7

JOSEPH

If the Joseph of Joseph and Aseneth is not the Biblical Joseph, then who is he really? In Syriac Christianity, whom does Joseph stand for? Remarkably, we find that Syriac-speaking Christians did see Joseph as a type. In fact, in Syriac Christianity, Joseph is a surrogate for none other than Jesus himself. As Kristian Heal puts it, “Joseph was seen in early Syriac Christianity first and foremost as a type of Christ.”¹

We had already suspected that Joseph was seen as a prefiguration of Jesus, since both Joseph and Jesus are redemptive figures. Nonetheless, it was gratifying to find that early Christian leaders had understood the Joseph narrative as a story about Jesus. This also helped us discover why early Christians had an interest in Joseph: it really wasn’t an interest in Joseph—it was an interest in Jesus.

Ephrem the Syrian

In the 4th century, Ephrem the Syrian was one of the most distinguished leaders in Syriac Christianity. He lived in Nisibis (modern-day Nusaybin) from approximately 306 to 373 C.E. Later, when the Romans ceded that city to the Persian Empire, he moved west, to Edessa (modern-day Sanliurfa). Today, both cities are in southeastern Turkey. Ephrem was a deacon and a member of a religious community called the Brothers of the Covenant. Like their female counterparts, the Sisters of the Covenant, the members of this religious community dedicated themselves to a life of service and devotion while abstaining from sexual activity and married life. Ephrem was Orthodox in his beliefs, and his bishop, Jacob of Nisibis, attended the highly influential Council of Nicea in 325 C.E., participating in the formulation of the authoritative statement of Christian faith, the Nicene Creed.

An extremely prolific Syriac writer, Ephrem wrote commentaries on individual Biblical writings, preached sermons, and composed many hymns. Over four hundred of these hymns survive. Because of his poetic eloquence, he was nicknamed Harp of the Holy Spirit. He used hymns not just as praise of God, but also primarily as an innovative teaching device. He used song to reinforce true belief, to encourage virginity, to urge periodic fasting, and—especially—to counter the opinions of those Christian groups he considered heretical. Other hymns were composed to celebrate particular events within the Christian liturgical year. For example, he penned hymns honoring the birth of Jesus or celebrating the adoration of the Magi at the feast of the Epiphany. These teaching hymns were exceptionally popular, and many were used in a liturgical context. A priest or deacon might chant portions of the hymn, and then the female choir would join in for the response or chorus.

Ephrem’s sermons covered a wide range of topics—on Abraham and Isaac, on Jesus’ suffering and death, and on repentance. His sermons abounded in types, and his penchant for typological analysis often creates difficulties for the modern reader not attuned to this interpretive maneuver. There is one sermon, however, that is especially relevant to our study. Remarkably, this sermon—“On Joseph the Most Virtuous”—not only survives but is readily available online.²

The opening lines of the sermon draw significant parallels between the life of Joseph, the Israelite patriarch, and that of Jesus. We don’t know when Ephrem delivered this lengthy sermon, but his point is clear: Joseph is a type of Jesus, and the story about the Biblical Joseph is really about the Christian message.

Here are some of Ephrem’s main comparisons:

• Joseph’s brothers plotted to destroy him. Likewise, “the Jews,” who were Jesus’ “brothers,” plotted against Jesus, saying “this is the heir, let us kill him and all will be ours.”

• Joseph’s brothers, while eating, sold Joseph; “The Jews,” while partaking of the Passover meal, slew the Savior.

• Joseph went down into Egypt; Jesus descended into the land of the dead.

• Joseph resisted the power of Potiphar’s wife; Jesus destroyed the power of death.

• Joseph saved his brothers; Jesus saved us all.

Incident by incident, Ephrem writes, there are significant parallels between Joseph and Jesus. In Ephrem’s words, “and so truly a type he became of that future Coming of the Lord” (Joseph the Most Virtuous, 25:17). All this leads Ephrem to the conclusion: Joseph = Jesus.

From this perspective, when a Christian reads the story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis, he is really reading a story about Jesus. Joseph is simply a surrogate figure. What happened in Joseph’s day was fulfilled in a deeper way in the life of Jesus. The latter’s life, moreover, is the real meaning of the original story. The original was a foreshadowing of events that would take place more than fifteen hundred years after Joseph was laid to rest.

As can be seen in the writings of Ephrem, typology removes the Hebrew Bible from its historical context. On this view, there is no need to do archaeology to find evidence of Joseph in Egypt. Nor is there any point to engaging in historical research in an attempt to identify the particular Egyptian Pharaoh under whom Joseph served. Nor would it serve any purpose to place the story of the ancient Israelite patriarchs in the nomadic world of the Middle East prior to 1500 B.C.E. All this kind of interpretation—the sort modern scholars would undertake—would be utterly irrelevant for Ephrem and his community of believers.

The Syriac Christians regarded both segments of the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, as a unified whole. They believed that both Old and New Testaments affirmed the truth, not of a historical Joseph, but of the Christian faith. Ephrem would have expected informed members of his congregation to make the connections he made and to be able to read through the superficial story to its real underlying import. Simply put, when reading the Syriac text of Joseph and Aseneth, Ephrem’s Syriac community would have substituted Jesus for Joseph.

Typological analysis demonstrates conclusively that neither Second Zacharias, who preserved Joseph and Aseneth, nor his intended audience would have had a scrap of interest in the ancient figure of Joseph. That story was useful and of significance only insofar as it revealed a truth about Jesus.

That was its real message.

Aphrahat

Ephrem was not alone in this view that Joseph is a type of Jesus. Another Syriac writer, Aphrahat, also treated Joseph as a Jesus figure. Aphrahat lived slightly before Ephrem, in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries C.E. (approximately 270–345 C.E.). Unlike Ephrem, who stayed within the Roman Empire, Aphrahat lived his life within the Persian Empire.

Aphrahat wrote a series of “Demonstrations” on various aspects of the Christian faith. Each Demonstration started with one of the letters of the 22-letter alphabet of the Syriac language. Demonstration 21 was likely written in 344 C.E., toward the end of Aphrahat’s life, and was perhaps not too distant from the time of Ephrem’s sermon on the same topic. Like Ephrem’s sermon, Aphrahat’s work can also be found online.³

Aphrahat drew many more parallels than Ephrem did between Joseph and Jesus. Here are just some of them, especially the ones not mentioned by Ephrem:

• Joseph’s father, Jacob, clothed him in a multi-colored robe; Jesus’ father, God, clothed him with a physical body through the Virgin Mary.

• Joseph was his father’s favorite; so, too, was Jesus the dearly beloved and only-begotten son of the Father.

• Joseph was persecuted by his brothers; Jesus was also persecuted by his brothers—his fellow Jews.

• Joseph saw visions and dreamed dreams; Jesus fulfilled visions and the predictions of the Prophets.

• Joseph was a shepherd; Jesus is the Chief Shepherd.

• Joseph’s brothers threw him into a well, from which he was eventually rescued; Jesus’ fellow Jews laid him in a tomb, from which he eventually rose.

• Joseph, at age thirty, stood before Pharaoh and became Lord over Egypt; Jesus, at age thirty, stood before John the Baptizer and was baptized. He became Lord of the world.

• Joseph nourished Egypt with bread; Jesus nourished the whole world with the bread of life.

• Joseph married Aseneth, the daughter of a non-Jewish “unclean” priest; Jesus “married” the church composed of non-Jewish, “unclean” pagans.

• Joseph died and was buried in Egypt, his bones eventually being transferred to Israel; Jesus died and was buried in Jerusalem, where his “Father raised him from the abode of the dead and took his body into heaven, uncorrupted” (Demonstration 21:9).

For Aphrahat, like Ephrem, Joseph = Jesus. The story of Joseph is really, in an earlier guise, the story of Jesus. Aphrahat, also like Ephrem, would have expected that educated members of his community would pick up on these parallels and so derive confirmation of the Christian message.

Typology, as can be readily seen, was the key that transformed the Old Testament into a Christian text. Through interpretive transferences, typology was the means by which people in Ephrem and Aphrahat’s religious communities made the narratives of the Old Testament into the Christian story.

Narsai, the head of the school of Edessa and the founder of the theological School at Nisibis, followed Aphrahat’s interpretive model. With respect to the Biblical Joseph, he states that “this wonderful story” is full of “symbols and types of the son of God” (N. 42:1–2). He goes on to say “the type of our Lord is depicted in the stories of Joseph and his brothers” (N. 43:17).⁴

Heal states that “for early Syriac writers such as Aphrahat and his younger contemporary Ephrem, typology was a central mode of expression.” He also states that “we find, then, in the literature of this early period of Syriac Christianity one of the few examples of a ‘genuinely Semitic-Christian literature’.”⁵ Heal proceeds to provide seven pages of “Syriac comparisons of Joseph and Jesus.”⁶ But the Syriacs were not alone. There were other early Christian theologians who drew the parallels between Joseph and Jesus.

Tertullian

Before Aphrahat, Ephrem, and Narsai, a late 2nd-century and early 3rd-century African Christian writer by the name of Tertullian (about 160 to 220 C.E.) tried to show how Jesus appears throughout the Old Testament. In his work Against Marcion—the Christian leader mentioned above who dismissed the value of the Old Testament—Tertullian sought to demonstrate the importance of these writings. Like others, Tertullian employed typology to discern the Christian message embedded in the historical narrative. In this way, Tertullian thought he could preserve the Old Testament for Christian purposes.

In particular, Tertullian devoted a chapter in his work Against Marcion to showing that the Old Testament presents “types of the death of Christ” (Against Marcion, Book III, chapter XVIII). Isaac, for instance, about to be sacrificed by his father as an offering to God, carries his own wood, just as Jesus carries the cross to his place of execution. Joseph likewise, Tertullian writes, “was a type of Christ” because he suffered persecution for the sake of his brothers, just as Jesus suffered on behalf of his fellow Jews and, indeed, all of humanity.

Tertullian goes further, noting a blessing Moses makes at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy. This blessing says that Joseph is “a firstborn bull—majesty is his! His horns are the horns of a wild ox; with them he gores the peoples, driving them to the ends of the earth” (Deuteronomy 33:17). The “horns of the wild ox” Tertullian interprets as a type of cross—the horizontal crossbeam reminiscent of the two horns of the ox. As he says, “the horns were the extremities of the cross.” As for the line “driving the peoples to the ends of the earth,” Tertullian equates this Biblical reference to Joseph as a description of Jesus’ manner—i.e., pushing some people from earth to heaven and others to judgment.

Joseph Decoded

Step One

Joseph = Jesus

As has been made clear—and this is really not a matter of conjecture—in the Syriac Christian context, Joseph is a type of Jesus, that is, a surrogate in modern language. But Joseph and Aseneth goes a step further. As we have seen, the text does not relate the story of Joseph only to read Jesus into it. It actually seems to be relating the story of Jesus and using his surrogate Joseph to mask that fact. Once this is understood, we can begin to make sense of the messianic language in Joseph and Aseneth, especially the phrases Son of God and savior. Even in a Christian context, these titles would not apply to Joseph the ancient Israelite. They would, however, pertain to Jesus and to Jesus alone. The Christian religious terminology—“the bread of life,” “the cup of life,” “the oil of incorruptibility,” “living forever,” the honeycomb liturgy with its pronouncement that “this is the honeycomb of life and those who eat from it will not die but live forever”—these phrases begin to make sense within the historical context in which we will now see Joseph and Aseneth.

An Incredible First

Seen in this light, we begin to understand that Joseph and Aseneth is a Christian story—a Gospel, if you will—about Jesus. Not rumor. Not speculation.

When interpreted in the way that ancient Christians understood their sacred writings, this is absolutely the first written document that makes the personal life of Jesus apparent. After all, it tells the story of how Jesus met his wife, how they married, and how they had children. More than this, it goes into details of who she was and what happened in their lives after the marriage and before the crucifixion. It’s surprising—perhaps shocking to some—but it presents a history that has thus far been hinted at but not otherwise known.

One scholar who got intriguingly close to this conclusion was the scholar priest Pierre Batiffol, the editor of the first modern edition of Joseph and Aseneth.⁷ As Kraemer puts it, “In Batiffol’s view, Joseph was an obvious type of Christ.”⁸ Batiffol couldn’t figure out, however, whom Aseneth represented. In Kraemer’s words, “the figure of Aseneth gave him a little more pause.”⁹ As a result, to once again quote Kraemer, Batiffol concluded that “the text grafted a symbolic interpretation of Joseph and Aseneth onto older Jewish stories about [their] marriage and that such symbolic interpretation could only have been Christian.”¹⁰ Put a different way, Batiffol believed that the Christian symbolism was grafted onto an earlier Jewish text. But how could the entire story of Joseph and Aseneth, as it appears in the text, be grafted? If you remove the symbolic grafted elements, you are left with no original text. What Batiffol missed is that the symbolic elements are the original story. The reason he missed this point is because he was typologically looking for Aseneth in all the wrong places—i.e., within Western Christian orthodoxy. Nonetheless, he concluded that Aseneth stands for virginity.¹¹ As we shall see, he wasn’t far from the mark. He was just associating virginity with Jesus’ mother, who does not correspond to the figure of Aseneth as presented in Joseph and Aseneth. He never thought that the virgin in the text might be a woman who the church has traditionally presented as a reformed whore.

Batiffol based his conclusion that the text was Christian on a strong argument for Joseph being Jesus, and a weak argument for Aseneth representing virginity. As a result, he was open to scholarly criticism and it was quick in coming. But he was on to something. What he couldn’t figure out was the typology of Aseneth.

If Joseph is Jesus, who, then, is Aseneth?