PREFIGURATION AND FULFILMENT IN THE BIBLE

Jerry Harkins

The Bible is an anthology, not a novel.  It consists of the Old Testament of 39 books, the New Testament of 27 books and, in some versions, the Apocrypha of 14 books. [1]  These compilations were assembled by various authorities at various times from a much larger reservoir of similar texts.  Inclusion was based primarily on the assertion that they were divinely inspired. In fact, however, the Old Testament is mainly the mythology of the Jewish people together with some history, some wisdom, some literature and a fair amount (16 Books) of prophecy. [2]  The New Testament relates primarily the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth together with some history, some philosophy and some mysticism.

Although there is no central plot, several major themes emerge and evolve.  Among the most important are:   the belief in a single god who created the universe and continues to act in history, the gradual change in the personality ascribed to that god from the raging sociopath of Genesis to the loving, self-sacrificing god of 1 John, and the acceptance of a moral code that must be followed if one is to achieve eternal life in the presence of that god.  The power of these fundamental ideas is suggested by the adherence to them of billions of members of the Abrahamic religions.

There is another theme, less obvious but more explicated by theologians and that is the belief that various prophecies and other material in the Old Testament foreshadow or prefigure important events in the New Testament.[3]  Consider, for example, these five lines from Psalm 22 attributed to King David:

1.   My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

8.   “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, / “let the Lord rescue him. / Let him deliver him, / since he delights in him.” 

15.  My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, / and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; /  you       lay me in the dust of death.

16.  Dogs surround me, / a pack of villains encircles me; / they pierce my hands and my feet.
All my bones are on display;  

18.  They divide my clothes among them / and cast lots for my garment.

Each of these lines has been interpreted as prefiguring an aspect of Christ’s passion.  Line 1 is, verbatim, one of the seven last words of Christ as reported by Matthew (27:46) and Mark (15:34)  and Line 15 is a close parallel of another as reported by John (19:28).  Line 8 is often seen as the predicting the mockery of Christ as reported by Matthew (20:19), Mark (10:34) and Luke  (18:32). Line 16 is said to refer to the holes made by nails in his hands and feet and, of course, Line 18 is quoted almost verbatim in Matthew and seems to refer precisely to what the Roman soldiers did at the foot of the cross.  Obviously, if King David foretold so many details of the passion a thousand years before it occurred, the commentators have a strong argument for prefiguration and, indeed, for the divine inspiration of the Bible.

Line 1 of Psalm 22 refers to its author as “me” but  it is clearly not David who never had cause to think he had been abandoned by God.  Quite the contrary, even God’s punishment for his crimes of murder and adultery – the death of his first-born son by Bathsheba – was modest by comparison with those meted out to Adam and Eve, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah or the entire world before the Flood. In the famous Psalm 23,  David recognizes that the Lord has been exceedingly generous to him.  “You anoint my head with oil;  my cup overflows.” [4]  Some think the “me” in 22 is Israel but there is nothing in the history to hint at any cause for despair during David’s reign. In any event, for a variety of reasons, the members of the Jesus Seminar coded the New Testament version of the forsaken line red, concluding that Jesus did not utter it on the cross but rather it may have been inserted by the author of Mark and copied by the author of Matthew neither of whom was present on Golgatha.  If so, it had to have been a deliberate attempt to promote an historical connection that did not exist.

Obviously, with perfect hindsight a case can be made for prefiguration in the Bible.  But the biblical prophets had no such intent. Rather they were raging against what they saw as the failure of the Jewish people to live up to divine expectations in the present and threatening dire consequences in the near future. (They would have been surprised to learn that there was a long term future, given God’s anger.)  It was, of course, the New Testament writers who introduced the idea of prefiguration.  Doing so forced them to stretch their interpretive powers to the breaking point in order to assure their readers of an intimate continuity between the teachings of ancient Israel and Jesus.  They were, after all, writing to their fellow Jews so it was natural for them to claim that Jesus was the promised Messiah. [5]  They found no fewer than 40 Old Testament citations to support this claim not one of which is convincing.  It is true that the Jews anticipated the coming of a Messiah or Redeemer from the earliest times but their belief was not based on any specific promise in any of the covenants God made with the patriarchs.  It is Isaiah in Chapter 53, not God, who describes the role of one who redeems mankind through his suffering.  The renewed availability of redemption after the fall is the central message of the Bible and the lynchpin of Western civilization.  Every aspect of it has been scrutinized in depth through every lens that could be devised including art.

Perhaps the most famous line of prefiguration is Isaiah 7:14:  “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a a son, and will call his name Immanuel.” This is repeated in Matthew 1:23 and used as a Recitative in Handel’s Messiah.  But Immanuel (God with us) cannot be Jesus Christ because two lines later Isaiah describes him as a boy saying, “before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.”  A Christian, of course, must believe that Jesus is God and certainly knows the difference between right and wrong.  Another Recitative in the Messiah is taken from Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 15:54).  “Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”  The “then” refers to the last days when “The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised.”  And the saying is said to be a paraphrase of the Prophet Hosea (13:14),  “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.”  This is rendered by Handel in the duet, “O death, where is thy sting, o grave where is thy victory?”  The passage in Corinthians begins with Paul saying, “Behold I tell you a mystery.”  The writer wants you to believe that the resurrection of the dead will defeat death itself and he is certain because God promised it to the Jews.  But that connection is nonsensical.  Hosea meant almost the opposite.  In this passage, he was denouncing Israel, personified as Ephraim, in the voice of God who says he may still ransom the innocent but, of the guilty, “repentance shall be hid from my eyes.”  In other words, there are some sins so heinous that even God will not forgive them, a teaching quite at odds with Christian teaching.  Paul didn’t have to claim prefiguration;  the issue is moot once you believe in salvation. But throughout his epistles, Paul was determined to offer definitive proof of the correctness of his interpretation of the good news vis a vis that of the Jerusalem apostles.  He invents the story that he was taken up to heaven for a meeting with God the Father and Jesus who wanted him to correct the doctrinal errors being preached by Peter and the others.

A similar distortion of the Bible’s meaning occurs in many of the inscriptions carved on the Cross of Bury Saint Edmund (also known as the Cloisters Cross).  In one case, the quotation seems to have been selected as foretelling the perfidiousness of the Jews of Jesus’s time.  In fact, Zechariah was denouncing lapses in keeping God’s commandments.  But a medieval scribe latched on to an obscure phrase (12:10) mentioning “the one they have pierced” as though it were intended to foretell Christ’s crucifixion. This sort of mendacity is easy to practice.  A close reading of Homer’s Odyssey can be used to prefigure many of the “superweapons” developed during World War II and the opening lines of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid can be interpreted as the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland in 1943. A dedicated scholar would have no trouble finding a forerunner of the Republican Party Platform in Marx’s Das Kapital or, for that matter, in the Sermon on the Mount.  History may or may not repeat itself but those who use it in debate rarely strive for objectivity.  As Shakespeare tells us,  “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. / An evil soul producing holy witness / Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, / A goodly apple rotten at the heart. / O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” [6] But if someone tries to tell you that The Merchant of Venice prefigures the Trump presidency,  you should check to be sure you still have your wallet no matter how much you might agree.

Notes

1.  The numbers given are for the King James and most other Christian versions of the Bible.  The Hebrew Bible contains the same material as the Old Testament but arranged in 24 books and does not include the Apocrypha.   Christian versions that contain the Apocrypha vary in their understanding of its authenticity and authority.

2.  The Biblical Prophets have a different function than the Greek and Roman oracles and from the Prophet Muhammad.  The oracles see and predict the future.  Muhammad is best thought of as the Messenger of Allah, the last in a line that includes Jesus.  The Hebrew prophets are guardians of God’s commandments to the Jews.  In addition to the 16 prophets counted here, Job, David and Solomon are sometimes considered to be prophetic.

3.  What I call "prefiguration" is often referred to as "typology" by biblical commentators but this strikes me as confusing.  The Latin root of type refers to an image or a symbol and its use in the sense of a prediction as meant here is a long stretch.  Some authors of commentaries propose that every verse of the Old Testament predicts something in the New Testament which is clearly nonsense.

4.  There is no chronological or other discernable order to the Psalms.  Thus, it is merely coincidental that David’s thanksgiving follows immediately on the heels of the despair described in Psalm 22.

5.  The “writings” that constitute the Bible were probably aimed at the very small number of people who knew how to read and write and, in the case of the New Testament, were perhaps meant as guides to them to teach others about the person and message of Jesus.  The gospel authors, with the possible exception of John, were not the disciples we refer to as the evangelists but codifiers of slightly different traditions who ascribed their work to more authoritative names.  The gospels were written by individuals two to three generations removed from the life of Jesus.

6  I am well aware that, like the Devil, I am quoting the Bible in this essay for my own purposes and that I benefit from the fact that hardly anyone these days has read the Bible cover to cover.  I would like to think that, like Sir Galahad, “My strength is as the strength of ten / Because my heart is pure” but most days I know better.