“The Bible is literally true, and that’s the end of it!” There are some Christians who literally (bad pun, I know!) believe this. But it is problematic, and I hope to show how and why that’s the case. Everyone knows that William Shakespeare (or the fashionable ghost-writer of the year) wrote Hamlet. But there is only one “Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and that’s the edition on paper. After that, we are faced with “Olivier’s Hamlet,” or “Burton’s Hamlet,” or “Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet,” or (God help us) “Richard Chamberlain’s Hamlet.” Interpretation is crucial in bringing to life a text that is simply words on a sheet (and without even stage directions!). Stories, once written, take on a life of their own, and writers (notably, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien) agree that an author doesn’t necessarily know more or better about his stories than anyone else. When it comes to the Bible, Christian interpreters have since the beginning seen references (or sometimes just hints) of Messianic prophecies that are in the Hebrew Scriptures and understood as fulfilled in Jesus, or Christianity in general. Some of the most important of these involve what is called “typology,” when events of the past are related to events of the present. The most famous of these is the Akeda, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, found in Genesis 22 and used during the Easter Vigil. The events there (climbing the mountain, carrying the wood of the sacrifice, being the offering) are seen as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion. Speaking in more “Catholic” terms, for centuries we have understood the words of God to the serpent (Genesis 3:15—“I will put enmity between you and the woman…”) as a prefigurement of Mary’s crushing the head of Satan. Think of our outside statue of the Blessed Mother as an example of this. Did the authors of Genesis 22 and Genesis 3 understand their writings in this way? Clearly no. Are Christians wrong in their application/interpretation of these writings? Also no, particularly if we believe God to be the ultimate author (the author behind the authors, so to speak) of the Scriptures. The document on Sacred Scripture from Vatican II, Dei Verbum, makes this principle of interpretation standard Catholic teaching. Manna can prefigure the Eucharist; the Chosen People can point to (and be a part of) the People of God; the priesthood of Melchizedek surely can also hint at the priesthood of Jesus Christ, our eternal High Priest; last Sunday’s boat with the disciples, battered by storms, has been often seen as a symbol of the Church and its struggles in the world. In all these cases, the words of JRR Tolkien about Lord of the Rings seems very to the point: “The story,” he said, “grew in the telling.” The original meanings of the texts are important. We must start with them. But we don’t have to end with them. -Fr. David