Exodus in the Fathers

Joel C. Elowsky

At the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in mid-fourth century Jerusalem, Cyril would deliver his Mystagogical Lectures on the sacraments each year. He would instruct those who had just been baptized on Easter about the significance of the sacramental life, something which the disciplina arcani would have forbidden him from speaking about earlier.1 He would recall to their minds how the baptismal candidate had entered the vestibule of the Baptistery, facing the West and stretched forth his hand to renounce Satan. Cyril tells the newly baptized that this action has ancient roots in history and he would rehearse for them the events of the Exodus as the Hebrew people escaped from the bitter and cruel tyrant Pharaoh after they had painted their door posts with the blood of the lamb and passed through the Red Sea, which then engulfed Pharaoh and his army. But what did this mean for these newly baptized? He told them that they were now to embark on their own Exodus:

Now turn from the old to the new, from the figure to the reality. There we have Moses sent from God to Egypt; here, Christ, sent forth from his Father into the world: there, that Moses might lead forth an afflicted people out of Egypt; here, that Christ might rescue those who are oppressed in the world under sin: there, the blood of a lamb was the spell against the destroyer; here, the blood of the Lamb without blemish Jesus Christ is made the charm to scare evil spirits: there, the tyrant was pursuing that ancient people even to the sea; and here the daring and shameless spirit, the author of evil, was following you even to the very streams of salvation. The tyrant of old was drowned in the sea; and this present one disappears in the water of salvation. Mystagogical Lecture 1.3

When trying to understand the profound effect Exodus had on the Fathers, one need look no further than the church’s liturgy, its preaching and its teaching. The fact that the Lamb of God chose the fourteenth day of Nissan for his

1 E.C. Whitaker, Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy (London: spck, 1970), 24. Whitaker dis- cusses the debate concerning whether it is Cyril or John who is the actual author of the lectures. He favors the former.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/9789004282667_022 512 elowsky sacrifice was no coincidence in the mind of the Fathers; it was part and parcel of the divine oikonomia. The early Christians immediately connected the events of the Feast of the Resurrection with the events of the Pascha. The Pascha was the central feast of the church, encapsulating the whole history of salvation in its narrative, from creation to parousia.2 At the Easter Vigil, chapter twelve of the Exodus narrative was read in its entirety. The events of the Passover and Exodus, more than any other event in the Hebrew scripture, formed the church’s life and liturgy, shaped by the Fathers typological and allegorical exegesis. The Passover Meal and the crossing of the Red Sea did nothing if not point to the sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism in the Christian church. Much of the commentary of the Fathers on Exodus is thus found in their liturgy, sacramental treatises, homilies, and catechetical instruction in prepa- ration for Baptism. But all of these were informed by the exegesis found in the commentary tradition that in turn traced its roots back to the New Tes- tament exegesis of Paul in 1Cor 10 and 2Cor 3—not to mention the entire book of Hebrews and the Johanine literature, especially John 6, and Revelation. Christians also looked to the contemporaneous Jewish commentator Philo of Alexandria for much of the extra-biblical details of the Exodus narrative and Moses’ life.3 Already by the mid-second century, works such as Melito of Sardis’ Paschal Homily, the and ’s Dialog with Trypho the Jew testify to a substantial body of testimonia on which they drew. Justin’s Dialog is significant, according to Bertrand de Margerie, because it gathers together all these disparate traditions into one place.4 “Taking them one by one,” Justin says, “I could show that all of Moses’ other prescriptions are types (τυποί), symbols, annunciations of what is to come to pass in Christ” (Dial. 40.1; 42.4). Apart from testimonia and scattered homilies, the first treatment of the whole of Exodus that we have extant occurs in the third century when composed his thirteen Homilies on Exodus. These were delivered in a three- year liturgical cycle in the church of Caesarea sometime between 238 and 244.5

2 Raniero Cantalamessa, Easter in the Early Church: An Anthology of Jewish and Early Christian Texts (trans. and ed. James M. Quigley and Joseph T. Lienhard; Collegeville: Liturgical, 1993), 1. 3 See Philo Judaeus, The Works of Philo Judaeus (trans. Charles Duke Yonge; London: H.G. Bohn 1854–1890), especially chs. 24–25 that deal with the Life of Moses. See also the chapter by Gregory E. Sterling in the present volume. 4 Bertrand De Margerie, An Introduction to the History of Exegesis: Vol. 1, The Greek Fathers (trans. Pierre De Fontnouvelle; Petersham: St. ’s, 1993), 33. 5 Ronald E. Heine, “The Alexandrians,” in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature (ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,