Melito of Sardis and Origen on the Passover of Exodus 12
Can patristic allegorical interpretation still be of use to us today? This is a weighty question, since by definition “allegorizing” may seem to imply misinterpretation of the biblical text. The etymology of the term “allegory” speaks for itself: allos (other) and agoreuein (to speak); hence, “to speak other”—other, that is, than what the words themselves appear to say. By what right would one “speak other” than what the words themselves convey? And how does such a practice of allegorizing not turn into an arbitrary imposition of our own preconceived notions onto the biblical text? By way of response to these questions I will turn to the exodus from Egypt, in particular the institution of the Passover at the beginning of the exodus narrative in Exodus 12. I will take for my guides in the reading of this segment of Scripture two early Christian interpreters of the passage, Melito of Sardis (died ca. 180) and Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185-ca. 254). In their readings of Exodus 12 we come face-to-face with questions regarding the validity of allegorical exegesis.
A full response to the questions just mentioned would bring in numerous aspects of patristic exegesis that I cannot properly deal with in this chapter.1 What I can do, however, is give the reader a taste of what the church fathers were doing when they read the biblical text and also provide some insight into what I believe to be the key element that motivated and determined the kind of exegesis that we witness in their writings. This chapter is divided into two segments. In the first, I want to explain why it is that the fathers thought that in their exegesis they were simply following the Bible’s own approach to interpretation. The kind of typological or allegorical reading that we find in the fathers is one that they saw present within the Scriptures themselves. They read Scripture in light of the new realities of Christ and of the church, an exegetical approach fundamentally rooted within Scripture itself—or, at least, so they were
convinced. In the second part, I will turn to a specific example, namely, the exegesis of the Passover in two identically named works—both called Peri Pascha (About the Passover)—written by Melito of Sardis and Origen. Throughout, I will make the argument that what stands out in the typological or allegorical interpretation of both works is the unabashedly christological reading of the text. In fact, Christology is so central to both writers that they were convinced that Christ (and, by implication, the church) is already present within the history described in Exodus 12. That is to say, Christ and the church constitute the New Testament mystery that is sacramentally already present within the Old Testament text.
As modern readers we tend to be anxious about exegesis becoming a free-floating, arbitrary endeavor—free from boundaries, guidelines, and the possibility of verification. This is the concern regarding patristic interpretation that I encounter most frequently: its apparently arbitrary character. Interestingly, within the early church this objection was never voiced—not even by those most staunchly opposed to the allegedly nonhistorical approaches of Origen and others from what is sometimes called the Alexandrian school of interpretation.2 I suspect that the main reason no one in the early church worried about arbitrariness in typological or allegorical exegesis is that they regarded the Bible as the book of the church. That is to say, the Scriptures were linked to the liturgy and the faith of the church. We often think of biblical exegesis as lying within the purview of the academy and of liturgy as the domain of the church; not so the church fathers. For them, the way we read the Bible has everything to do with how it functions in the church. Exodus 12, for Melito and Origen, speaks not just of historical realities of long ago; it speaks of the liturgical gathering of the church as well as of the confession that the church holds dear. Lex orandi, lex credendi is the catchphrase expressing this conviction: the rule of prayer (the liturgy) is closely linked to the rule of faith (what we believe). Our interpretation of the Bible (and our doctrine) is intimately tied up with our worship practices. I believe that this holds true whether or not we acknowledge the validity of the connection—that is to say, it operates within ecclesial contexts of all different traditions—but the early church’s preachers and theologians were keenly aware of this close link.3 It means that the exegesis of Scripture did have concrete boundaries, guidelines, and points of verification, and these were given by the church’s liturgy and confession. It is because exegesis wasn’t a self-governing endeavor but instead functioned within an ecclesial setting that no one expressed the fear that typology and allegorizing might run amok.4
The church fathers were convinced that the Bible itself anticipated their ecclesial, theological readings. For them, what justified their interpretation of the Scriptures was the way in which the New Testament authors had approached the Old Testament, and before that, the way in which, within the Old Testament, earlier passages had been read by later authors. This comes to the fore with particular clarity in the way in which the Passover account of Exodus 12 (along with the rest of the narrative of the exodus from Egypt) functions within the later biblical witness. Before we turn to Melito and Origen, therefore, I want to look at how the Passover narrative functions in the Bible itself. I am taking my cue from Jean Danielou’s excellent 1950 publication, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers.5 Danielou’s basic argument is that we can properly understand the fathers only by regarding their interpretation as an extension of the typology that the Scriptures themselves employ. Danielou puts it as follows: “The Fathers have rightly insisted at all times that the types of the Exodus are fulfilled in the life of Christ and the Church, and in this they have but followed the teaching of the New Testament, which shows that these types are fulfilled in Christ.”6 So the typological lines, according to Danielou, run from Exodus, via the Prophets, to Christ and the church; and this typological development, he argues, is anchored in the Bible itself.
How is this the case? Danielou shows how already the Prophets announce a new, future exodus, one that has each of the main features of the first exodus: a crossing of the sea, a desert journey, living water pouring from rocks, a cloud, and a new covenant.7 Danielou turns to Hosea 2:14-15:
Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
Later, in chapter 12, Hosea promises that Israel will again live in tabernacles:
I will again make you dwell in tents,
as in the days of the appointed feast. (Hos. 12:9)
For Hosea, Israel’s original exodus serves as a type that corresponds to the antitype of her anticipated restoration. Isaiah does much the same thing, as Danielou explains with reference to Isaiah 11:15-16:
And the LORD will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt, and will wave his hand over the River with his scorching breath,
And there will be a highway from Assyria for the remnant that remains of his people, as there was for Israel
when they came up from the land of Egypt. (cf. Isa. 10:26)
The exodus theme is unmistakable. According to Isaiah 4:5, on the day of Israel’s redemption, “the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night.” Again, the fire and the cloud are reminiscent of the exodus (Exod. 13:21; Ps. 77 [78]:14). Finally, according to Isaiah 10:26, God will wield against his enemies “a whip, as when he struck Midian at the rock of Oreb. And his staff will be over the sea, and he will lift it as he did in Egypt.” These early chapters of Isaiah consistently anticipate a redemption that will be in line with the exodus from Egypt.
The later chapters of Isaiah seem to Danielou to be even more insistent in the way they recall the exodus from Egypt. Isaiah 43:16-19 exclaims:
Thus says the LORD,
who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters.
“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing;
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
There will be a pillar of fire and a cloud as in the exodus; water will again come from the rock (Isa. 48:21); and, unlike the first exodus, this new one will not be a hasty flight but will take the form of a triumphal march:
For you shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go in flight, for the LORD will go before you,
and the God of Israel will be your rear guard. (Isa. 52:12)
According to Jeremiah, the grandeur of the new exodus will far outshine the old: “Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up and led the offspring of
the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land” (Jer. 23:7-8). In the same way, the new covenant will be greater than the old, according to the famed prophecy of Jeremiah 31 (which states that the new covenant will not be “like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt” [Jer. 31:32]). Thus, while typology is based on similarities between the original type and the later antitype, there are also significant differences: the glory of the new exodus will be much greater than that of the initial one.
The New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew in particular, picks up on this exodus theme of the Prophets and—as Danielou makes clear—shows it as being fulfilled in Christ.8 Jesus Christ, returning from Egypt after Herod’s death, fulfills the prophecy of Hosea, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1; cf. Matt. 2:15). John the Baptist serves as the “voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’” (Matt. 3:3; cf. Isa. 40:3). After his baptism, which functions as his own Red Sea crossing, Jesus, much like Israel, is “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness” (Matt. 4:1). There he fasts for forty days and forty nights (Matt. 4:2), a number corresponding to the forty years of the wilderness journey and the forty days of Moses’ fast. The three temptations in the desert echo the temptations of Israel in the wilderness.9 The evangelist presents Jesus as the new Moses, with his Sermon on the Mount serving as the new law.10 Jesus distributes bread as Moses distributed manna (Matt. 14:19); and Jesus sends out seventy disciples much as Moses chose seventy elders (Luke 10:1; Num. 11:16).
Something similar, Danielou explains, takes place in John’s Gospel, which he argues functions “as a kind of Paschal catechetical instruction, to show to those baptized on the night of Holy Saturday that the Sacraments they then received were divine interventions which continued the great acts (the magnalia) of Yahweh at the time of the exodus and also at the time of the Passion and resurrection of Christ.”11 In other words, Danielou sees the setting of Saint John’s Gospel as a liturgical one—connected to the baptism of catechumens—and he argues that John locates the catechumens typologically in line with the exodus and with the suffering and resurrection of Christ. Danielou points to the Word appearing in various forms in John’s Gospel: as the Shekinah, the glory of God (John 1:14); as the bronze snake lifted up in the desert (3:14); as the manna coming down from heaven (6:31-51); as the water gushing from the rock (7:37-38); as the pillar of fire (8:12); and as the Passover lamb whose blood washes away the sins of the world (1:29; 19:36).- In each of these cases, the Gospel writer presents Jesus as the reality foreshadowed in the Old Testament exodus narrative.
Danielou elaborates on the Old Testament backdrop of other New Testament books in similar fashion,13 and he concludes with the comment:
A deep impression forms itself on our mind after reading these many texts. It was the clear intention of the New Testament writers to show the mystery of Christ as at once continuing and surpassing the outstanding events in the story of Israel at the time of Moses. God had revealed his might in redeeming the chosen people. But the human race remained subject to another captivity more exacting and spiritual in nature. The Prophets had foretold that the might of God would be seen in a new redemption, on a far greater scale, which would inaugurate the New Covenant. The burden of the New Testament writers is to show that all this has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ.14
In biblical typology, the exodus plays a major role, and the linear pattern that emerges runs from the historical exodus itself, via the Prophets—who announce a new exodus—to Christ and the church.
The way in which the exodus theme is developed throughout Scripture can serve as a paradigm for patristic spiritual interpretation and explains why it is that the church fathers allegorized without worrying that their exegesis might turn arbitrary. Take the well-known example of the narrative of the bronze snake in Numbers 21. The people complain to Moses about the lack of food and drink (21:5), and in response the Lord sends venomous snakes (21:6). So the people repent, and Moses prays for them (21:7-8). We then read: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’ So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live” (21:89). Most of us know the Gospel of John quite well, and it doesn’t strike us as odd or arbitrary to find here a christological reference: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). The fathers—and Danielou shows this with references to Tertullian, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Gregory of Nyssa—eagerly appropriated this connection between Numbers 21 and John 3.- Neither John the Evangelist nor the church fathers appear to have had the kind of historical consciousness that made them shrink back from a christological reading of Numbers 21. Surely, though, John’s use of the story of the bronze snake must raise some historical-exegetical eyebrows. It can hardly have been the historically intended meaning of the book of Numbers to make a prophetic announcement about the coming Messiah. Clearly, Saint John moves well beyond authorial intent in his treatment of this passage.
Assuming that John’s Gospel and the church fathers were right about seeing the bronze snake as a type of Christ—or, we might say, if John read Numbers 21 allegorically16—this raises an important question: Could we perhaps do something similar with other elements in the exodus narrative?17 The fathers
thought they could and should. Moses praying with his arms outstretched (Exod. 17:11-13) was, many of the fathers maintained, a type of Christ.18 Joshua leading the people into the promised land became a type of Christ’s redemption. The wood that Moses threw into the bitter water so that it became sweet (Exod. 15:25) turned into a type of the cross, which transforms the waters of baptism.19 And the twelve springs and seventy palm trees at Elim (Exod. 15:27) stood for the twelve apostles and the seventy disciples (Luke 10:1). What is it that convinced the early church’s interpreters to do all this? At bottom, this exegesis is grounded in one underlying conviction: as God’s people we are implicated directly in the exodus that takes place in Christ. We ourselves are taking the exodus journey. Since, according to the Prophets, the new exodus would be similar in character to the first, the church fathers felt compelled to look for similarities between the old exodus and the new.20
Thus, speaking of the twelve springs and seventy palm trees, Danielou perceptively observes:
This numerical correspondence will probably strike us at first sight as rather artificial. But can we be quite sure of this? We are not to expect in “twelve fountains” a hydrographical exactitude. We can consider what light Jewish tradition will afford. From this we learn that the Red Sea opened in twelve divisions to allow the twelve tribes to pass (Ps. 136:13). The Koran shows us another tradition, that Moses caused twelve springs to gush forth from the rock (Koran, VII, 160). It seems that we must emphasize the connection of the twelve springs with the twelve tribes, as did the Rabbis, who saw in the twelve springs a type of the twelve tribes. . . . And as we said above, it seems quite clear that the choice of the twelve Apostles by Christ had its relation to the twelve tribes.21
Far from being arbitrary, each of these exegetical choices—perceiving the cross in Moses’ outstretched arms as well as in the wood that sweetened the waters, discerning Jesus in Joshua, recognizing the apostles and disciples in the twelve springs and the seventy palm trees—result from the church fathers’ conviction that in Christ they had embarked on a new exodus. It is Christology, therefore (or, to put it differently, it is the new exodus), that shaped their readings and kept these from turning into random allegorical impositions. The fathers’ readings of Moses’ outstretched arms, of the wood sweetening the waters, of Joshua conquering Canaan, and of the waters and trees of Elim were in no way different from John’s reading of the narrative of the bronze snake. Their allegorical exegesis simply followed the biblical example of trying to locate Christ’s redemption in the Old Testament texts.
The fathers based their exegesis on the way in which the Prophets and the New Testament speak of God initiating a new exodus. The implication is that the early church’s preachers believed that a new exodus was taking place in Christ and in the liturgical life of the church. This may be a novel claim to some of us,
especially those of us who worship in a nonsacramental (or nonliturgical) context. But we cannot avoid this link between the exodus and the liturgy when we take the church’s early exegesis seriously. As we will see, both Melito and Origen were convinced that it is through the liturgy that God allows us to join in the new exodus, which is the great archetype anticipated by Israel’s rescue in the book of Exodus.
If the liturgy genuinely makes us join the exodus journey, then this fills the liturgy with tremendous significance. We see this liturgical prominence reflected in the patristic exegesis of the Red Sea crossing and of the eating of the manna: they are types of the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Initiation of new believers into the church was centered on these two sacramental acts. In light of the famous passage of 1 Corinthians 10—“All were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (10:2-4)—the fathers saw in the exodus event the sacramental initiation of new believers into the church.22
It would take us too far afield to go through each of the individual church fathers, but Danielou shows that this exegetical approach was a common feature of the patristic tradition. Numerous church fathers saw references to baptism and Eucharist in the exodus narrative.23 The overall picture that emerges from reading these early interpreters is the following: baptism, which took place on the night of Holy Saturday, recalled the departure from Egypt and from the realm of sin; in the rite of initiation, the proselyte passed through each of the stages that the Israelites had also gone through. The Pauline passage of 1 Corinthians 10 provided a basis for this link between the baptizand and the Israelites.24 As a result, a broad-ranging allegorical network emerged: Egypt became the world of the human passions; the waters of the Red Sea were seen as the means of salvation; Pharaoh and his soldiers were interpreted as the devil and his companions; the pillar of light became Christ, and the pillar of cloud the Holy Spirit; the blood of the lamb was identified with the blood of Christ that put the demons to flight; the three-day journey into the wilderness turned into the Paschal triduum (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Resurrection Sunday); the manna was the Eucharist; and the water from the rock was understood either as the cup of salvation in line with 1 Corinthians 10 or as baptism, following John 7:37.^
One specific example may be worth highlighting, that of Theodoret of Cyrus (ca. 393-ca. 458/466), an Antiochene interpreter often regarded as fairly open to nonhistorical modes of interpretation. His exegesis serves as a word of caution against distinguishing too sharply between Antiochenes and Alexandrians, as if
the former sharply rejected allegorizing while the latter advocated for it. Theodoret’s interpretation shows little hesitance in making use of what we may term “christological/ecclesial allegorizing.”26 The Red Sea, Theodoret explains, “is the type of the baptismal font, the cloud of the Holy Spirit, and Moses of Christ our Saviour; the staff is a type of the Cross; Pharaoh of the devil and the Egyptians of the fallen angels; manna of the divine food and the water from the rock of the Saviour’s Blood. Just as they enjoyed a wonderful refreshment coming from a miraculous source, after they had passed through the Red Sea, so we, after the saving waters of Baptism, share in the divine mysteries.”27 Theodoret reads the exodus allegorically as referring to the church and her sacraments. Danielou rightly comments: “This passage brings out better than any other the value of the liturgical comparison.”28 The church fathers were convinced that in the liturgy—in baptism and Eucharist—they were taken up into the sacramental mystery of Christ himself. By implication, they were also taken up into the new exodus. Thus, there was nothing arbitrary about scrutinizing the exodus narrative for christological and ecclesiological references. The typological or allegorical reading of the exodus passages was rooted in biblical precedent and in liturgical celebration.
So far I have used Danielou’s broad treatment of the church fathers to illustrate that Christology governed their typological exegesis. Christ was the great archetype, and as such his person, his words, and his deeds determined the search for Old Testament types that might correspond in some way to the marvelous newness of the Christ event. Needless to say, this approach assumes great confidence in God’s providential guidance of the events of history.29 The early church discerned similarities between type and antitype because of the conviction that at different points throughout salvation history the character of God comes to expression in similar ways. On this understanding, God’s action in and through Christ determines the way in which we interpret his earlier dealings with humanity as well. In the light of Christ, it is no longer possible to read the Old Testament in the same way as before. This conviction, more than anything else, determined the church fathers’ reading of the Old Testament. They were persuaded, rightly I believe, that they simply followed the Bible’s own understanding of God’s dealings with his people.
With this background, I will now turn to the Passover celebration and to the church’s appropriation of the Exodus 12 narrative. The liturgical setting of the
interpretation of Scripture is particularly clear in Melito of Sardis’s homily On Pascha. Melito likely preached the sermon, which dates from about AD 160 to 170, as a means of introducing the eucharistic celebration. It was in the celebration of the Eucharist that the Scriptures came to their fulfillment, according to Melito. This notion—that the reality of the Scriptures was present here, in the liturgy—means that each of the elements of the liturgy took on great significance. For example, many regarded the very time slot of the Easter celebration as a matter of crucial importance. Since Easter was the Christian celebration of the Passover, Melito argued that it had to be celebrated on the same day that the Jewish Passover was celebrated: the evening of the fourteenth day of the first month (Nisan).- As a result, Melito and other Asian Christians who celebrated Easter on this precise date became known as “Quartodecimans,” or “Fourteeners.”- Other churches, including the church of Rome, celebrated Easter on the Sunday following the Passover celebration, which meant a break with the precise regulation of Exodus 12 as well as with Jewish tradition.
This disagreement turned into a high-stakes controversy in the late second century. Saint Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons in central France, wrote a letter to Pope Victor in Rome to try to convince him to allow the Asian churches freedom in what he considered a nonessential liturgical matter. We may find it difficult to appreciate that this issue led to such a sharp, protracted controversy. But we need to recognize that at stake was the church’s ability to say that the exodus from Egypt was the church S exodus—that we ourselves are the ones making the exodus journey. The celebration on the fourteenth of Nisan, for Melito and other Asian Christians, gave expression to the typological reading of the exodus event. Melito, in On Pascha, places himself squarely in the tradition of the Quartodecimans, and so his typology moves from the church’s liturgy back to the Jewish Passover in order to appropriate for the church the Passover celebration of Exodus 12.
Melito speaks of the historical Passover celebration of Exodus 12 as “type” (typos) and of the fulfillment in Christ as “reality” or “truth” (aletheia): “For there was once a type, but now the reality has appeared.”32 Melito also uses the terminology of “mystery” (mysterion). He begins by saying, “The Scripture of the exodus of the Hebrews has been read, and the words of the mystery have been declared.”33 Repeatedly, he speaks of the “mystery” of the Pascha.34 The term “mystery” would become quite prominent in the later Christian tradition. It has its roots in Scripture itself, especially the Pauline Letters. In Ephesians 5, Saint Paul speaks of the bodily union between husband and wife and then comments, “This is a profound mystery” (mysterion), adding that he is “saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32). The Latin text of the Vulgate
renders the word mysterion as sacramentum. Indeed, throughout the subsequent tradition, the term “mystery” has held sacramental significance. The word didn’t have quite the same connotations that it has for us today. Certainly, it did not refer to a puzzle of sorts, whose secret we can uncover by means of clever investigation, a connotation that comes through when we talk about mystery novels, for example. For the patristic and medieval mindset, the word meant something slightly—but significantly—different. “Mystery” referred to realities behind the appearances observable by the senses. That is to say, although our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp it. They cannot comprehend it. Twentieth-century patristics scholar Henri de Lubac explains: “In Latin mysterium serves as the double for sacramentum. For Saint Augustine, the Bible is essentially the ‘writing of the mysteries,’ and its books are the ‘books of the divine sacraments.’ The two words are often simply synonyms.”35
Further, de Lubac argues that when at times medieval theologians did distinguish between sacramentum and mysterium, they typically saw the former as the sacramental sign and the latter as the spiritual reality:
They are sometimes distinguished as the two terms of a relation or as the two poles of an alternating movement. Then sacramentum designates rather the exterior component, the “envelope,” as Saint Augustine says: “Christ has been preached by the prophets almost everywhere with a wrapping of sacrament.” This is the sign or the letter as bearer of the sign: “the signs of things are in the sacraments.” Whether thing or person, fact or rite, it is the “type,” the correlative of the mystery, just as the “figure” or “image” is the correlative of the “truth”: “the sacrament comes before the truth of the thing.” It is the sacrum [sacred thing] rather than the arcanum [hidden thing]. The mystery is this arcanum itself. It is the interior component, the reality hidden under the letter and signified by the sign, the truth that the figure indicates; in other words, the object of faith itself.36
This quotation may be somewhat lengthy and dense, but it captures exactly how, for the church fathers, exegesis was sacramental. The “exterior” of the letter, while indispensable, had a purpose that lay beyond itself. Its purpose was the “interior” of the Spirit. The type or figure of the Old Testament had as its telos the hidden reality of Christ, revealed in the New Testament.
The sacramental character implied in the notion of mystery comes through already in Melito’s use of the term. When in the above discussion I mentioned the biblical origins of typology, we saw that it was based on the similarities of divine action across history. Typology identifies a historical progression from the exodus, via the Prophets, to the christological reality in the New Testament. Danielou accentuates this horizontal, historical, forward-looking character of typology, and he is certainly right to do so. But he overemphasizes it.37 This comes to the fore in Danielou’s popularizing of the distinction between allegory
and typology. On his understanding of patristic exegesis, it is the Alexandrians (followers of Origen) who especially used allegory. Allegory was derived from Philo; it was moralizing; it looked for eternal realities; it was upward looking; it ignored history; and as a result it was arbitrary in its interpretation of the Bible. By contrast, the Antiochene typological approach, according to Danielou and others, was biblical rather than pagan in origin; it was christological rather than moralistic; it was forward looking; it looked for historical progression rather than for links with eternal realities; and as a result it avoided arbitrariness.
De Lubac, Danielou’s own teacher, demonstrated decisively that his student’s opposition between allegory and typology was alien to the church fathers.38 Most patristics scholarship today has abandoned any sharp distinction between allegory and typology, and I am largely sympathetic to this new consensus.39 And we see evidence for it in Melito. Without doubt, Melito’s typology is historical, in that it moves from the Passover of Exodus 12 to the suffering of Christ. But the typology involves more than just a historical or chronological move. The forward move from type to antitype or from shadow to reality is for Melito at the same time an upward move, from temporal, earthly types to eternal, heavenly realities.40
Paragraph 2 of On Pascha may serve to illustrate this. Here Melito comments: “Therefore, well-beloved, understand, how the mystery (mysterion) of the Pascha is both new and old, eternal and provisional, perishable and imperishable, mortal and immortal.” Notice that Melito is able to shift effortlessly from horizontal language (“new and old”) to vertical language (“eternal and provisional, perishable and imperishable, mortal and immortal”). And he keeps up this vertical language throughout. The reason is that we have in Melito not just a (nominalist) succession of unrelated, fragmented historical incidents.41 The progression from the Passover to the suffering of Christ and so to the eucharistic celebration is not just a historical progression of separate moments in time. Rather, these events have an internal relationship to each other. And it is this internal relationship to later events that turns the Passover of Exodus 12 into a “mystery.”
Melito makes this particularly clear at the height of his exposition, immediately prior to his explanation of typology. Addressing the angel of death directly, in paragraph 32 he asks: “Tell me angel, what turned you away? The slaughter of the sheep or the life of the Lord? The death of the sheep or the type of the Lord? The blood of the sheep or the spirit of the Lord?” Notice how he pulls type and antitype apart here, as he asks the central question: What was the origin of the salvation of the Hebrews? Was it the blood of the sheep or that of Christ? His answer is unequivocal: “It is clear that you turned away seeing the
mystery (mysterion) of the Lord in the sheep and the life of the Lord in the slaughter of the sheep and the type of the Lord in the death of the sheep. Therefore you struck not Israel down, but made Egypt alone childless.”42 The reality of Christ—the historically later event—was mystically or sacramentally present already in the Passover celebration of the Hebrews. The two historical events slide inside one another; and it is the eternal, immortal character of the christological archetype that infuses the temporal and provisional Passover of Exodus 12 with its saving power. Paragraph 69 is equally explicit. Speaking of Christ, Melito comments: “This is the Pascha of our salvation: this is the one who in many people endured many things. This is the one who was murdered in Abel, tied up in Isaac, exiled in Jacob, sold in Joseph, exposed in Moses, slaughtered in the lamb, hunted down in David, dishonored in the prophets.”43 The sufferings of each of these Old Testament figures were “mysteries,” according to Melito, of the sufferings of Christ. The archetype—Christ himself —suffered in the suffering of the earlier types.44 The Old Testament types contain a mysterious, inner depth that the language of historical progression cannot capture.
Melito clarifies his approach by referring to the “writing of a parable” (graphe paraboles) in language and the use of a “model” or “preliminary sketch” (typos prokentematos) in sculpting.45 He compares the law to a parable that alludes to the reality of the gospel narrative, and he likens the Jewish people as a preliminary sketch to the church as the repository of reality.46 And so he comments: “When the thing comes about of which the sketch was a type, that which was to be, of which the type bore the likeness, then the type is destroyed, it has become useless, it yields up the image to what is truly real. What was once valuable becomes worthless, when what is of true value appears.”47
As a small but important aside as we transition from Melito to Origen, I should note that Melito employs etymology in defense of his christological reading of the Passover. We see this in paragraph 46: “What is the Pascha? It is called by its name because of what constitutes it.”48 The word “Pascha”
(pascha), maintains Melito, comes from the word “suffering” (paschein).
Among the church fathers, etymology was a common strategy in trying to identify the christological or ecclesial meaning of the Old Testament. This approach had already been used by Philo, and the church fathers’ love of words and their meaning predisposed them to follow Philo in order to find the spiritual, christological meaning of the text by means of etymology.49
Origen, Treatise on the Passover
The etymology that Melito assumed—the move from pascha to paschein—is an interesting one, especially in light of the way in which Origen deals with it in his Treatise on the Passover, a book to which we now turn. Origen wrote his Peri Pascha around 245, approximately eighty years after Melito’s work by the same title. Origen’s book is in many ways quite different from that of Melito. The flowery rhetoric of Melito’s sermon gives way to a rather straightforward two-part treatise. Origen presents his main argument in the first part: he wants to correct a misunderstanding of how the typology of the Passover works. In the second part he presents the spiritual interpretation of Exodus 12—although, since he has done a great deal of work in terms of typological interpretation already in part 1, the second part turns out to be rather brief.50
In part 1, as he corrects a misunderstanding of the “mechanics” (if we may use that term) of the typology of the Passover, Origen makes a small but, in his eyes, important distinction. He rejects the notion that the Passover was a figure or type of Christ’s passion. Now, we just saw that this view, rejected here by Origen, was exactly that of Melito. And Hippolytus of Rome (ca. 170-ca. 236) too had typologically connected the Passover to Christ’s passion, and it may well be that Origen wrote directly to counter Hippolytus’s view.51 Origen insists that instead of being a type of Christ’s suffering, the Passover is a type of Christ himself and of his “passing over” to the Father, and that as a result the Passover functions also as a type of our “passing over” to the Father. The church, after all, is included in Christ.52 Careful textual critic that he was, Origen recognized that the interpretation that Melito and others had put forward errs because it fails to take into account the Hebrew original. “Most of the brethren,” comments Origen, “indeed perhaps all, think that the Passover (πάσχα; pascha) takes its name from the passion (πάθος; pathos) of the Savior.”53 He then correctly points out, however, that the Greek pascha is simply the Hellenized form of the Hebrew pesakh, which means “passage” or “Passover,” and which, when translated into Greek, would have to be rendered by the word diabasis.-
For Origen, this was more than just a lexical matter. He rejected the typological link between the Passover and Christ’s suffering in part because he stood in a different tradition than that of Hippolytus, Melito, and the Quartodecimans. Melito’s Asian tradition tended to be more literal or historical in its exegesis than the Alexandrian tradition of Origen. We have already seen that we need to be careful about positing absolute contrasts in terms of ancient schools of biblical interpretation. We cannot state simply that the Asian tradition was typological while the Alexandrian tradition was allegorical. Still, it is probably significant that Melito, from within the Asian tradition, insisted on the Jewish Passover being the typological counterpart to the passion of Christ.
Origen’s lineage was a different one and went back, via Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca. 215), to the Jewish Platonic philosopher Philo (ca. 20 BC-ca. AD 50). Origen’s predecessor, Clement, had recognized that the term pascha has to do not with suffering but with passage. And in this Clement had followed Philo: for Philo the Passover had been an allegory describing the passage of the soul from the material world into the eternal, spiritual world.55
As a result, Origen presents several arguments against the Jewish Passover being a type of Christ’s suffering. First, he argues that while in the Passover saints used to sacrifice a lamb, Christ instead was sacrificed by “criminals and sinners.”56 This contrast would seem to rule out a direct typological link between the Passover and the suffering of Christ. Second, this means, according to Origen, that it is Christians (the saints) who eat the true Passover lamb when they consume the body of Christ. The Passover typologically foreshadows not the suffering of Christ but the church’s eschatological participation in Christ. This participation occurs, John David Dawson points out, in the very practice of one’s allegorical reading of the exodus narrative: Origen “identifies the consuming of the lamb with the allegorical reading of Scripture which is contrasted with various deficient modes of reading.”57 In our reading of the Scripture, we eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood (John 6:53).- So, according to Origen, the antitype of the Passover is not just Christ’s suffering but Christ himself in his act of passing over, along with our participation in this passing over to the heavenly realm as we read the Scriptures in a spiritual rather than a physical manner.59
John O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, in their book Sanctified Vision, explain how Origen wants us to read the Passover narrative christologically: “Having blocked a false reading of Israel’s Passover as verbally connected to Jesus’ passion, Origen turns toward what he envisions as a fuller and more fruitful interpretation of the relationship between the Passover and the saving work of Jesus Christ. This fuller reading forces us to connect the narrative moments of dedication, roasting, eating, and celebration to the manner of our participation in Christ’s life, teaching, death, and resurrection.”60 So according to Origen, the antitype of the Passover is not just Christ’s suffering but Christ himself in his act of passing over. In particular, as Origen makes clear later on in his treatise, it is the Passover lamb that is a type of Christ.61 The hermeneutical issue for Origen, then, becomes how we relate to Christ as our Passover lamb—and he answers this by suggesting an allegorical interpretation of the exodus narrative.
However one may evaluate Origen’s arguments here, it is important to notice that he presents a detailed exegetical argument against the Quartodecimans. He rejects the view of Melito and Hippolytus on exegetical (partially linguistic)
grounds, and he attaches significant liturgical and theological consequences to his rejection of the Asian tradition.62 This is important because it is especially Origen—and the tradition following the Alexandrian theologian—who has been much lampooned for his so-called arbitrary allegorical exegesis.63 There is nothing arbitrary about what Origen does here. He presents a careful, rational argument for choosing one particular typological reading of the Passover over another. One may well disagree with his particular choice, or even reject his allegorical approach altogether (though obviously I am not inclined to do the latter myself). But any such disagreement cannot take the form of a claim that allegory is an arbitrary de-historicizing of the biblical text.64 Such a position simply betrays lack of familiarity with Origen’s work.
Origen is quite aware that the interpretive move from the historical to the spiritual is a delicate process. The important point in this process, in connection with the Passover, is absolutely evident to him: “That the Passover still takes place today, that the sheep (πρόβατον; probaton) is sacrificed and the people come up out of Egypt, this is what the Apostle is teaching when he says: ‘For Christ, our paschal 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’ (1 Cor. 5:7-8). If ‘our Passover has been sacrificed,’ Jesus Christ, those who sacrifice Christ come up out of Egypt, cross the Red Sea, and will see Pharaoh engulfed.”65 Origen’s key argument is that the Old Testament historical events surrounding the exodus still take place today. They take place in believers’ identification with Christ as they recognize him in their spiritual reading of the narrative. This means that despite the particular exegetical disagreement that Origen may have with Melito, the two interpreters agree on the underlying point, namely, that the Old and New Testament events ought to be identified with each other. The Old Testament Passover in some way sacramentally or mystically contains the New Testament reality of the Christ event. The two theologians agree that we ourselves are the ones taking the exodus journey.
Origen makes several fascinating textual observations as he makes his exegetical case that we may rightly perceive today’s ecclesial situation within the ancient text. He notes, for instance, the distinction between “beginning” and “first” in Exodus 12:1-2: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.”66 When we look simply for the historical meaning, we may note that the Passover was celebrated in the first month of the year, the month of Nisan. “As far as the history goes,” says Origen, “this month is indeed the ‘first month.’”67 But he then adds (and here he moves to the spiritual meaning) that when Christ came, he showed the true Passover,
the true “passage,” and to describe this spiritual reality the text uses the term “beginning” rather than “first.” As Origen explains: “And for the one in the passage, ‘the beginning of months’ is when the month of passing over out of Egypt comes around, which is also the beginning of another birth for him.”68 Origen argues that this spiritual “beginning” or new birth takes place through the water of baptism. This spiritual meaning of the text—based on the distinction between the words “beginning” and “first”—is relevant, according to Origen, only for the perfect. It is only “for you,” the text says; that is to say, it is only for Moses and Aaron.69
In similar fashion, when Exodus 12:9 states, “Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted,” Origen discerns here three different approaches to the Scriptures. If people simply follow the literal meaning of the Scriptures, it is like eating the flesh of the Savior raw. This is a Jewish, literalist approach to interpretation.- Heretics, on the other hand, add water and so boil the flesh with water. It is only Christians who roast the flesh of the Scriptures with fire—the fire of the Holy Spirit.71 Roasting the flesh of Scripture with the fire of the Spirit, maintains Origen, refers to a spiritual reading of the text.
When he finally devotes a separate section of his book (part 2) to the spiritual meaning of the Passover, Origen begins by speaking of “mystery” (the same language we have already encountered in Melito): “Since the sacred ceremony and sacrifice of the Passover was already carried out in mystery (μυστηριωδως; mysteriodos) in the time of Moses . . . we now raise the question whether . . . it is also carried out in a different manner in our own time, the time of fulfillment —‘upon whom the end of the ages has come’ (1 Cor. 10:11).”- The Passover was not just a historical event; at its heart it already contained the New Testament mystery. And so Origen explicitly distinguishes here between the historical meaning and the anagogical (upward-leading) or spiritual meaning of Exodus 12. The former refers simply to the original event; the latter speaks of the “passage” of Christians, mystically present already within the events narrated within the book of Exodus.73 The result is an exegetical approach that is sacramental in character: the very reading of the Scriptures, in an allegorical mode, is our participation in the Passover event of Exodus 12. As Dawson puts it: “Indeed, Origen will argue that Scripture is itself a sacrament like the Eucharist. Christ the lamb is still the Word, that Word is found in Scripture, and eating the Word refers to the interpretation of Scripture. . . . The ancient Passover continues to be celebrated, then, in the allegorical reading of Scripture, which is not a disembodiment through interpretation but instead a consumption of a body through reading.”74 It is the distinction between historical and spiritual
meaning, therefore, that allows Origen to speak of Christ as the true Passover lamb and also to discuss the “passage” of those who are included in Christ.