fits an existing theological frame.
6. The Ark of the Covenant as a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice. Although not stated explicitly in Paul’s letters, the typological reading of the Ark of the Covenant has been widely accepted in the Pauline theological tradition as a shadow of Jesus’ role as the sacrifice of atonement.
The cover of the Ark (הַכַּפֹּרֶת, ha-kappōret) was the place sprinkled with blood on Yom Kippur, marking atonement between God and the Children of Israel. In the Septuagint the term is rendered ἱλαστήριον (hilastērion), and Paul uses that very word:
25ὃν προέθετο ὁ θεὸς ἱλαστήριον διὰ πίστεως ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι εἰς ἔνδειξιν τῆς δικαιοσύνης αὐτοῦ διὰ τὴν πάρεσιν τῶν προγεγονότων ἁμαρτημάτων
25Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;4
The verse shows how Paul made the body of Jesus a substitute for the kappōret in the Temple, transferring the concept of atonement from the sacrificial system of the Torah to the crucifixion. The interpretation became the basis of the doctrine of blood redemption, and it also distorted the original meaning of the law by importing a foreign element of divinity into the function of the Ark of the Covenant.
Interpretation of this kind became the basis of church culture to this day, where allegory and typology continue to be used to legitimize teachings far removed from the literal meaning of revelation.5
- Romans 5:14, where Adam is the τύπος (typos) “of him that was to come”; 1 Corinthians 10:6, 11. ↩
- David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (University of California Press, 2002), p. 45. ↩
- cf. Exodus 17:6. ↩
- Romans 3:25 (SBLGNT; KJV). ↩
- Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 89–92. ↩
