How Should Christians Read the Old Testament? Typology, Allegory, and History

Many Christians love the Psalms and the stories of Genesis, then quietly skip the rest of the Old Testament. Leviticus feels foreign, the wars of Joshua trouble them, and the prophets seem to be talking about someone else's history. Others go to the opposite extreme and find Jesus under every rock, so that the measurements of the tabernacle become coded messages about the Cross. Both habits leave a real question unanswered: what is the Old Testament for, if you are a Christian?

The question is older than the New Testament itself. The first Christians had no other Bible. When they said that Christ died and rose "according to the Scriptures," they meant the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, read for the most part in Greek. How they read those books, and how the Church Fathers argued about reading them well, shaped the faith that the Orthodox Church still prays every week. This article looks at that evidence, at the objections, including Jewish ones, and at the places where Christians have handled these texts badly.

In brief

The New Testament reads the Old Testament as a story that leads to Christ. In Luke 24 the risen Jesus explains "in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself," and St Paul calls Israel's wilderness events "types" (1 Corinthians 10) and reads Sarah and Hagar allegorically (Galatians 4). Second-century writers such as Justin, Melito and Irenaeus read the Old Testament this way, and Irenaeus defended that reading against the Gnostics, insisting that Scripture be read within the Church's rule of faith. Origen taught that Scripture, like a human being, has body, soul and spirit, but he also held that most biblical history is true as history. The old picture of an allegorizing Alexandria against a literal-minded Antioch contains some truth, but both traditions looked for a spiritual meaning and both respected the text. The Orthodox Church receives the Old Testament in its Septuagint form and reads it constantly in worship. It has no single dogmatic method of exegesis, but its tradition is clear about the center: Christ is the key, the history matters, and interpretation belongs to the Church's common life.

Thesis: Christians should read the Old Testament as true history and as the Church's own book whose meaning is fully disclosed in Christ, taking both the letter and the figure seriously while admitting that this reading is a confession of faith made in hindsight, not a neutral proof.

"Beginning at Moses": how the New Testament reads the Old

The clearest starting point is the road to Emmaus. Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, convinced that their hope has died. The risen Christ joins them and asks, "Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?" Then, "beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." Later he tells the apostles that "all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me," and "He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures."¹

Two things here matter for everything that follows. The whole Old Testament is in view, not a handful of proof-texts. And the disciples did not see it by themselves: their understanding had to be opened, after the Resurrection. Elsewhere Jesus says of the Scriptures, "these are they which testify of Me," and points to concrete episodes: "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up," and as Jonah was three days in the great fish, "so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."²

St Paul gives this way of reading a vocabulary. The Israelites in the wilderness "were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea" and "drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ." These things "became our examples," and "they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come." The Greek words behind "examples" are typoi and typikōs, the source of our word "type."³ Paul calls Adam "a type of Him who was to come" (Romans 5:14); 1 Peter calls baptism the "antitype" of Noah's flood (3:21); Hebrews says the Law had "a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things" (10:1).⁴

Then there is Galatians 4. Paul takes Abraham's two sons, by the slave Hagar and the free Sarah, and says "which things are symbolic": the two women are two covenants, and "the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all." The Greek word the NKJV renders "symbolic" is allēgoroumena, "spoken allegorically."⁵ So the New Testament uses both words, "type" and "allegory," without sharply separating them. (On Paul's Greek Bible, see Which Bible Did Paul Quote?)

The second century: whose book is it?

In the second century this reading was challenged from several sides. Marcion rejected the Old Testament and its God altogether (see Who Was Marcion?). Gnostic teachers kept the Scriptures but rearranged them to fit their own myths. Jewish teachers denied that the books pointed to Jesus at all.

St Irenaeus of Lyons, writing Against Heresies late in the century, answered the Gnostics with a famous image. They treat Scripture as if someone took "a beautiful image of a king" made of precious jewels and rearranged the gems "into the form of a dog or of a fox," then claimed it was the king's portrait. The faithful reader, who keeps "the rule of the truth which he received by means of baptism," recognizes the jewels but "will certainly not receive the fox instead of the likeness of the king."⁶

Irenaeus also states the positive principle. Whoever reads the Scriptures attentively "will find in them an account of Christ," for "the treasure hid in the Scriptures is Christ, since He was pointed out by means of types and parables." He adds that "every prophecy, before its fulfilment, is to men [full of] enigmas and ambiguities," and ties this directly to Luke 24.⁷ (See Irenaeus of Lyons.)

Melito, bishop of Sardis in the same century, preached a Paschal homily, usually identified with the On the Passover that Eusebius attributes to him, in which the Passover becomes the pattern of Christ's death.⁸ He uses an artist's analogy: a model in wax or clay comes before the finished work and gives way to it. "The people then was a model by way of preliminary sketch, and the law was the writing of a parable." Christ is the one "that was in Abel murdered," who was bound in Isaac and exiled in Jacob, and "in Joseph sold, and in Moses exposed."⁹

Honesty requires saying what else these texts contain. The same homily turns on Israel with bitter accusation: "What strange crime, Israel, have you committed?" St Justin Martyr tells his Jewish partner in dialogue, Trypho, that the prophecies are "contained in your Scriptures, or rather not yours, but ours."¹⁰ Irenaeus says that when the Law is read to the Jews "it is like a fable."⁷ The claim that the Old Testament belongs to the Church is central to Christian faith, but it was sometimes made in a way that denied Jews any claim to their own Scriptures. A faithful reader today can receive the typology of Melito and Irenaeus without repeating their polemic.

Origen and the spiritual sense

Origen of Alexandria, who died in the early 250s aged sixty-nine, was the most gifted and most controversial biblical scholar of the early Church (see Origen: Brilliant Church Father, Dangerous Speculator, or Condemned Heretic?).¹¹ In Book 4 of On First Principles he set out the first systematic Christian theory of interpretation: "For as man consists of body, and soul, and spirit, so in the same way does Scripture." The simple believer is edified by "the flesh, as it were, of the Scripture, for so we name the obvious sense"; the more advanced by its soul; the mature by "the spiritual law, which has a shadow of good things to come."¹²

Origen went further. He argued that God placed "stumbling-blocks" and "impossibilities" in the narrative so that readers would look beneath the surface. Who, he asks, "will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars?"¹³

Yet in the same book he insists that "the passages that are true in their historical meaning are much more numerous than those which are interspersed with a purely spiritual signification," citing Abraham's burial at Hebron, Solomon's temple, and the command to honor one's parents, which is useful "apart from all allegorical meaning."¹⁴ His allegories could be fanciful, and some later Fathers said so. But he did not treat the Old Testament as a book of myths.

Alexandria and Antioch: a contrast often overstated

Textbooks often describe two "schools." Alexandria, following Origen, allegorized. Antioch, with Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia and St John Chrysostom, read literally and historically. There is something to this. Theodore was very cautious about finding Christ in the Psalms; scholars note that he accepted a christological reading of only Psalms 2, 8, 44 (45) and 110. He was condemned after his death at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, mainly for his Christology.¹⁵

But the contrast is easy to overdraw. Chrysostom, the most famous Antiochene, comments on Galatians 4:24: "Contrary to usage, he calls a type an allegory; his meaning is as follows; this history not only declares that which appears on the face of it, but announces somewhat farther."¹⁶ He wants the history kept, and he also wants the "somewhat farther." The Antiochenes had their own word for seeing it, theōria, "insight" or "contemplation." The Orthodox scholar Bradley Nassif devoted his doctoral dissertation to theōria in Chrysostom.¹⁷

Frances Young, a leading historian of patristic exegesis, argued that Alexandrians and Antiochenes both knew "that the wording of the Bible carried deeper meanings." In her view the Antiochenes wanted the spiritual meaning to mirror the coherent story of the text, while allegory could treat single words as symbols and break the story apart. She also argued that the modern habit of treating typology as a method separate from allegory "has no basis in the patristic material."¹⁸

Not everyone goes so far. Mark Edwards of Oxford notes that many scholars have given up the dichotomy, yet he maintains "that there were indeed two traditions," with Alexandria more hospitable to allegory; he also concludes that the Alexandrians were seldom guilty of the arbitrary allegory Theodore attacked.¹⁹ Richard Perhai likewise defends a real Antiochene distinctiveness built around theōria, against both those who ignore it and those who call Antiochene exegesis essentially Alexandrian.²⁰ {{moderate: The two traditions differed in emphasis and technique, but both read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture that speaks of Christ, and neither discarded the history.}}

The Old Testament in Orthodox worship

For an Orthodox Christian, the main school for reading the Old Testament is not a commentary but the services. The Psalter is the backbone of daily prayer, and at Vespers on the eve of great feasts the Church reads Old Testament passages chosen to illuminate the feast.

The feasts of the Theotokos are a good example. Fr Thomas Hopko's catechism for the Orthodox Church in America explains that at Vespers for her Nativity "the three Old Testamental readings are 'mariological' in their New Testamental interpretation": Jacob's ladder uniting heaven and earth (Genesis 28), Ezekiel's eastern gate of the temple, perpetually closed and filled with the glory of the Lord (Ezekiel 43-44), and the house that Wisdom builds (Proverbs 9).²¹

During Great Lent, readings "from Genesis and Proverbs are added to Vespers, and the Prophecy of Isaiah to the Sixth Hour," and Hopko notes that each is read nearly in its entirety over the fast.²² On Holy Saturday, Vespers with the Liturgy of St Basil includes "fifteen readings from the Old Testament scriptures," from creation and the Passover to Jonah and the song of the three youths, "all of which relate to God's work of creation and salvation which has been summed up and fulfilled in the coming of the predicted Messiah."²³ The whole history of Israel is read beside the tomb of Christ, just before the first announcement of the Resurrection. None of this denies that Jonah preached to Nineveh or that the Passover was Israel's feast. It reads those events, as Paul did, as written for us.

Why the Septuagint matters

The Orthodox Church's Old Testament is the Septuagint, the Greek translation begun by Jews in the centuries before Christ and widely used by the New Testament writers, with its fuller canon. Sometimes the Greek text is where the Christian reading begins.

Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40 (39 in the Greek) as words of Christ entering the world: "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared for Me." The Hebrew, as the NKJV renders it, reads "My ears You have opened." Brenton's translation of the Septuagint reads, "Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not; but a body hast thou prepared me."²⁴ Hebrews builds its argument about Christ's sacrificial body on that wording.

Scholars disagree about its history. Almost all Septuagint manuscripts read "body," but Rahlfs's edition prints "ears," and Karen Jobes and Moisés Silva argued that "ears" was the original Greek. Ronald van der Bergh concluded in 2008 that "body" is the better-attested reading, probably a translator's interpretation of the Hebrew.²⁵ {{debated: Whether "a body" was the original Septuagint wording or entered the Greek Psalter through Hebrews is still argued.}} Either way, the Church received and prays the Psalm in the form Hebrews quotes. A similar case is discussed in Isaiah 7:14: "Virgin" or "Young Woman"?

The Orthodox position

• Dogma. The Old Testament is inspired Scripture and belongs to the Church. The God of Israel is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Creed confesses the Holy Spirit "Who spoke by the prophets." Marcion's rejection of the Old Testament is a heresy.
• Common tradition. Christ is the key to the Old Testament. Typology, beginning in the New Testament, is the Church's normal way of reading it, and the liturgy is its main school. The Septuagint is the Church's Old Testament. Scripture is read within the rule of faith.
• Theological opinion. How far to go with allegory, which details are figures, and whether a given psalm speaks of Christ directly or by extension. The Church has never defined one exegetical method, and Fathers in good standing disagreed.

Fr Georges Florovsky, one of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, summarized the balance. The Old Testament is "a book of the generation of Jesus Christ," in which "Events also were prophecies." Yet it must not be "transformed into a collection of proof-texts," and he faulted allegorism "from Philo and Pseudo-Barnabas" onward for making history a mere "pictorial frame." "The Bible is history," he wrote, and "The true prophetic meaning of the prophecies is clearly seen only, as it were, in retrospect, after they have been actually fulfilled."²⁶

The strongest objections

"You are reading Christ into texts that meant something else"

This is the Jewish objection, shared by many historical critics. Isaiah, the Psalms and the Torah had meanings for ancient Israel, and reading them as references to Jesus seems to override their authors. Worse, Christians have used these readings to accuse Jews of blindness, as some passages quoted above show.

Much of this should be granted. The human authors of the Old Testament did not know the name of Jesus. Even the Catholic Pontifical Biblical Commission has said that "the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one," and that "excessive insistence, characteristic of a certain apologetic, on the probative value attributable to the fulfilment of prophecy must be discarded."²⁷ That is not an Orthodox document, but it states a lesson Christians have learned slowly.

The Orthodox answer is that typology never claimed to be the first reading. It is a reading in hindsight, as Luke 24, Irenaeus and Florovsky all say. The Protestant scholar Richard Hays calls it "reading backwards": "the discernment of a figural correspondence is necessarily retrospective rather than prospective."²⁸ The claim is that the God who acted in Israel's history is the God who raised Jesus, so the patterns are real, not invented. That is a claim of faith. It cannot be proved by counting fulfilled verses, and it need not deny that Jewish reading has its own integrity. (For one disputed case, see Isaiah 53.)

"Scripture has one sense, and allegory is arbitrary"

Many Protestants are wary of allegory. The Westminster Confession (1646) holds that "the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one)" must be "searched and known by other places that speak more clearly."²⁹ Some evangelical scholars defend typology while rejecting allegory; Brent Parker argues that interpreters should understand "typology and allegory as separate literary phenomena."³⁰ The worry is fair: if a text can mean anything, it means nothing.

The Orthodox agree with more of this than one might expect. Irenaeus's king and fox is a warning against arbitrary reading, and the Antiochenes made the same protest. The difference lies in where the controls are. For the Orthodox, the check is not a single method but the rule of faith, the liturgy and the consensus of the Fathers, together with respect for the letter. The Fathers also let Scripture interpret Scripture, but they did so as members of the Church, reading within its faith and worship.

"Isn't this just the Catholic four senses?"

Catholic teaching distinguishes "the literal and the spiritual" senses, the spiritual being allegorical, moral and anagogical, and holds that "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal." It affirms typology "as early as apostolic times," while warning that it "must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as Revelation."³¹ Orthodox readers will recognize much of their own inheritance, since both draw on the same Fathers. The difference is mostly one of form: the fourfold scheme became a medieval Western system, while Orthodox reading has stayed less formalized, carried by hymns and feasts.

What we can say confidently

• {{very-strong: The New Testament itself reads Old Testament persons and events as "types" of Christ and the Church, and Paul once uses the language of allegory (Galatians 4:24).}}
• Irenaeus and other second-century writers defended a Christ-centered reading against Marcion and the Gnostics and tied it to the rule of faith.
• Origen taught a threefold sense of Scripture but held that most biblical history is true as history.
• Antiochene writers, Chrysostom included, sought a spiritual meaning (theōria) as well as the historical one.
• The Orthodox Church reads the Septuagint Old Testament extensively in worship, in the light of Christ.
• Some early typology was joined to harsh polemic against Jews, which Christians should not repeat.

What remains disputed

• How sharply Alexandria and Antioch differed, and whether typology and allegory are distinct methods.
• Whether "a body" in Psalm 39(40) was the original Septuagint reading.
• How far a given passage refers to Christ directly or by later figural extension; the Fathers disagreed.
• What controls figural reading should have, which Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox readers answer differently.

Conclusion

So how should Christians read the Old Testament? As the Fathers did at their best: slowly, as true history, and with Christ as the key that the risen Lord himself gave on the Emmaus road. The wilderness, the Passover, Jonah and Jacob's ladder are not puzzles to be decoded but events in which the same God was already at work. Their full meaning appears in hindsight, and the Church says so openly.

The Orthodox Church gives its members less a method than a way of hearing. On Holy Saturday, by the tomb of Christ, it reads fifteen passages from Israel's Scriptures, and then, as the vestments are changed from dark to bright, sings the psalm verse "Arise, O God, and judge the earth."²³ It is gathered up, as Melito said of the artist's model, into the finished work. Those who learn to hear it that way will neither skip Leviticus nor hunt for codes in every verse. They may find, as the disciples did, that their hearts burn when the Scriptures are opened.

Notes

1. Luke 24:25-27, 44-45, NKJV.
2. John 5:39; John 3:14; Matthew 12:40, NKJV.
3. 1 Corinthians 10:2, 4, 6, 11, NKJV. Greek typoi (10:6) and typikōs (10:11), SBL Greek New Testament.
4. Romans 5:14; 1 Peter 3:21; Hebrews 10:1, NKJV. Greek typos (Romans 5:14) and antitypon (1 Peter 3:21), SBLGNT.
5. Galatians 4:24-26, NKJV; Greek allēgoroumena (4:24), SBLGNT. The RSV renders it "Now this is an allegory."
6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.8.1 and 1.9.4, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885).
7. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.26.1, same translation.
8. Eusebius, Church History 4.26.2-3, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890). The identification of the surviving homily with this work is the usual scholarly view.
9. Melito of Sardis, On Pascha 36-40 and 69, in Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments, ed. and trans. Stuart George Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), as reproduced by the Boston College Center for Christian-Jewish Learning.
10. Melito, On Pascha 73, Hall translation; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 29, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1.
11. Eusebius, Church History 7.1, McGiffert translation, says that Origen died when Gallus succeeded Decius, "being sixty-nine years of age."
12. Origen, On First Principles 4.11 (numbering of the translation from the Greek), trans. Frederick Crombie, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 4 (1885).
13. Origen, On First Principles 4.15-16 (translation from the Greek), Crombie translation. "Stumbling-blocks" and "impossibilities" are at 4.15, the question about the days at 4.16.
14. Origen, On First Principles 4.19 (Greek), Crombie translation.
15. Richard J. Perhai, Antiochene Theōria in the Writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret of Cyrus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), ch. 1 (publisher's sample chapter), summarizing earlier scholarship on Theodore's Psalms commentary and noting his posthumous condemnation in 553.
16. John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, on 4:24, trans. Gross Alexander, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 13 (1889).
17. Bradley L. Nassif, "Antiochene theōria in John Chrysostom's Exegesis" (PhD diss., Fordham University, 1991), abstract.
18. Frances M. Young, "Alexandrian and Antiochene Exegesis," in A History of Biblical Interpretation, vol. 1, ed. Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 352; and Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 152-53, 162, both as quoted in Brent E. Parker (note 30), 58, 74 and 78.
19. Mark J. Edwards, "Origen, Didymus and Theodore on the Literal Sense," in Perspectives on Origen and the History of His Reception, ed. Alfons Fürst, Adamantiana 21 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2021); author's accepted manuscript in the Oxford University Research Archive.
20. Perhai, Antiochene Theōria, introduction (publisher's sample).
21. Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, Worship, "The Nativity of the Theotokos," oca.org.
22. Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, "Lenten Services," oca.org.
23. Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, "Holy Saturday," oca.org.
24. Hebrews 10:5 and Psalm 40:6, NKJV; Psalm 39:7 (Brenton's verse numbering), The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London: Bagster, 1844), ebible.org edition. Greek of Hebrews 10:5, sōma, SBLGNT.
25. Ronald H. van der Bergh, "A Textual Comparison of Hebrews 10:5b-7 and LXX Psalm 39:7-9," Neotestamentica 42, no. 2 (2008): 353-382, at 355-357, which reports the position of Jobes and Silva and the reading printed by Rahlfs.
26. Georges Florovsky, "Revelation and Interpretation," in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Collected Works vol. 1 (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972), 23, 29-32 (first published in Biblical Authority for Today, ed. Alan Richardson and W. Schweitzer, 1951).
27. Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (2001), sections 21-22, vatican.va.
28. Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), 2, as quoted in Benjamin L. Gladd's review, Reformed Faith & Practice 1, no. 1 (2016).
29. Westminster Confession of Faith 1.9, Orthodox Presbyterian Church text, opc.org.
30. Brent E. Parker, "Typology and Allegory: Is There a Distinction? A Brief Examination of Figural Reading," Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 21, no. 1 (2017): 57-83, at 57.
31. Catechism of the Catholic Church 115-116, 128-129, vatican.va.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. Comparison with the Revised Standard Version (1952) and the SBL Greek New Testament (2010).
• Brenton, Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. London: Samuel Bagster, 1844. ebible.org edition.
• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885. newadvent.org.
• Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. Translated by Marcus Dods and George Reith. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. newadvent.org.
• Melito of Sardis. On Pascha and Fragments. Edited and translated by Stuart George Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
• Origen. On First Principles, Book 4. Translated by Frederick Crombie. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4. 1885. newadvent.org.
• John Chrysostom. Commentary on Galatians. Translated by Gross Alexander. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 13. 1889. newadvent.org.
• Eusebius of Caesarea. Church History. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1. 1890. newadvent.org.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works, vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
• Hopko, Thomas. The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, Worship. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org.
• Nassif, Bradley L. "Antiochene theōria in John Chrysostom's Exegesis." PhD diss., Fordham University, 1991.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Edwards, Mark J. "Origen, Didymus and Theodore on the Literal Sense." In Perspectives on Origen and the History of His Reception, edited by Alfons Fürst. Adamantiana 21. Münster: Aschendorff, 2021.
• Hays, Richard B. Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014.
• Perhai, Richard J. Antiochene Theōria in the Writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret of Cyrus. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.
• Van der Bergh, Ronald H. "A Textual Comparison of Hebrews 10:5b-7 and LXX Psalm 39:7-9." Neotestamentica 42, no. 2 (2008): 353-382.
• Young, Frances M. Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Sources from the traditions discussed (Catholic, Protestant and Jewish-Christian dialogue)

• Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. vatican.va.
• Pontifical Biblical Commission. The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible. 2001. vatican.va.
• Westminster Confession of Faith (1646). opc.org.
• Parker, Brent E. "Typology and Allegory: Is There a Distinction? A Brief Examination of Figural Reading." Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 21, no. 1 (2017): 57-83.