He was also one of the first Christian thinkers to treat the New and the Old Testaments as forming a single work. He taught his students to read the Bible allegorically, in order to see how every event in the Old Testament foreshadows later events in the New, like the Jews’ exodus from Egypt foreshadowing the flight of the Holy Family, and Joseph’s run-in with Potiphar foreshadowing Christ before Pilate. This would then lead them to read the events and images symbolically, as reflecting the highest spiritual truths or “mysteries” of Christianity, and morally, meaning its connection with the
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