Paul treats the story of Adam and the fall in the same way in Romans 5.14, where he describes Adam as “the ‘tupos’ of the one who was to come” – clearly, Jesus Christ. Whereas in our previous passage ‘tupos’ was closely linked to ‘hupodeigma’, here it is linked with ‘skia’. We saw that in both Colossians 2. 16-17 and Hebrews 10.1 ‘skia’ is followed by ‘ton mellonton’, which is the genitive plural neuter of the present participle of the verb ‘mello’, which means to ‘be about to be’, and so can be translated ‘things to come’. Here the singular of the participle is used, and the gender must be masculine rather than neuter, though the two forms are the same; thus the meaning is “the one who was to come”, and we could say that Adam ‘foreshadowed’ Christ, or was his ‘prototype’: just as the disobedience of Adam brought death to all people, so the obedience of Christ – who was “obedient even to the point of death” (as Phil 2.8 should be translated) – made new life available to all people. Such an attitude to the OT could seem excessively imaginative, and it can, indeed, be carried to extremes, when, for instance, every detail of the structure and furnishings of the Tabernacle is forced to yield a symbolic or ‘typical’ meaning. But the principle that Christ is the key to the OT comes from the lips of Christ himself. First, on the walk to Emmaus, he gave those two wonderfully privileged disciples a personal bible study: “beginning from Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24.27); and then he told all the disciples together “that it is necessary that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms should be fulfilled”. “Then”, Luke goes on, “he opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (44-5).
Friday, 16 December 2011
SKENE 8 (c): 'tupos' iv
Paul treats the story of Adam and the fall in the same way in Romans 5.14, where he describes Adam as “the ‘tupos’ of the one who was to come” – clearly, Jesus Christ. Whereas in our previous passage ‘tupos’ was closely linked to ‘hupodeigma’, here it is linked with ‘skia’. We saw that in both Colossians 2. 16-17 and Hebrews 10.1 ‘skia’ is followed by ‘ton mellonton’, which is the genitive plural neuter of the present participle of the verb ‘mello’, which means to ‘be about to be’, and so can be translated ‘things to come’. Here the singular of the participle is used, and the gender must be masculine rather than neuter, though the two forms are the same; thus the meaning is “the one who was to come”, and we could say that Adam ‘foreshadowed’ Christ, or was his ‘prototype’: just as the disobedience of Adam brought death to all people, so the obedience of Christ – who was “obedient even to the point of death” (as Phil 2.8 should be translated) – made new life available to all people. Such an attitude to the OT could seem excessively imaginative, and it can, indeed, be carried to extremes, when, for instance, every detail of the structure and furnishings of the Tabernacle is forced to yield a symbolic or ‘typical’ meaning. But the principle that Christ is the key to the OT comes from the lips of Christ himself. First, on the walk to Emmaus, he gave those two wonderfully privileged disciples a personal bible study: “beginning from Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24.27); and then he told all the disciples together “that it is necessary that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms should be fulfilled”. “Then”, Luke goes on, “he opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (44-5).
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