Typology

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore typology, a method of biblical interpretation that aims to meaningfully link people, places, and events in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, with the coming of Christ in the New Testament. Old Testament figures like Moses, Jonah, and King David were regarded by Christians as being ‘types’ or symbols of Jesus. This way of thinking became hugely popular in medieval Europe, Renaissance England and Victorian Britain, as Christians sought to make sense of their Jewish inheritance - sometimes rejecting that inheritance with antisemitic fervour. It was a way of seeing human history as part of a divine plan, with ancient events prefiguring more modern ones, and it influenced debates about the relationship between metaphor and reality in the bible, in literature, and in art. It also influenced attitudes towards reality, time and history.

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Guests

• Miri Rubin 13 episodes
  Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London
• Harry Spillane No other episodes
  Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge and Research Fellow at Darwin College
• Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe No other episodes
  Associate Professor in Patristics at Cambridge

Reading list

• Events and their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante
  A. C. Charity (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis: The Context for 'The Faerie Queene'
  Margaret Christian (Manchester University Press, 2016) Google Books →
• Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion
  Dagmar Eichberger and Shelley Perlove (eds.) (Brepols, 2018) Google Books →
• The Lion and the Lamb: Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art and Literature
  Tibor Fabiny (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992) Google Books →
• Typology: Pros and Cons in Biblical Hermeneutics and Literary Criticism
  Tibor Fabiny (Academia, 2018)
• The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
  Northrop Frye (Mariner Books, 2002) Google Books →
• Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New
  Leonhard Goppelt (trans. Donald H. Madvig) (William B Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1982) Google Books →
• Typologies in England, 1650-1820
  Paul J. Korshin (Princeton University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century
  Judith Lieu (T & T Clark International, 1999)
• Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee
  Sara Lipton (University of California Press, 1999) Google Books →
• A Guide to the Windows of King's College Chapel
  Montague Rhodes James and Kenneth Harrison (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies
  J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2008) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0029zmc

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0029zmc

Auto-category: 220.6 (Bible - Interpretation & Criticism)