The Body of Jesus and the Structure of the Bible

[Victor]

The greatest biblical type of Christ is the Bible itself. When seen as a whole and single Book, the Inspired Word of God is an icon of the Incarnate God the Word. Scripture is all about Jesus, both Old and New Testaments.

Nowhere is this fact more obvious than in the four Gospels. They proclaim the life of the man Jesus Christ, who laid His body of flesh for our redemption. In the final portion of the Evangels, in the near end of John’s Gospel, we find a reference to the body of Christ that encapsulates a vision of, not only the whole four Gospels, but also the entire written Word of God.


In John’s resurrection account, we read:
Joh 20:11 But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,
Joh 20:12 And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.This is an almost unique allusion to the head and the feet of the Lord in Scripture. (There is only one more joined mention of the head and feet of Christ in a single verse of the Bible: Luke 7:46. Concerning the connection of this verse to John 20:12, see the thread At the feet of Jesus (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1219).)

What about the meaning of John 20:12? It is an old understanding of the Church that the the physical body of Christ has a special symbolic significance. Concerning this verse, Augustine wrote:


But why did one [angel] sit at the head, the other at the feet? To signify that the glad tidings of Christ's Gospel was to be delivered from the head to the feet, from the beginning to the end. The Greek word Angel means one who delivers news.Head and feet, as the natural extremities of the physical body, are an intuitive symbol of the concept of “beginning and end”. The Hebrew language reflects this idea: the words “head” and “first” are the same in Hebrew, Rosh, which is cognate to the name of the 20th Letter (http://www.biblewheel.com/Wheel/Spokes/Resh_Wisdom.asp) of the Hebrew Alphabet. Hence we have the expression “from head to foot” (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/Fr/From+head+to+foot.html).

Since there were angels (“messengers”, “deliverers of news”) at the head and feet of Jesus, and "Gospel" means “good news”, the fact of there being angels at the head and at the feet of the place where Christ was buried is interpreted by Augustine as signifying that the Gospel is preached from beginning to end.

How does that impact the structure of Scripture? Well, John 20:12 was not the only time when the head and feet of Christ were connected to His burial. More than once, women anointed Christ with oil, and the Gospels show that this was done precisely over either His head or His feet. The association of the anointing of His head and feet to His burial was made by Christ Himself. Consider the first and last Gospels:


Mat 26:12 For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.


Joh 12:7 Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.Therefore, when we encounter in John 20:12 an allusion to Christ’s head and feet in connection with the place that He was buried, we cannot help but make a link to the accounts of the anointing of Jesus!

All four Gospels describe an anointing of Jesus during his ministry. (Matthew 26:6,7; Mark 14:3; Luke 7:37,38; John 12:2,3) Glancing upon those accounts, a clear pattern emerges:

http://i36.tinypic.com/u22x.png

Can you see design? The first Gospels record the anointing of Christ’s head; the last Gospels record the anointing of Christ’s feet!

There are several independent threads that converge here:

There was no “need” for each Evangelist to record an event of anointing. Each had much liberty, from a naturalistic point of view, to choose to either include or exclude an account, as it often takes place in other stories. But all of them chose to include an anointing!
The accounts happen to be distributed with exactly two of them recording an anointing of the head and the two others recording an anointing of the feet.
The pairings of accounts just happen to track with the canonical sequence of Bible books, which was not established by the Evangelists. And the order of the Gospels was obviously not defined because of the anointing accounts.
The tracking is self-reflective! The beginning links to the head, the ending links to the feet.Could that be a product of chance? If it was so, that chance just happened to correlate with the Christian claim that the written Word of God is a reflection of the Living Logos! The structure of the Bible is reproducing the basic pattern of its own content! We can say that the Gospel message of Christ’s Death is being preached from beginning to end in the four Gospels!

And if that wasn’t enough, this pattern is easily extendable to the entire structure of the Bible! That we shall see next.

[Victor]

Sixth-century Church Father Gregory the Great was especially sensitive to the structure of Scripture. Just like Augustine correlated John 20:12 with the preaching of the Gospel from beginning to end, Gregory correlated this same verse with the basic structure of the Bible.


The Angel sits at the head when the Apostles preach that in the beginning was the Word: he sits, as it were, at the feet, when it is said, The Word was made flesh. By the two Angels too we may understand the two testaments; both of which proclaim alike the incarnation, death, and resurrection of our Lord. The Old seems to sit at the head, the New at the feet.
That’s an excellent insight of his! First he draws a parallel between the overall message of Scripture and John’s panoramic view of Bible history (as found in chapter 1 of his Gospel). The Old Testament begins with Genesis (Bereshith = 'In the beginning') and that links to the first verse of John’s introduction to the Gospel message: 'In the beginning was the Word.' (John 1:1) Similarly, the New Testament begins with the Incarnation recorded in the four Gospels and that links to the second part of John’s overview: 'The Word was made flesh.' (John 1:14)

The correlation extends to the Old and New Testaments in their respective relationships to the head and feet of Christ. The Old corresponds to the head, since it is the fountainhead of all Christian Revelation. The New corresponds to the feet, since the Gospel is preached in the life of Christ and the apostles, and 'how beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!' (Romans 10:15)

Once more we find a basic and direct correlation between the body of Jesus and the structure of Scripture!

[Victor]

We now can combine the insights that link the body of Jesus (1) to the Gospels and (2) to the entire Bible. The primary twofold structure of the Bible is reflected on the twofold arrangement of the four Gospels seen above.

Oil was poured on Christ’s head in Matthew and Mark. Accordingly, Matthew and Mark direct their eyes to the Old Testament, for they are the two Gospels that are canonically positioned closer to the OT and also because they constantly quote from the OT. Luke and John tend to allude to the OT more than to quote it directly.

Likewise, in Luke and John oil was poured on the feet of Jesus and these two Gospels are the ones that move forward to New Testament environment. They are canonically positioned closer to the remaining of the NT – the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles. Luke’s account continues in Acts, and John is the mystical Gospel that speaks to the heart of Church life. The eyes of Luke and John are directed to the New Testament.

The following diagram sums it all up:

http://i33.tinypic.com/ev56aw.png

[Victor]

Gregory the Great was the one who detailed the structure of the bible in the form of Ezekiel’s mystical wheels (http://www.biblewheel.com/Wheel/Ezekiel_Wheels.asp). Just like he saw an image of the basic twofold structure of Scripture in the head and feet of Jesus, so did he interpret the “wheel within the wheel” envisioned by Ezekiel:
The wheel within the wheel is, as we said, the New Testament within the Old Testament, because what the Old Testament defined the New Testament showed forth.But Gregory recognized that this structure was just a simplified vision of the Bible. He added some complexity to the structure when he noticed that the basic twofold division of the Bible could be unfolded into a fourfold canonical division. This insight was drawn from the fact that the wheels are accompanied by living creatures, and the traditional interpretation of the Church holds the faces of these creatures as symbols of the four Evangelists. Gregory states:


Hence also this same wheel which appeared by the sacred creatures is described as having four faces because Holy Scripture is divided into four parts through both Testaments. Indeed the Old Testament is divided into the Law and the Prophets, and truly the New into the Gospels and the Acts and Sayings of the Apostles.Ha! The primary twofold correlation is expanded by Gregory into a fourfold one, and we had an anticipation of this association in the fact that the four Gospels had already been linked to the Old and New Testaments, two and two. Taking the four Gospels as a template, we now achieve a higher resolution in our mapping of the structure of Scripture.

Just as a twofold structure was expanded into a fourfold one, we can go one step further and expand this fourfold structure into a sevenfold one, much like the symbol of the four-armed Cross can be unfolded into the symbol of the seven-branched Menorah (http://www.biblewheel.com/Topics/menorah.asp). (The Cross was made from the wood of a tree, just as the Menorah was designed to resemble an almond tree.)

It has been demonstrated elsewhere that the optimal way of grouping the books of Scripture is in the form of a symmetrical, sevenfold, division (cf. The Sevenfold Canon (http://www.biblewheel.com/canon/SevenfoldCanon.asp)). The thematic patterns revealed in the distinctions between the four Gospels are reflected on the great topics that characterize the seven Canonical Divisions.

The Gospels exhibit a 3 + 1 structure: three Synoptics plus John. Each Synoptic links to a pair of canonical divisions, mirroring biblical patterns such as the Days of Creation and the Gates of Ezekiel’s Temple. The correlation goes like this:

http://i35.tinypic.com/21cib02.png

This detailed pattern should be compared to the basic one above, where Matthew + Mark links to the OT and Luke + John to the NT.

The correspondence is precise: Matthew and Mark govern four out of the five OT Divisions! (Torah, OT History, Major and Minor Prophets) The first two Gospels steer almost the entirety of the Old Testament, except for the Wisdom books, governed by Luke.

Likewise, Luke governs NT History and John governs the Epistles, covering the whole New Testament! The basic pattern presented by Gregory is fulfilled in detail!

Interestingly, three Gospels, Matthew, Mark and John, record anointings that took place down the very end of Jesus’ ministry, in the Passion Week. Luke’s account in a sense breaks the pattern because it takes place much earlier. This seems to elegantly link to the fact that Luke governs one OT Division, Wisdom. Just as the anointing in Luke is anticipated to an earlier period of Jesus’ ministry, thus “breaking” the timing when compared to the other Gospels, this event in Christ’s life appears to find a parallel in the structure of the Bible, since the Wisdom division is itself an anticipation of Luke’s influence in the arrangement of the sevenfold canon.

[Victor]

The following is what Matthew Henry commented about the two angels mentioned in John 20:12:


Their sitting to face one another, one at his bed's head, the other at his bed's feet, denotes their care of the entire body of Christ, his mystical as well as his natural body, from head to foot; it may also remind us of the two cherubim, placed one at either end of the mercy-seat, looking one at another, Ex. 25:18. Christ crucified was the great propitiatory, at the head and feet of which were these two cherubim, not with flaming swords, to keep us from, but welcome messengers, to direct us to, the way of life.
This is yet another image of the Word of God found in the Bible. Just like the Word (Davar) of God proceeded from between the two Cherubim over the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:22; Numbers 7:89), the place where the Johannine Word was buried was sided by two angels!


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/William_Blake_-_Christ_in_the_Sepulchre,_Guarded_by_Angels.jpg
Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels - William Blake

[Rose]

Astounding Victor....:clap2:

Once again, you have taken the pallet of the Bible with its infinite array of brilliant colors, and presented us with one of its exquisite portraits of Christ.

Many Blessings to a faithful servant. :pray:

Rose

[Richard Amiel McGough]

The greatest biblical type of Christ is the Bible itself. When seen as a whole and single Book, the Inspired Word of God is an icon of the Incarnate God the Word. Scripture is all about Jesus, both Old and New Testaments.

Nowhere is this fact more obvious than in the four Gospels. They proclaim the life of the man Jesus Christ, who laid His body of flesh for our redemption. In the final portion of the Evangels, in the near end of John’s Gospel, we find a reference to the body of Christ that encapsulates a vision of, not only the whole four Gospels, but also the entire written Word of God.

Tremendous article Victor! :thumb:

:signthankspin:

You have brought so many fragments of the Bible into clear focus in relation to each other.

I wrote a bit about the Written Word as a type of the Living Word in my discussion of Spoke 6 (http://www.biblewheel.com/Wheel/Spokes/Vav_Sixth_Seal.asp), the Sixth Seal (when the sun was darkened) and the Sixth Hour when the sun was darkened at the Crucifixion of Christ:
These correlations demonstrate that the Seven Days of Genesis and the Seven Seals of Revelation – regardless of their historical interpretation future or past – were designed to reveal structural patterns of the Word itself, centered on its central event (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/../Wheel/WheelofRevelation.asp), the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, the more I have studied the Wheel, the more I see that it prophesies its own design. This is because the Bible – the Written Word of God – is, when taken as a unit, the ultimate type of the Lord Jesus Christ – the Living Word of God – who is its complete fulfillment, its true antitype (BW book pg 148).
So yes indeed, "The greatest biblical type of Christ is the Bible itself."



Since there were angels ('messengers', 'deliverers of news') at the head and feet of Jesus, and "Gospel" means 'good news', the fact of there being angels at the head and at the feet of the place where Christ was buried is interpreted by Augustine as signifying that the Gospel is preached from beginning to end.

Finding these insights from our ancient tradition is extremely helpful. Sometimes it seems that modern Christians think the faith was invented yesterday and have no awareness of the exceedingly rich treasure house of understanding bequeathed unto us from the generations of faithful Christians.



How does that impact the structure of Scripture? Well, John 20:12 was not the only time when the head and feet of Christ were connected to His burial. More than once, women anointed Christ with oil, and the Gospels show that this was done precisely over either His head or His feet. The association of the anointing of His head and feet to His burial was made by Christ Himself. Consider the first and last Gospels:
Mat 26:12 For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.
Joh 12:7 Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.Therefore, when we encounter in John 20:12 an allusion to Christ’s head and feet in connection with the place that He was buried, we cannot help but make a link to the accounts of the anointing of Jesus!

In Hebrew, the word "to bury" is the Quph KeyWord qavar. Thus we have a tight association of the letters Quph (burial), Resh (head) and Shin (annointing with oil = shemen). And we must not forget Tav = cross. These are the final letters of the Alphabet that are strongly linked to the final days of Jesus. This is a prime example of how God designed the Alphabet to tell the Everlasting Story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!



All four Gospels describe an anointing of Jesus during his ministry. (Matthew 26:6,7; Mark 14:3; Luke 7:37,38; John 12:2,3) Glancing upon those accounts, a clear pattern emerges:

http://i36.tinypic.com/u22x.png

Can you see design? The first Gospels record the anointing of Christ’s head; the last Gospels record the anointing of Christ’s feet!

Can I see design? Yes, I could, until it's brightness blinded me! :sunny:


There are several independent threads that converge here:
There was no 'need' for each Evangelist to record an event of anointing. Each had much liberty, from a naturalistic point of view, to choose to either include or exclude an account, as it often takes place in other stories. But all of them chose to include an anointing!
The accounts happen to be distributed with exactly two of them recording an anointing of the head and the two others recording an anointing of the feet.
The pairings of accounts just happen to track with the canonical sequence of Bible books, which was not established by the Evangelists. And the order of the Gospels was obviously not defined because of the anointing accounts.
The tracking is self-reflective! The beginning links to the head, the ending links to the feet.Could that be a product of chance? If it was so, that chance just happened to correlate with the Christian claim that the written Word of God is a reflection of the Living Logos! The structure of the Bible is reproducing the basic pattern of its own content! We can say that the Gospel message of Christ’s Death is being preached from beginning to end in the four Gospels!

And if that wasn’t enough, this pattern is easily extendable to the entire structure of the Bible! That we shall see next.

Very well stated! :thumb:

[Richard Amiel McGough]

Sixth-century Church Father Gregory the Great was especially sensitive to the structure of Scripture. Just like Augustine correlated John 20:12 with the preaching of the Gospel from beginning to end, Gregory correlated this same verse with the basic structure of the Bible.

The Angel sits at the head when the Apostles preach that in the beginning was the Word: he sits, as it were, at the feet, when it is said, The Word was made flesh. By the two Angels too we may understand the two testaments; both of which proclaim alike the incarnation, death, and resurrection of our Lord. The Old seems to sit at the head, the New at the feet.That’s an excellent insight of his! First he draws a parallel between the overall message of Scripture and John’s panoramic view of Bible history (as found in chapter 1 of his Gospel). The Old Testament begins with Genesis (Bereshith = 'In the beginning') and that links to the first verse of John’s introduction to the Gospel message: 'In the beginning was the Word.' (John 1:1) Similarly, the New Testament begins with the Incarnation recorded in the four Gospels and that links to the second part of John’s overview: 'The Word was made flesh.' (John 1:14)

The correlation extends to the Old and New Testaments in their respective relationships to the head and feet of Christ. The Old corresponds to the head, since it is the fountainhead of all Christian Revelation. The New corresponds to the feet, since the Gospel is preached in the life of Christ and the apostles, and 'how beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!' (Romans 10:15)

Once more we find a basic and direct correlation between the body of Jesus and the structure of Scripture!
Where did you find the quote from Gregory?

I have a copy of the hard to find Homilies of Saint Gregory the Great on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. I was compelled to acquire it after discovering that this picture has text from his homilies around the image of the Bible as a wheel within a wheel:

http://www.biblewheel.com/Art/Angelico_Wheels.gif

Note the text near the figure on the bottom right - it sasy "Gregorius" - the figure on the left represents Ezekiel. This image is from Fra Agelica (ca. 1450 AD). This shows that this interpretation spanned at least 900 years from the time of Gregory (sixth century).

[Richard Amiel McGough]

Gregory the Great was the one who detailed the structure of the bible in the form of Ezekiel’s mystical wheels (http://www.biblewheel.com/Wheel/Ezekiel_Wheels.asp). Just like he saw an image of the basic twofold structure of Scripture in the head and feet of Jesus, so did he interpret the “wheel within the wheel” envisioned by Ezekiel:
The wheel within the wheel is, as we said, the New Testament within the Old Testament, because what the Old Testament defined the New Testament showed forth.But Gregory recognized that this structure was just a simplified vision of the Bible. He added some complexity to the structure when he noticed that the basic twofold division of the Bible could be unfolded into a fourfold canonical division. This insight was drawn from the fact that the wheels are accompanied by living creatures, and the traditional interpretation of the Church holds the faces of these creatures as symbols of the four Evangelists. Gregory states:
Hence also this same wheel which appeared by the sacred creatures is described as having four faces because Holy Scripture is divided into four parts through both Testaments. Indeed the Old Testament is divided into the Law and the Prophets, and truly the New into the Gospels and the Acts and Sayings of the Apostles.Ha! The primary twofold correlation is expanded by Gregory into a fourfold one, and we had an anticipation of this association in the fact that the four Gospels had already been linked to the Old and New Testaments, two and two. Taking the four Gospels as a template, we now achieve a higher resolution in our mapping of the structure of Scripture.

Just as a twofold structure was expanded into a fourfold one, we can go one step further and expand this fourfold structure into a sevenfold one, much like the symbol of the four-armed Cross can be unfolded into the symbol of the seven-branched Menorah (http://www.biblewheel.com/Topics/menorah.asp). (The Cross was made from the wood of a tree, just as the Menorah was designed to resemble an almond tree.)

It has been demonstrated elsewhere that the optimal way of grouping the books of Scripture is in the form of a symmetrical, sevenfold, division (cf. The Sevenfold Canon (http://www.biblewheel.com/canon/SevenfoldCanon.asp)). The thematic patterns revealed in the distinctions between the four Gospels are reflected on the great topics that characterize the seven Canonical Divisions.

The Gospels exhibit a 3 + 1 structure: three Synoptics plus John. Each Synoptic links to a pair of canonical divisions, mirroring biblical patterns such as the Days of Creation and the Gates of Ezekiel’s Temple. The correlation goes like this:

http://i35.tinypic.com/21cib02.png

This detailed pattern should be compared to the basic one above, where Matthew + Mark links to the OT and Luke + John to the NT.

The correspondence is precise: Matthew and Mark govern four out of the five OT Divisions! (Torah, OT History, Major and Minor Prophets) The first two Gospels steer almost the entirety of the Old Testament, except for the Wisdom books, governed by Luke.

Likewise, Luke governs NT History and John governs the Epistles, covering the whole New Testament! The basic pattern presented by Gregory is fulfilled in detail!


I think an image might help make this clear. The sevenfold pattern of the Canon Wheel is linked to the sevenfold pattern of the Menorah, and both are linked to the fourfold pattern of the Cherubim by uniting paired branches/divisions:

http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/../Art/MenorahBible_4Creatures.gif

Thus we have a direct correlation between the Cherubim/Gospels and the fourfold division of the sevenfold Scripture:

http://www.biblewheel.com/Wheel/God_enthroned_4Creatures.gif

This is equivalent to Victor's table:

http://i35.tinypic.com/21cib02.png


It is important to understand the implications here. The Four Gospels give an image of Jesus Christ, and they span the entire Bible which gives the same image at a "higher resolution" as Victor put it! What a wonder to behold!

[Victor]

Tremendous article Victor! :thumb:

:signthankspin:

You have brought so many fragments of the Bible into clear focus in relation to each other.


I wrote a bit about the Written Word as a type of the Living Word in my discussion of Spoke 6 (http://www.biblewheel.com/Wheel/Spokes/Vav_Sixth_Seal.asp), the Sixth Seal (when the sun was darkened) and the Sixth Hour when the sun was darkened at the Crucifixion of Christ:
These correlations demonstrate that the Seven Days of Genesis and the Seven Seals of Revelation – regardless of their historical interpretation future or past – were designed to reveal structural patterns of the Word itself, centered on its central event (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/../Wheel/WheelofRevelation.asp), the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, the more I have studied the Wheel, the more I see that it prophesies its own design. This is because the Bible – the Written Word of God – is, when taken as a unit, the ultimate type of the Lord Jesus Christ – the Living Word of God – who is its complete fulfillment, its true antitype (BW book pg 148).
So yes indeed, "The greatest biblical type of Christ is the Bible itself."

This is a rich area of study. There is a little more in Analogies between the Living and the Written Word (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=25).


Finding these insights from our ancient tradition is extremely helpful. Sometimes it seems that modern Christians think the faith was invented yesterday and have no awareness of the exceedingly rich treasure house of understanding bequeathed unto us from the generations of faithful Christians.

There are 2,000 years of written works that articulate the Christian Faith! There's more than a lifetime to read!


In Hebrew, the word "to bury" is the Quph KeyWord qavar. Thus we have a tight association of the letters Quph (burial), Resh (head) and Shin (annointing with oil = shemen). And we must not forget Tav = cross. These are the final letters of the Alphabet that are strongly linked to the final days of Jesus. This is a prime example of how God designed the Alphabet to tell the Everlasting Story of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

That alphabetic correlation is interesting!

[Victor]

Where did you find the quote from Gregory?

I think the quote originally comes from his Forty Gospel Homilies. But I found it, together with Augustine's quote, in Saint Thomas Aquinas' Catena Aurea (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php) (Golden Chain), where he collects and organizes, verse by verse, excerpts from about eighty Greek and Latin commentators of the four Gospels, like Augustine and Gregory, spanning centuries of commentary.


I have a copy of the hard to find Homilies of Saint Gregory the Great on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. I was compelled to acquire it after discovering that this picture has text from his homilies around the image of the Bible as a wheel within a wheel:

http://www.biblewheel.com/Art/Angelico_Wheels.gif

Note the text near the figure on the bottom right - it sasy "Gregorius" - the figure on the left represents Ezekiel. This image is from Fra Agelica (ca. 1450 AD). This shows that this interpretation spanned at least 900 years from the time of Gregory (sixth century).

Oh yes, and I think that the interpretation of the "wheel within the wheel" as picturing the Old and Nestaments is even older than him. Gregory was pretty much a talented synthetist of earlier material (http://homiliaria.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/gregory-the-greats-forty-gospel-homilies-a-brief-introduction/).