Specific differences in the approach to the use of old testament imagery in early Christian exegesis and iconography

One of the peculiarities of early Christian art was its regular recourse to stories and images borrowed from Old Testament history. Art historians reasonably assume that the use of such images could not have been purely illustrative, and that such images contained a message addressed directly to the Christian flock and available for their understanding, yet not verbalised and therefore not always comprehensive for modern interpreters. Meanwhile, a similar task of an actualising reinterpretation of the content of the Hebrew Scriptures has been successfully accomplished by the so-called typological exegesis, which allowed to consider the characters and events of Old Testament history as "types" (that is, as images that symbolically and prophetically foreshadow the events and realities of the New Testament era) and the entire Old Testament as a prophetic foretelling of the coming of Christ, taught in a mysterious form. It is therefore in the experience of typological exegesis that researchers most often seek the key to understanding the role of Old Testament motifs in Paleo-Christian iconography. However, the formal reference to the existence of a stable tradition of typological interpretation of biblical texts, conveyed to the faithful through catechetical instructions and homilies, does not provide sufficiently convincing grounds for the claim that early Christian iconography, when dealing with Old Testament themes, was guided by these interpretations in the choice of depicted subjects, in assuming that they would be perceived by believers in a specified typological sense. The article deals with the main features of Christian typological exegesis, which did not reduce itself to attributing symbolic meanings to the images of Old Testament history that could be mechanically transferred to the pictorial plane. The internal logic of the development of typological interpretations has been a function of the tasks to which they were subject. The typology, which emerged as instrument of anti-Jewish polemics, sought to prove the messianic role of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who offered himself as a sacrifice for the atonement of original sin, and the victory of the Christian Church as the new people of God. Both the range of subjects interpreted and the meanings assigned to them, as well as the nature of the connections established between them, were determined in accordance with these objectives. The article shows that these features, which determined the specificity of typological interpretations, were not reflected in the early Christian iconography, the main task of which was to strengthen the trust of the faithful in the salvation and eternal life granted by God. The fundamental difference between the early Christian exegetical and iconographic traditions is especially evident in the different ways in which the same biblical motifs are treated, suggesting that these traditions developed in parallel but independently of each other, even though they had common origins.