№ 19: Symbolic History in the Gospels

The continuing travels of Alastair and Susannah

Dear all,

We’ve been apart for…

I don’t even know how long… WEEKS! And it stinks. I’m in New York, and Alastair is in Stoke - he’ll be back on September 3.

At the end of last month, Alastair and I were at our I think third wedding of the summer? Two more to go. Our dear friends Brittany Petruzzi and Ryan Hurd, who (under God’s providence) we justly take credit for getting together, were married in Greensboro, North Carolina; we were both in the wedding party. We had the chance to catch up with many friends from our shared Davenant-and-Theopolis adjacent worlds.

Shortly after Brittany & Ryan’s wedding, Alastair headed back to the UK for a couple of weeks, and I have been gallivanting around NYC on my own.

Last weekend, I was up at my dad and stepmother’s place for an impromptu dad-family reunion; we had intended to get together at Tanglewood for a Yo-Yo Ma concert - the program was Shostakovich - but then Yo-Yo Ma got COVID and cancelled and Renée Fleming was going to sub in singing Strauss but THEN it started raining, so we damply packed up our stuff and met up back home.

It ended up being a fantastic hang-out time with my cousins on my dad’s side, complete with Barbie discourse. We’d sort of had the idea that we were going to listen to Shostakovich at home, but instead, later on, just watched episodes of the thoroughly bizarre musical theater-inspired Netflix comedy Schmiggadoon.

Most recently, that gallivant included a twelve-mile Long Walk with friends, the length of Manhattan Island. We ended up at a friends’ house close to the Cloisters, our bodies broken, dehydrated and needing the loo, like Sam and Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, if when they approached the mountain, Frodo had turned wearily to Sam and said, “do you think we were supposed to bring wine or anything?”

It was extremely fun but I gotta tell you, my feet still hurt.

Alastair: Perhaps after a few months our life will have settled down and, besides sharing the latest content that we have produced, the updates in these Substack posts will be relatively short. It doesn’t look like this is going to be the case any time soon! The weeks since our last instalment have once again been densely packed with work, commitments, travel, events, meetings, and activities and little resembling a stable and quiet routine.

At this point, I wouldn’t mind cutting myself off from the world for a while! Long stints of being on the road, significant disruptions in my living situation, lots of events, and extended socialization wear me out. While I love and enjoy various events and engagements taken individually, collectively they take a toll. I’m hoping that things will calm down after October and I’ll be able to ignore all other demands upon my time, stay put in my office, and catch up on the huge backlog of writing and recording that has been accumulating (I have dozens of incomplete or abandoned projects on account of the sheer number of demands upon my time right now).

We posted our last Substack post at the end of my first week in Birmingham: I had just been at the Theopolis Ministry Conference and Psalm Tap, and the Fellows Program had begun. There is a superb group of Fellows this year and the residential periods of the course, packed as they are with time for conversation, fellowship, and activities, provide ample opportunity for everyone to get to know each other. The week climaxed in the annual ‘Buckleys’, showcasing many surprising talents of the Fellows. This year the winner made a hilarious spoof video about me and other Theopolis faculty.

James Jordan was present for the first few days of the program. He is a lot frailer now, but it was such an honour to spend time with him again. He has been such an important influence upon my work and my thinking. His eyes still light up in conversations about the Scripture.

We also enjoyed more incredible food from Laura Clawson, including Theopolis pies!

Over the main week of the Fellows Program, I taught sessions on Exodus and Numbers, Prophecy and the Prophetic Literature, John’s Gospel, and the Pauline Corpus. Besides a few rough headings to keep me from straying too much from the subject, I generally teach these sessions without notes, which gives me a lot more latitude for exploration and keeps the material fresh for me. Having such thoughtful and engaged students is also a privilege. After the end of the residential week, we have pesher sessions every second Saturday. The Fellows are divided into three subgroups, each of which prepares notes on a passage set for them and gives feedback to the wider group, after which the group and lecturers get to question them and add further thoughts of our own. We had the first of these sessions last week, discussing Genesis 16 (Abram and Hagar), 28 (Jacob at Bethel), and 37 (the sale of Joseph).

Having been apart from Susannah for two weeks—long stints apart from each other have been an unfortunate feature of this summer—it was wonderful to return to New York and spend time together again. Having Central Park on our doorstep, we made the most of the beautiful weather and wandered through it and hung out in it on several occasions.

We attended a memorable performance of Hamlet in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park with some friends, who had picked up extra tickets and invited us earlier in the afternoon. Although the set design and certain other aspects of the production weren’t as effective as they could have been, the performances were strong (Daniel Pearce’s Polonius was the standout for me), and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Chuck Schumer also made an appearance before the play began. The next day Susannah and I finally got around to watching the Barbie movie. A few days ago, we recorded a podcast on Barbie with Leah Libresco and Hannah Long, which will be released on the PloughCast next week!

A great friend of mine from Durham days—who visited me in Stoke about a year ago—was passing through New York and took some time to visit me and Susannah. We shared a couple of meals, meandered around Central Park, and, as the MET was closed, enjoyed macarons at Ladurée instead.

With all my travelling during this US stint, I hadn’t spent any time with Susannah’s dad and stepmom, so it was wonderful to share a meal with them on Thursday 3rd. We had a very successful visit to The Strand bookstore before meeting them, picking up an incredible Folio edition of the Book of Common Prayer, among other finds.

July began with a wedding in San Francisco and on August 4th we travelled to Greensboro for the wedding of our great friends Ryan and Brittany the next day. The celebration was glorious and joyful, and an opportunity to reconnect with several close friends in Davenant and other circles (Ryan is also one of my colleagues on the Davenant faculty). In God’s providence, Susannah and I played a part in connecting Ryan and Brittany and we did a joint speech for their toast. It was such a blessing to see two such remarkable, faithful, and gifted people coming together in marriage. We are so very happy for them!

Back in New York, we continued our process of settling into our new flat, assembling our IKEA bed, clearing out items for donation, and removing our possessions from boxes, bags, and suitcases, and putting them in drawers and shelves. We are gradually starting to feel at home.

On Monday 7th we had the special pleasure of an afternoon with Esther Meek, who has taught for Theopolis. Esther—whose latest book, Doorway to Artistry, was released earlier this summer—is a Christian philosopher with an infectiously joyful personality, love of life, and delight in reality. It was Susannah’s first time meeting Esther and they instantly hit it off. We shared a meal in a French restaurant followed by gelato, talking about our recent activities and hatching plans for an Arthurian quest.

I flew back to the UK on the 9th, arriving in London early in the morning of the 10th. I didn’t get any sleep on the plane or train, reading (Nina Power’s refreshing What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents) and watching movies (The Whale and … er … Weird: The Al Yankovic Story) instead, but determined not to sleep before my regular UK bedtime. My brothers were all in the UK with their families for various periods over the start of August and almost everyone was still around when I returned. As several of the others were going to Manchester for the afternoon, my brother Mark and I decided that we should enjoy the beautiful weather and went to Thor’s Cave in the Peak District. On a perfect English summer’s day there are few better places we could have been. By the time I finally got to bed that evening, however, I had travelled for fourteen hours, read a book from cover to cover, watched two movies, written over 3,000 words, and walked over 30,000 steps before I had last slept.

Mark and my niece Jane stayed in our house until Tuesday 15th, when they returned to Marseille. On Friday 11th, the family all gathered in Stoke for a day together, starting with a big brunch. We had planned to go for a walk together but, unfortunately, my father, whose health continues to deteriorate, had a fall into the side of the car door and had a very nasty cut that bled profusely for some time. While my father rested after his injury, some of us went blackberry picking in the local park, quickly filling five tubs. We ended the day together with a special family meal.

On the Saturday evening, I went with Mark, Jane, and my mother and father to Westport Lake, where we wandered around the lake, enjoying the evening light and the wildlife. With my father’s limited mobility and worsening health, such times are very precious.

Jane was very eager for me to make her the same casserole with dumplings that I cooked last time they visited, so on Monday evening we prepared a large meal together for their last night. Jane and Mark also made a spectacular raspberry and apple crumble and a blackberry and apple crumble. Blackberry and apple crumble has long been a favourite of mine, but the raspberry and apple was arguably even more delicious.

Unfortunately, likely due in no small part to my exhaustion after weeks of intense work, travel, activity, and poor sleep, I came down with a cold, which I have suffered under over the last few days while trying to make some headway with the immense backlog of work on my plate. I have several articles and lectures to write or prepare in the next two weeks, on top of reading and recording commitments. I am also delivering a sermon at a wedding in London on the 2nd September, after which I return to the US. Please pray that I will be able to get everything done that I need to get done.

Symbolic History in the Gospels

In our previous Substack post, I commented on the nuptial motif in the books of John and Revelation, exploring some of John’s uses of the Song of Songs as an intertext. Although he doesn’t discuss the connections with the Song in much detail, I referenced the work of Warren Gage, who argues for pronounced thematic, literary, and theological bonds between the books of John and Revelation. Such work strengthens the plausibility of my argument for unifying nuptial themes from the Song of Songs in John and Revelation.

Gage, among other things, makes the startling claim that the Samaritan woman in John 4 is related to the Harlot and the Bride in Revelation 17-22. He observes the presence of a cluster of verbal parallels between the figures:

To some these supposed parallels seem ridiculous and forced. Surely John’s gospel is a relatively artless account of historical events! To suggest such elaborate literary artistry, symbolism, and typology is to treat it as something quite different from what it is—straightforward ‘reportage’. A particularly vocal critic of such an approach to the gospel narratives is Lydia McGrew, a philosopher and apologist and the author of The Mirror or the Mask: Liberating the Gospels from Literary Devices and The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage.

Within McGrew’s work more broadly, she has been concerned to defend the historicity and reliability of the gospels. Challenges to the historicity of the gospels are perhaps most common and pronounced when it comes to the gospel of John; much of McGrew’s work has focused on John for this reason. The style, form, and content of John, which have generally been regarded as markedly contrasting with those of the Synoptics, have been adduced by many scholars and commentators as reasons to doubt the historical reliability of the book. Taking the work of Michael Licona as her primary foil, McGrew has written detailed responses to claims that the gospel authors, especially John, employed fictionalizing literary devices in writing their accounts of Christ, operating within literary genres with relaxed principles when it came to the facticity of historical details. Against this McGrew insists that the gospel writers were relatively ‘artless’ practitioners of ‘historical reportage’, something she believes to be evidenced by numerous details in the gospels that are oddly specific yet seemingly unrelated to any literary or theological purpose, precisely what we might expect to find in eyewitness testimony.

In this video, McGrew challenges attempts to find ‘symbolic details’ in the gospels. While she makes clear that there is no logical inconsistency in reading gospel details as both historical and symbolic, she references the principle of ‘explaining away’ (citing the work of David Glass and Jonah Schupbach), whereby two potentially true and even potentially compatible explanations for some evidence can nonetheless be in competition with each other. In many respects this could be seen as an application of some form of Occam’s Razor—where there is a simple explanation that is sufficient to account for some phenomena, it is be preferred over unnecessarily elaborate ones and dispenses with the need for additional explanations. Because we should prefer simpler explanations, two or more plausible hypotheses can compete for the force of the evidence: as one hypothesis becomes more persuasive, other hypotheses can be correspondingly weakened, as it is more likely that we will abandon them as unnecessary.

To connect this principle to her claims about reportage and the gospel accounts, McGrew gives an example of a husband describing witnessing an accident to his wife, in which a red car ran a stop light and hit the side of a green car. McGrew imagines the wife speculating whether her husband mentioned those specific colours in order symbolically to reference the Christmas season. Yet even were it possible her husband intended some additional symbolic point in mentioning those details in his account, as the husband’s intention to indicate the actual colours of the cars is sufficient explanation, the wife’s speculative theory of some additional symbolic meaning is greatly weakened. While logically compatible, the theories of symbolic and concrete literal meaning are in competition for explanatory force.

Part of McGrew’s concern is that theories of symbolic meaning in the gospels, even though theoretically compatible with it, compete for explanatory force with the hypothesis of accurate reportage that she is committed to defending. The more open we become to the explanatory force of intended symbolic meaning, the more the force of claims of historical accuracy can be weakened. While there are those who argue for symbolic meaning instead of historically accurate reporting, even those who seek to maintain both symbolic meaning and historical accuracy together end up weakening the claims of historical accuracy.

To McGrew, most random details in the text—the sequence of days in John 1 and 2, the five porticos of Bethesda in John 5, the green grass in Mark’s account of the feeding of the five thousand—are nothing more than the sorts of incidental, yet sometimes indirectly confirmatory, details characteristic of faithful eyewitness testimony. The gospel writers are not writing sophisticated literary or esoteric theological texts, but straightforward and relatively artless reports. The moment that we start to admit theological symbolism into our readings, we open the door at least a sliver to doubts about the historical reliability of the text. Besides this, McGrew argues, theories concerning theological symbolism are typically highly subjective, fanciful, and lacking in controls. Rather than trying to read between the lines of the text, we should just read the lines themselves!

At around the 19:30 mark of her video, McGrew makes a key concession: there are some occasions when the gospel authors do indicate some symbolic or deeper theological meaning in addition to mere literal reportage of concrete events. She gives the example of John 19:32-37, where the fact that Jesus’s bones were not broken after his death is presented as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. In this instance, John is quite explicit that he sees some theological meaning in the historical detail. We should, McGrew argues, require high standards of evidence for any such claims and, when the gospel writers engage in such symbolism or deeper theological meaning, they are not shy about telling their readers.

McGrew’s concern for the historical reliability of the gospels is laudable and her work is valuable even if one recognizes the very serious problems with her approach to symbolism in scriptural narrative. However, her position has critical weaknesses. Even if we were to grant that a historical reportage account of the gospels and an account of them that sees lots of symbolism genuinely compete for explanatory force, a combination of the two may well prove to be the strongest—and, indeed, only sufficient—explanation for the evidence. Jonah Schupbach, whom McGrew cited in laying out her account of ‘explaining away’, observes in this paper that two explanations that are truly in competition taken independently may both be validated by the evidence. He writes: ‘If there are net explanatory gains to accepting multiple, distinct explanations, then IBE [Inference to the Best Explanation] should allow us to accept multiple explanations, regardless of whether they compete.’ This is precisely what we find in the case of the gospels. Both symbolic meaning and accurate historical reporting are independently supported by the text at many points and, even if each of these were to weaken the strength of the case for the other, only the combination of the two provides a sufficient account of the texts in front of us.

McGrew is on strong grounds when she claims that the gospels are accurate historical accounts and that they bear hallmarks of and concern for trustworthy reporting. She is also correct in believing that, since this is the case, details should not automatically be presumed to be symbolic. However, her claim that the gospels seldom engage in literary artistry or theological symbolism in crafting their accounts and are relatively artless reportage is an exceedingly weak one and seems to serve more to protect her concerns for historical accuracy than as an attentive account of the scriptural evidence.

Her acknowledgement that there are rare occasions when gospel writers might also be communicating symbolic or theological meanings within their reporting of concrete historical facts is worth considering more carefully. She gives the example of John 19:32-37, where the trustworthiness of the witness borne to Jesus’s unbroken bones and the blood and water from his pierced side is stressed, and that Jesus’s bones weren’t broken is presented as a fulfilment of Scripture.

It should be noted that the fulfilled Scripture in question is Exodus 12:46 (coupled with Psalm 34:19-20), which, in its original context, isn’t presented as a prophecy but is rather within the instructions for the celebration of the Passover. That the manner of Christ’s death might be the ‘fulfilment’ of this Scripture rests upon—and gestures towards—a deeper theological and symbolic connection between Christ and the Passover sacrifice.

Such a connection is, of course, both treated more explicitly and developed in places like 1 Corinthians 5:6-8—

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

If Christ is the Passover Lamb, then the Church is the community celebrating the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The ‘leaven’ that we need to purge out is the old sinful manner of life. The typological connection that Paul identifies invites considerably more elaboration, not least in the underlying Exodus associations: Christ accomplishes his own ‘exodus’ in Jerusalem (cf. Luke 9:31).

What such passages might suggest is that overt typology in the text manifests and expresses an underlying typological root system, within which many implicit typological connections that comprise may support and strengthen the explicit ones, collectively bearing the weight of broader theological associations. If this were the case, the presence of an explicit typological connection is an invitation to consider this broader implicit root system. So, in John’s gospel, the connection between Jesus and the Passover Lamb implied by a likely allusion to Exodus 12 might lead us to reflect upon the significance of the fact that Christ’s death and resurrection occurred during the feast of Unleavened Bread or that John the Baptist referred to Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’.

Such connections are not limited to the world of the text. Indeed, John’s peculiar concern with the trustworthiness of the eyewitness account of the manner of the death of Jesus suggests that the historical accuracy of the reported events mattered so much for John in large part because they were symbolic and not merely incidental details.

Another good example of the way that an explicit connection can open up broader connections is found in Matthew 2:15b—

This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

In a use of Hosea 11:1 that has puzzled many commentators, Matthew takes a statement that refers to the deliverance of the Exodus in its original context and treats it as a prophecy of Jesus being brought back from Egypt as an infant. Putting the surprising use of the Hosea text to one side for a moment, the connection between Jesus’s return from Egypt and the event of the Exodus doesn’t stand alone in the context of the opening of Matthew, but is surrounded by several further literary and typological connections.

There is a man called Joseph, the son of Jacob (cf. 1:16), who had several dreams and led his people down into Egypt for protection from a threat. There is a tyrannical king killing baby boys (2:13-18). There are also further episodes that are reminiscent of the Exodus narrative. For instance, 2:19-21—

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel.

In Exodus 4:19-20 we read:

And the Lord said to Moses in Midian, “Go back to Egypt, for all the men who were seeking your life are dead.” So Moses took his wife and his sons and had them ride on a donkey, and went back to the land of Egypt.

Further possible allusions back to the Exodus narrative in the context could be noted, but it is important to see the problems with trying to contain symbolism here. Any one of these details taken by itself might not be especially strong. However, when there is a more explicit typological connection given to us by the text, each of the other implicit connections with the Exodus is significantly more plausible and, collectively, they are very strong. There is a cumulative case for Exodus symbolism, with the weight of plausibility distributed over several details.

We should also consider that none of the other three gospels record these episodes connected with Christ’s nativity. The existence of four gospels highlights that the story of the gospel can faithfully be recounted in several different ways, with different episodes included or excluded, with different ordering of events, with different turns of phrase and terminology, and with different literary structure. The attribution of these differences to the natural divergences between four instances of relatively artless reportage and the downplaying of literary artistry (and symbolism) seems to neglect the evidence of the texts themselves. It also seems to operate with a very narrow and more modern notion of history, a sort of history where bare facts are detached from meaning, literary artistry, authority, and exhortation (see my discussion of Joshua Berman’s treatment of this in this older Substack post). As I see it, the position arises more from a reactive fixation upon the threatening foil of fictionalizing literary devices than from close consideration of the character of the text itself.

Besides this, we should consider why Matthew could use Hosea 11:1 in the way that he does in 2:15 (similar questions could be asked about some other ‘fulfilment’ statements elsewhere in his gospel such as 1:22-23 or 2:17-18). Hosea 11:1 isn’t a prophecy of a future event, but a recounting of Israel’s history. The best explanation for the use of such Scriptures in Matthew and elsewhere requires recognition that history itself was seen to be typological in character, with former events anticipating later. To recount the history faithfully is not merely to give an artless account of a series of happenings, but to make plain to the hearer how former events are being escalated and recapitulated in later events (or, sometimes, how earlier events are foreshadowing later events) and how unifying themes and overarching or higher realities are symbolically and otherwise present. To give a faithful account of Jesus’s nativity and childhood, Matthew shows that Jesus was recapitulating the story of Israel itself, thereby fulfilling it.

The very beginning of Matthew’s gospel takes a key distinctive expression only found elsewhere at the beginning of Genesis (2:4, 5:1)—the ‘book of the generations’. The final verses of Matthew, the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), are clearly reminiscent of the final verse of the final book of the Old Testament in some canonical orders:

Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up.’ (2 Chronicles 36:23)

Matthew tells his gospel story in a manner that frames it by the Old Testament canonical narrative. Does the neatness of the literary parallel that Matthew sets up between the end of his gospel and the end of the Old Testament canon suggest that the words of the Great Commission aren’t real? By giving another possible typological motive for the use of those words, it may well slightly weaken—without by any means refuting—the case for their historical reliability. But this inconvenience should not excuse a tin-eared reading of the text that refuses to pick up on such allusions. The idea that the gospel writers are fairly ‘artless’ in their accounts seems to arise from a very inattentive reading of them.

The beginning of John’s gospel is another case worth considering here. Almost all commentators note the allusion to Genesis 1 (‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…’) in John 1 (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…’). This allusion strengthens the credibility of other connections, such as the description of the Word in terms of light (John 1:4), connecting the Word with the first day of creation. Already this would suggest that John is doing something richer, more theological and symbolic, than a simple historical record. When many commentators see the seemingly irrelevant sequence of days later in the chapter and speculate that, rather than being an incidental detail of historical memory alone, some connection is being drawn with the days of creation, they are working with the fact that John has already been alluding to the creation narrative earlier in the chapter. They are being attentive readers, not pulling a random speculative connection from their hats.

We could deal with a myriad examples across the biblical canon, but our treatment here must be limited. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the strength of typological, symbolic, and literary readings of Scripture is seen in their fruitfulness and consistency across the canon and many different readers (something confirmed by the fact that so many commentators—both Jews and Christians, for instance—can independently arrive at very similar typological readings of various texts). My own biblical commentary is an attempt to demonstrate this practically.

Let’s start to move back towards consideration of the suggested connections between John and Revelation with which we began.

We should here consider that traditionally the books of John and Revelation have generally been regarded to have come from the same hand. Even were there no closer relationship between them than this, reflecting upon this perceived connection could prove instructive. To modern minds, the contrasts between the two books are immediately striking: the one is a historical account and the other is a visionary text, dense with symbolism, typology, and allusion and exhibiting elaborate literary structures. The book of Revelation expects its hearers to reflect intelligently upon numerological details (most notably the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18) and to pick up on lots of non-explicit allusions and intertextual connections (several commentators have observed that Revelation, while containing no direct citations, hardly has a single verse without an allusion to other Scripture). The sort of hearers that Revelation seems to demand and to reward are precisely the sort of readers that are likely to hear allusions and recognize symbolism in John’s gospel.

Now, it could naturally be argued that John and Revelation are radically different genres of text and that the sort of reading the one invites is quite unfitting to the other. While there are undeniable differences in genre between the two texts, the existence of a significant relationship cannot be so easily dismissed.

John and Revelation are traditionally associated with each other in their authorship. They are also connected in their hearers, both being within the New Testament canon. Different books imply different modes of hearing and types of hearers. The density of biblical allusion in Revelation suggests that it was written for hearers who were attentive to echoes and more allusive references to Old Testament scriptures, not needing explicit citations to recognize connections. Revelation also implies hearers that were profoundly literate in the interpretation of symbolic and allusive texts, with an extensive ‘vocabulary’ of symbolism, familiar with things such as numerology. Further, the book of Revelation evidences an author who was a master of crafting texts, someone with capacities far exceeding those required for relatively artless reportage.

Throughout Revelation, earlier historical events are deployed symbolically and typologically. Balaam (2:14), Manna (2:16), Jezebel (2:20), Sodom and Egypt (11:8), and Babylon (14:8) are all applied as symbols or types of other things. We have symbols and archetypes such as the woman, the bridal city, the Lamb, the dragon, the beasts, wine, grain, lampstands, the river of the water of life, etc., etc. The reader of Revelation is expected to see throughout the historical Scriptures as symbols and types of later escalated or heavenly realities. If you read the Scriptures in such a manner, its history is unavoidably symbolic and typological.

And this is quite in keeping with what we find in John itself. John’s gospel has numerous allusions back to earlier events in Israel’s history and to symbols as the means to understand the identity of Jesus. Jesus is related to the Word of creation itself. He is like the light of the first day of creation. He is the Lamb of God. He is like Jacob’s Ladder (1:51; cf. Genesis 28:12). He is like the bronze serpent in the wilderness (3:14). He is like the manna, as the true bread from heaven (John 6:31-33). He is the true vine (elsewhere a symbol of Israel, e.g. Psalm 80:8-16). Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus performs signs and symbolic actions. These actions are often associated with teaching material that elucidates the meaning in the events. The wedding feast at Cana is closely followed by a description of Jesus is the bridegroom. The cleansing of the temple occasions a revelation of Jesus as the true temple. The feeding of the five thousand is followed by a discourse concerning Jesus as the true manna. The healing of the blind man is accompanied by teaching concerning Jesus as the light of the world. Jesus teaches concerning his death by washing his disciples’ feet. Jesus often speaks symbolically about reality, rather than literarily. He talks about a second birth and means spiritual resurrection. He talks about water and means the Spirit (4:10). He talks about food and means the will of his Father (4:31-34). He talks about sleep when referring to death (11:11-15). Events and actions are symbolic (and such symbolism can operate on more immediate levels, such as the presence of a charcoal fire at both Peter’s denial and at his restoration—18:18 and 21:9). Once this has been recognized, it isn’t hard to see further symbols and types.

It is difficult to understand the way the gospels tell their stories without consideration of the understanding of history in terms of which they are operating. History, for the gospel writers, has a musical and symbolic character. The burden of the gospel records is not narrowly focused upon underlying brute historical facts to which they bear witness, but also reveals the way those events meaningfully feature within the larger symphony of salvation, something manifest in symbolism and typology. Symbolism and typology weren’t a threat to history for the gospel writers, because history for them was symbolic and typological.

The parallels listed by Gage, with which we began, taken individually, are extremely weak, save perhaps for the very odd similarities between the statement about the husbands and the kings. However, without anything further, they could just be dismissed as very strange and puzzling coincidences. The strength of such connections largely arises from a larger network of connections and from the manifestation of their fruitfulness. The mere presence of weird common details doesn’t take us very far. When those common details coalesce in larger meaningful typological and symbolic patterns, they begin to display their proper force.

In our last Substack post, I explored the overarching nuptial themes in the gospel of John and the connections with the Song of Songs. The symbolic and typological connections in this case serve to form a symbolic portrait of Jesus as the bridegroom, his people as his bride, and the eschaton as a wedding. An episode such as the encounter with the Samaritan woman employs the ‘type scene’ of an encounter with a woman at a well leading to a marriage and/or children, a scene familiar from several places in the Old Testament and often commented upon by both Jewish and Christian scholars. Jesus uses the water as a symbol of the ‘water’ that he will give, the water of the Holy Spirit (again, observe the frequent slippage between concrete reality and symbolic reality). He also talks to the woman about her marital state, foregrounding the nuptial themes (in the previous chapter he was described as the bridegroom and in the chapter before that he performed one of the duties of a bridegroom in providing wine for the guests at the feast).

How might this help us to understand the Whore of Babylon and the Bride of Christ in Revelation? The strange detail of similarity between the description of the Samaritan woman’s husbands and the Whore’s kings will probably be our first tip-off to a broader connection. However, taken by itself, it might not be clear how it is fruitful—it could be little more than a very strange coincidental detail. Besides, the Samaritan woman is clearly portrayed as having a positive and blessed end, while the Whore is destroyed. How could they be alike?

The reappearance of water of life imagery at the end of Revelation is certainly interesting, as that is such an important symbol in the gospel of John. The fact that this is associated with marriage themes is also noteworthy. At this point, some might suspect that there is possibly a deeper connection to be found and will be trying to sniff it out.

Gage’s thesis is very expansive and far beyond the scope of a short reflection like this. He highlights the ways in which the Whore of Babylon recalls an earlier city, another city associated with a harlot, another city destroyed by the blowing of seven trumpets. That city, of course, is Jericho in Joshua 6. Rahab the harlot was delivered from that city. Gage draws attention to the summons of God’s people from out of the harlot city (Revelation 18:4). The bridal city, he suggests, is formed out of persons who formerly belonged to the harlot city.

At this point, the fruitfulness of the connections might start to become more apparent. The Samaritan woman, like several other figures in the gospel of John, is an archetypal believer, a (historical) person whose story is told in a way that enables others to see themselves (and the people of God more generally) in her. The Samaritan woman, though appearing in a familiar nuptial type scene, is far from an ideal bride. She has had many men and is not married to her current man. Besides Jesus’s statement concerning her husband being evidence of his supernatural knowledge, it is also a jarring detail in terms of the nuptial type scene. Jesus’s offer of water is an offer of the eternal life of the Spirit. A scene that began with a request for physical water has developed into a scene about Jesus as the true well of living water, symbolic of the Spirit, with people coming out of the city to him. The movement from literal to symbolic occurs very naturally here.

The Samaritan woman is a key to the conclusion of John. She is related to both the Whore and the Bride, highlighting the fact that the latter comes from the former, much as Rahab, the harlot of the doomed city of Jericho, became the bride of Judah’s prince. Once this is recognized, the connections that Gage recognizes come into clearer focus. The linguistic connections (whose force is very much collective and cumulative) find their import as they fruitfully explore a broader nuptial symbolism, spread across both John and Revelation. Whereas we see parallels between her and the Whore of Babylon, it is in the figure of the Bride, on the true mountain of worship (Revelation 21:10; cf. John 4:20-21), drinking of and calling other to the true waters of life (Revelation 21:6; 22:17), that we see a glorified image of the Samaritan woman. And in it all, we gain a fuller appreciation of the wonderful grace of Christ.

Recent Work

Alastair

❧ The latest Mere Fidelity episodes were on flags in churches (with our friend Miles Smith as a guest) and the Trinity in the Bible with Dr Brandon Smith.

❧ Our Deuteronomy series on the Theopolis podcast continues with episodes on Deuteronomy 13-14: Clean and Unclean, Deuteronomy 14: Boiling a Young Goat in its Mother’s Milk, and Deuteronomy 15: The Sabbatical Year.

❧ My Theopolis Ministry Conference talk, ‘Politics of Love’, has been published on the Theopolis podcast. You can also listen to the talks from the conference on the new Theopolis App.

❧ The second part of my discussion of the seven seals has been published on the God’s Story Podcast.

❧ Davenant Hall is doing a series of spotlight interviews for its faculty. My interview with Nathan Johnson, our Provost, has been published here (or listen to the audio here). You might also be interested in some of the interviews with other members of the faculty: Ryan Hurd, Matthew Hoskin, Tim Jacobs, Joe Minich, and Michael Lynch.

❧ Unsurprisingly, I have a deep appreciation for and interest in the lectionary, having produced a series of reflections through the 2019 BCP lectionary. My friends Clayton Hutchins and Steven Wedgeworth recently started their own lectionary podcast, The BCP Propers Podcast. I brought them both on my podcast to discuss the BCP lectionary and how it can be used by preachers. Take a listen!

❧ I wrote a piece on reading well for the Premier Christianity magazine.

Reading well is a matter of developing, extending and practising a repertoire of attention, receptivity, comprehension and responsiveness. It is something akin to the practice of hospitality and is also a form of love. Good reading is receptive, but it is never passive.

Poor readers are inhospitable readers. They engage with books only on their own terms. They are impatient with books and don’t give them time. They don’t give books the close, undivided and sustained attention they require. They prejudge and allow the voice of books to be drowned out by the clamour of the crowd and its opinions, not granting them a generous hearing. They are listening for things in the books they read, rather than listening to them. They don’t welcome strangers but only engage with books that fit tidily into known categories of friends and enemies (further confirming and entrenching them in their existing beliefs). Such readers receive little from their reading.

Read the whole piece here.

Upcoming Events

❧ Alastair will be teaching a residential intensive course for Theopolis in Birmingham, on the subject of Exodus. He co-wrote a short book on the subject, but this will probably be his definitive treatment of the subject. Theopolis intensive courses are a wonderful experience, having much in common with the Fellows Program, especially in the daily pattern of worship. You can sign up for the course here.

❧ Alastair’s next Davenant Hall course is on the books of John and Revelation. The course will be a twenty-hour course, over ten weeks, starting at the end of September.

John, the fourth of the Gospels, stands out from the Synoptic Gospels that precede it in both content and style. Together with the book of Revelation, also written by John and with which it is structurally and thematically related, it invites and rewards sustained reflection. However, as both books require extensive familiarity with the rest of the Scriptures and an informed alertness to John’s literary artistry, they are difficult to understand and many of their depths go unrecognized. This course will guide students in their reading of both these books, equipping them to unlock their treasures.

If you are interested, you can register for the course here.

❧ Alastair will be preaching at a wedding on September 2nd, the first time he will have done so.

❧ Alastair is one of the speakers at a conference on a Protestant Theology of the Body on September 9th.

❧ Most of Alastair’s work is as an independent scholar, funded by Patreon donors. His primary goal is to create thoughtful yet free Christian material for the general public, most notably his largely-completed chapter-by-chapter commentary on the whole Bible (available here and here). If you would like to support his continuing research, teaching, writing, and other content production, you can do so here.

Much love,

Susannah and Alastair