Does typology imply fiction? – Walking With Giants

It is a well-known fact that the New Testament writers often present Jesus as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies, or as having come in the spirit or tradition of certain Old Testament personages. It is often inferred from this that stories about who Jesus was and what he did were fictitious accounts, with their sources not in history at all, but in those Old Testament passages. According to New Testament scholar and historian Dale C. Allison (in this interview with Steven Jake), this dates back to D.F. Strauss, who repeatedly argued from typology to fiction.

Allison (while not arguing for the historicity of everything that has been recorded in the Gospels), remarks that we need to be careful here. It is quite plausible, he says, that Jesus engaged in typological interpretations of himself, and that he saw himself (as recorded especially in Matthew) as ‘the prophet like Moses’. This does not necessarily undermine the factuality of the facts upon which those interpretations were based. After all,

Martin Luther King, Jr., presented himself sometimes as akin to Moses, at other times akin to Lincoln. Alexander the Great thought of himself as being like Achilles. Julius Caesar thought of himself as being like Alexander. Napoleon thought of himself as being like Caesar. General Santa Anna thought of himself as being like Napoleon. Obama went to his first inauguration by train and created parallels between himself and Lincoln. Eusebius, when recounting Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian bridge, cast the latter in the role of Pharaoh, the former in the role of Moses, which does not mean they fought no such battle. John Bunyan, writing of his own conversion, drew heavily upon the New Testament accounts of Paul becoming a Christian, which scarcely entails that Bunyan’s recollections are free of facts.

Allison adds:-

That the NT gives Jesus roles and titles from the OT doesn’t logically entail that all those roles and titles were foreign to his own thought.