Commentary on the Twelve Prophets (review)

This English translation of Theodore of Mopsuestia's Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, most likely his second major work, is based on the text of H. N. Sprenger's 1977 critical edition. Although it follows the Hebrew edition's listing of the prophets, Theodore uses, so it seems, an Antiochene Greek version of the Septuagint. Hill helpfully notes when Theodore's text differs from the Hebrew and the common version of the LXX and how he handled in a reasonable, if not rationalistic, way their discrepancies. The translation is clear, readable, and, if spot checks can be presumed typical, accurate. Hill also provides an extended introduction that provides, on the whole, balanced and insightful comments that profit one's evaluation of Theodore's and the general Antiochene approach to biblical interpretation.

Hill strives to steer a middle course amid those who disparage and extol Theodore though he tends, in fact, to offer more critical but fair estimates that are based on the present work. As regards his major points, Hill faults Theodore's overly historical, rationalistic interpretative approach and his adamant unwillingness to address an eschatological/apocalyptic vision and to confirm possible allusions to Christ in many places which have evident New Testament resonances. He also wonders why, granted Theodore's stress upon the "historical," he made no attempt to seek out further historical and geographical information that would be helpful for his readers' understanding.

My comments arise out of my knowledge of Theodore's later works, but I hope that they can provide a broader context for judging the concerns which Hill raises. First, as regards how Theodore construes the word "historical," I think that it must be understood in terms not merely of his opposition to Origen's allegorical interpretation but of the extant portions of his Reply to the Emperor Julian. Julian attacked the Christian Bible as mythic fiction whose value comes from the spiritual, philosophical truths that one can possibly derive there. Both Diodore and Theodore realized that the Christian Scriptures had to possess a factual, historical basis if the text were to be accepted as really revealing the intended will of God. For them, it is the text itself, not some unverifiable spiritual truth, that is inspired and needs to be interpreted as the source of God's revelation. They believed that critical reason must be the standard for judging what God intends to be his meaning in a particular text. This explains why Theodore makes no attempt to elaborate further on what may enlarge one's understanding of the historical and geographical points made in the text. One must stay only with what is explicitly affirmed. Theodore's point here is absolutely fundamental. Today there are those who maintain that the account of Christ's bodily resurrection is not historically factual but a fanciful creation of Peter's own imagination. For Theodore, the resurrection would be a revealed fact whose true meaning reason can critically defend from the text and the context.

Theodore does allow a direct nexus between the Hebrew and New Testaments when his strict requirements for true typology are fulfilled, as he does in the case of Jonah in the whale. This is clearly exemplified in his later works where he holds Adam to be the type and Christ in his humanity the true archetype insofar as the two, each in his own way, are the heads of mortality and immortality, the recapitulating bonds of the universe and the true images of God. For Theodore, the type and the archetype are existing realities that are similar to each other, with the type being an inchoate, imperfect, and inferior image of its archetypal fulfillment. The type, moreover, must be dynamically related to its archetype in the sense that God has guaranteed its fulfillment in the Scriptures.

Theodore's stress upon the eschatological is highlighted in his discussion of both baptism and the Eucharist in his catechetical homilies. Thus, those passages in...