Traditionally, Christians believed that Christianity was the fulfillment of promises made to ancient Jews. Christians recognized foreshadowing in the prophecies of the Old Testament, which were put forward as proof that Christianity corresponded to the promises in Judaism. John Calvin, for example, claimed that the Mosaic Law was a shadow of the Christian morality taught by Jesus and his apostles.18 Typology is the linking of biblical figures. Believers in typology held that figures in the Old Testament, “types,” foreshadowed figures – usually Jesus – in the New Testament, “antitypes.” Mason Lowance describes this system: “For Mather the ‘type’ was a very particular kind of symbol, historically true and eternally verifiable because it was instituted to perform a specific function in the historical scheme of things” (16). Skeptical critics examined typology carefully and drew attention to fulfillments that did not appear logical. These critics revealed that some of the fulfilled prophecies, especially those mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, stemmed from an entirely different context, were phrased very differently, or, in some cases, did not even appear to be extant by the seventeenth century. While conservative
commentators, such as Mather’s uncle, Samuel, found a variety of means to explain why the Old Testament and the New Testament did not always match, skeptics began to argue that
Christianity simply did not have a solid foundation in the Jewish tradition. The fracturing of traditional interpretation began a process that ultimately caused a splintering into apposite
arguments from faith and arguments from reason.19
18 Calvin argues that the Mosaic Law is a “type” of Christian law and it “shows that God did not enjoin sacrifice, in order that he might occupy his worshippers with earthly exercises, but rather that he might raise their minds to something higher” (1:300).
19 Another somewhat related issue was the rise of “single fulfillment.” Until Whiston heavily criticized it, some exegetes believed in the “double fulfillment” of prophecies. For example, a prophecy in Isaiah might have had an initial fulfillment in Isaiah’s own time and a second fulfillment in the person of Jesus.
One of the most famous skeptics, Anthony Collins,20 belittled typology in A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724). Historians often regard Anthony
Collins as one of the fathers of early modern skepticism. Hans Frei’s influential The Eclipse of
Biblical Narrative attributes the decline of a Bible-centered worldview to Collins’s decisive attack on typology: the last half of the eighteenth century, after Collins’s ideas had permeated mainstream exegesis, revealed “the breakup of the cohesion between the literal meaning of the biblical narratives and their reference to actual events” (Frei 4). As the relationship between the Old and New Testaments became increasingly difficult to prove with empirical evidence, particularly in light of the challenges presented by Collins, the Bible itself was seen as an allegorical book on morality rather than a literally accurate record of historical events. Historian David Ruderman summarizes Frei’s position: “Collins’s work and the issues it raised were significant in that they proclaimed the triumph of the historical-critical interpretation of the
Bible” (Ruderman, Connecting the covenants, 68). Throughout the seventeenth century, Frei
argues, literal interpretations of typology become increasingly difficult to defend and
commentators began to offer allegorical explanations to resolve contradictions. The continuous revising of tradition, however, only illustrated to skeptics that the Bible could not be defended using modern empirical methods.
In a study of Collins’s library, historian Giovanni Tarantino reveals that Collins utilized the works of Richard Simon (231). Of the five major prophetic texts from Matthew that Collins assesses, three were also discussed in Simon’s historical-critical commentary and “none of them, according to Collins, prove that the biblical prophecies occurred literally in the life of Jesus”
(233). Collins was no doubt influenced ideologically by John Toland, whose Nazarenus (1718) was in his library, too (Tarantino 234).
Collins embraced the empirical evidence that could be used to destabilize biblical authority. Simon’s works provided ample material, Tarantino argues: “He used Simon’s texts to lend weight to his strategy of demolishing the authority of the Scripture and of tradition, and drew on them for rigorous scholarship and philology” (231). As Tarantino implies, Collins’s strength was not hermeneutical analysis, but witty rhetoric. David Ney observes that, unlike other commentators, Collins was not interested in authorial intent: “Whereas appeals to authorial intent are rooted in acknowledgement of the opacity of language, Collins’ account is dominated by confidence in the transparency of language” (Ney 99). He undermined biblical authority not primarily by firsthand study of its weaknesses, but by exploiting the weaknesses of its
conservative defenders. Collins depended heavily on William Surenhusius21 (Ruderman,
Connecting, 63). Like Simon, Surenhusius wrote with the intention of defending Christianity
(Ruderman, Connecting, 75). He did so by consulting rabbis and learning about traditional
Jewish methods of exposition and interpretation in order to understand the intention of the Old
Testament writers and of Matthew, who wrote for a Jewish audience (Ruderman, Connecting,
72).
The turn to extra-biblical sources was part of the hermeneutical shift sparked by the rise of empirical philosophy and biblical criticism. David Ruderman suggests that, even though Collins ridiculed Surenhusius’s method, the study of rabbinic interpretations was becoming
mainstream in Christianity by the early eighteenth century (Ruderman, Connecting, 76). David
21 William or Guilielmus Surenhusius (1664-1729), a highly reputed Hebraist in Amsterdam, was a teacher who studied Greek as well as the history of the Bible (van der Aa). He wrote a 6-volume commentary on the Mishnah, which was used not only by exegetes like Mather but by deists to mock orthodox interpreters (Ruderman 134).
Ney agrees with Hans Frei that by the end of the seventeenth century, allegorical reasoning was dismissed as fanatical – a perspective that would become problematic after Collins’s publication (Ney 88). However, Ney proposes that “the notion that the literal meaning of a word is its one- to-one ‘correspondence with external reality’ can be traced, at the very least, to earlier work done by Collins’ opponent, William Whiston” (Ney 86).
Ney argues that Whiston’s focus on single fulfillment of prophecies underlined the association of literal meaning with external reality (86). Perry Miller has observed that the philosophical view that ideas can only have one corresponding reality is reminiscent of John
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), wherein Locke argues that all ideas
are definable and based on sensory experiences (Miller, Errand, 173). Miller suggests that this
concept was “Locke’s major contribution to the Enlightenment, his weapon against enthusiasm,
incantation, and priestcraft” (Miller, Errand, 172). Ney adds that the application of Lockean
principles challenged typology “by forcing interpreters to assign but one referent to each prophetic sign” (86). Frei attributes this shift to Collins, which Ney suggests exaggerates Collins’s influence (Ney 98). Collins himself was exploiting the arguments of Simon, Surenhusius, and Whiston.
While Mather uses many of Whiston’s works, the most significant for this debate on
typology was Whiston’s An Essay Towards Restoring the True Text of the Old Testament (1722).
As the title implies, Whiston argues that the Old Testament had remained essentially the same from antiquity until the second century C.E. (19). During the rise of Christianity, Whiston complains, Jews deliberately changed text in the prophets so that copies being dispersed would
not match the quotations of prophets in the New Testament (228).22 He says “Inconsistencies”
are not major problems because they are only “bare Mistakes of our present Copies” (33). His
work goes through many examples of New Testament quotations and citations that do not match an Old Testament text. Instead of agreeing with Surenhusius that the New Testament fulfillment could be allegorical, Whiston mutters that the Hebraist had been “driven” to propose an “absurd and ridiculous Hypothesis” (289). Whiston concludes that, since the Hebrew Bible had been corrupted by Jews, “We ought faithfully to use all the Helps and Assistances we already have, in order to so truly noble Design as is this, of restoring the True Text of the Old Testament, to its original Purity” (333). Mather did not openly support this plan, since he ultimately agreed with one of the orthodox responses to the debate. However, the examples raised by Whiston
inevitably factored into Mather’s exegesis. Ney observes that:
by insisting on the literal correspondence of prophetic texts the defenders of Christianity had made things easy for Collins. Whiston had already done the hard work of
demonstrating that many decisive messianic texts of the New Testament did not agree with their supposed antecedents in the Old. (Ney 100)
Collins had only to recognize the implications of Whiston’s findings. Frei explains that, in the wake of Collins, commentators had only two options: accept either that the Gospels’
interpretations of the prophecies were incorrect or that the Old Testament must be read
allegorically and therefore is not verifiable (Frei 70). Collins summarizes his bottom line well:
22 Whiston had recognized the weakness in his earlier Boyle lecture on single and double fulfillment. He revised his exegesis for his Essay, where he alleges that “the Jews seem to have corrupted or dislocated their Copies here” in order to make the context misleading (Whiston, Essay, 232). The prophecy itself is clear, Whiston claims, but “the Coherence and Context do now look much disorder’d” and the blame should be placed on “the Corruptions and Dislocations of the later Jews,” not on the texts (232).
If the proofs for Christianity from the Old Testament be not valid; if the arguments
founded on those books be not conclusive; and the Prophesies cited from thence be not
fulfill’d; then has Christianity no just foundation: for the foundation on which JESUS and his Apostles built it is then invalid and false. (Collins 31)
Commentators had already become increasingly radicalized in response to skeptics’ criticism, but Whiston and Collins left little room for conservative argument. Conservative Christians struggled to meet Collins’s challenge to prove that the Old Testament contains “a compleat, internal, divine demonstration of the truth of Christianity” (Collins 30).
One of Collins’s fiercest critics was Edward Chandler,23 who, in A Defence of
Christianity from the Prophecies of the Old Testament (1725), responded to Collins’s charges by utilizing Jewish methods of interpretation and placing the prophecies and the Gospel of Matthew within their historical and hermeneutical context. Protesting too much, Chandler claims that typology was not fundamental to Christianity (Chandler ix). He remarks that Christianity had been proven by Jesus’s miracles, prophecies, and gifts, so Christianity would be just as strong even if the prophets “had not said, a tittle of the Messias” (ix). Having established that his response defending typology is basically unnecessary, Chandler proceeds with it anyway. David Ruderman remarks that Chandler, as a scholar of Jewish hermeneutics, “openly approved the typological and allegorical readings of biblical prophecy dismissed by Whiston, and
acknowledged, without any hesitation, that they were similarly understood by Jews” (Ruderman 68). Ney adds that, unlike earlier commentators, Chandler explores the context of the prophecies in order to comprehend and prove the intention of the prophets (Ney 106). By authoring one of
the first major replies to Collins’s Discourse, Chandler became the “spokesman” of Collins’s
23 Edward Chandler (1668-1750), bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (Ruderman 68). Chandler was also a scholar of Judaism and felt qualified to comment on Collins’s interpretation of Surenhusius (Ruderman 68).
opponents (Ney 104). His search for empirical evidence, Ney suggests, inspired the rise of Jewish studies in English (Ney 111). Mather, after years of struggling with this issue as the debate unfolded, sided with Chandler.
Cotton Mather’s exegesis reflects the tempestuous era in which he wrote. He incorporated ideas from the Church Fathers, medieval exegetes, and contemporary Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Anglican writers. With his Bible commentary, he endeavored to provide a guide to interpretation that maintained the traditional authority of the Bible while weighing the challenges of skeptics seriously. The breadth of explanations he offers to resolve the apparent conflicts between traditional and skeptical interpretation reflects both his earnestness and the small leeway conservative commentators had to make convincing literal arguments.
Even when he essentially describes typology, he does not always expressly use the term “type.” Mather routinely seeks opportunities to demonstrate the harmony between the Old and New Testaments without resorting to typology. Scholar Hans Frei has shown that while typology had been a favored means of interpreting human history prior to the Enlightenment, it had waned
by the eighteenth century (Frei 2). Mather might have avoided using typological terms24 because
this method had fallen out of vogue. According to Frei, typology “was now bound to look to historical-critical eyes like a rather preposterous historical argument, and it rapidly lost credibility” (7). Mather probably would not have gone that far in his skepticism of it, but the arguments of Whiston about the foolishness of double fulfillment, which are discussed in
24Ironically, however, in BA 1 and especially with regard to Noah, Mather blatantly makes numerous
typological references and relies particularly on his uncle’s The Figures or Types of the Old Testament. Dublin, 1683. For example, Cotton agrees with Samuel that the Noahic ark has “Typical Importance” (BA 1: Gen. 6:22). He also asserts that he “cannot but suspect, that the Four Monarchs conquered by
Chapter Six, Typology, likely went a long way towards changing Mather’s mind about traditional methods of interpretation.25