by Narkissos 18 Replies latest jw friends
Thanks Jeff,
I had a hesitation about the ticket being Russell/Rutherford or Rutherford/Knorr... :)
Other related examples of tupos (in a non-Platonic sense) are Romans 5:14 (rarely quoted because JWs tend to see Adam as an antithesis rather than a "type" of Jesus) and 1 Corinthians 10:6 (another favourite prooftext for the typological method).
Well you were right about them dropping 1935 for the anointed. And your reasoning here certainly makes more sense than many of the new "explanations" they are coming up with: such as how the anointed are now meant to be the "generation".
But like Jeff said, the Witnesses' use of Hebrews immediately sprang to mind. Hebrews takes various features of the old Law Covenant and applies it to the New Covenant. This gives the Witnesses license to view events that happened under the "Old Covenant" as having corresponding antitypes under the "New Covenant". Since both the New Testament and modern Jehovah's Witnesses are in the New Covenant era there can be no such antitypical parallels between the two.
I had a look at the Survival into A New Earth book to see if there were any examples of types taken from the New Testament and applied to modern Witnesses. Under the heading, "foreshadowed by the following groups or individuals" there are 21 examples cited, all from the OT. Then under the heading, "additionally, described prophetically as follows" are 26 prophetic passages not involving types/antitypes, taken from both the OT and NT.
I just noticed on page 39 it also says:
The Bible book of Hebrews, for example, opens our eyes to the prophetic significance of matters that a casual reader might view as simply being history. It reveals that "the [Mosaic] Law has a shadow of the good things to come." - Hebrews 10:1
Annoyingly they don't make explicit in the text that follows precisely whether this is the reasoning behind their only drawing parallels between now and OT passages.
Thanks sbf.
When I wrote the op I (also) had in mind a discussion with a smart JW apologist (yes) who used to post here as Death to the Pixies, a couple of years ago maybe, about the other sheep of John 10:16. At some point, if I remember correctly, he was about ready to admit that the "other sheep" did mean the Gentiles in the 1st century but that would not rule out a further application to "spiritual" Israel vs. "spiritual" Gentiles. Of course the WT would not endorse such an explanation... so far. But it's interesting that the best JW apologists naturally come up with it.
Of course the risk of such a strategy, as I pointed out right away, would be of marking themselves one step further away from (early) Christianity, as a new religion which is to Christianity what Christianity was to Judaism (not unlike Islam from that perspective). But practically every new Christian movement faces a similar charge and finds some rhetorical way to refute it.
Btw, is it not what they are already doing when they practice "ricochet" or second-degree OT typology, as in the case of Elijah/Elisha? Or when they apply Israel/Gentile OT "prophecies" to the "anointed"/"great crowd" relationship, although similar "prophecies" are already applied to the Gentiles joining Christianity in the NT? But it is quite possible that the methodology has to remain implicit (hence limited in its application) to work.
I remember, when I was new in the truth, an elder explained to me what types and antitypes mean - he made it very easy to understand by saying that if we were to think of a typewriter, the type would be what is printed and the antitype would be the typewriter keys theyselves. I guess this rendition is opposite to Plato'd heirachy
Would the reference to the John class be a type from the NT?
w89 4/1 p. 12 par. 8 Hear What the Spirit Says to the Congregations ***Today, this remnant makes up a John class that lives to see and participate in the fulfillments of many parts of Revelation.
ql, good illustration indeed -- which, taken strictly, would imply that in temporal (non-Platonic, event to event) typology the past is shaped by the future...
But practically the use of tupos and antitupon can vary a lot, as evidenced by the Platonic-style allegory of Hebrews where the eternal, heavenly temple is the tupos (also in Stephen's speech in Acts 7) while the old, earthly, handmade one is the antitupon. Another interesting example of this "imprint" thinking is the use of kharaktèr ("character") in the description of the Son in 1:3.
Blondie, good find, thank you! This sort of confirms my intuition that the methodology hasn't been thoroughly thought. Perhaps the OT style of Revelation naturally brought out the typological method in the writers' mind.
Narkissos
Fascinatingly, I was reading that "Philo used allegory to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy and Judaism. His method followed the practices of both Jewish exegesis and Stoic philosophy."
Wiki goes on to identify him as the real founder of Chrisitanity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo
Regarding events and eventing, I think I understand what you mean about the past seeming to be shaped by the future in linear time whereas in contrast I guess events can be thought to be moving backwards and forwards in non temporality.
Strangest typology - sorry, not trying to hijack - I have stumbled across, is the one referring to the book of Ruth, where (have forgotten most of it now and have no material at hand) Ruth and Naomi point forward to the pre- and post 1914 remnant groups, Ruth the "original" one and Naomi to the post-1914 one. Something like that.
Interesting thread.
ql,
Philo has a spatial rather than temporal kind of allegorical typology; the "type" (tupos, such as the heavenly temple in 8:5, like in "Hellenist" Stephen's speech of Acts 7:43f, both from Exodus 25:39[40] LXX) or "paradigm" (paradeigma, "model") occupies an intermediate position between the archetype which consists of intelligible but non-sensible Platonic-like ideas and the earthly "shadows" (skia), which Hebrews calls "antitype" (antitupos, 9:24) and Philo calls mimèma, "imitation" or "copy," like in Wisdom of Solomon 9,8 ("You have given command to build a temple on your holy mountain, and an altar in the city of your habitation, a copy of the holy tent that you prepared from the beginning") or hupodeigma ("sketch," also used in Hebrews 4:11; 8:5; 9:23). In Hebrews this spatial aspect is pretty remarkable but combined with more common temporal ones (the "heavenly" and "eternal" is also that "is to come").
TOH,
The sequence I get from skimming through The Watchtower 2/1, 1972 is Naomi / 1919 / Ruth, but I may be wrong... :)
