Meredith G. Kline, “Antitype” and “Astruc, Jean” in The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 1, ed. by E.H. Palmer. Wilmington, DE: National Foundation for Christian Education, 1964, pp. 292, 454-455.
ANTITYPE
(Greek transliterated, in italics)
In the terminology of Biblical theology, antitype denotes the Messianic reality which fulfills a particular pre-messianic, promissory figure, i.e., type. The antitype is the eschatological (“the good things to come”; Heb. 10:1) and “heavenly” (Heb. 8:5; 9:23), the archetypal substance (eikwn, “image,” Heb. 10:1) and the “true” (Heb. 8:2; 9:24 ). As antitupos, “antitype,” it answers to the historically prior OT type. Thus in I Pet. 3:21, the Noahic deliverance is type, and the Messianic salvation symbolized in baptism is antitype. In Heb. 9: 24, however, antitupos describes the OT tabernacle as it copy of the heavenly original which afterwards enters human history through Christ.
See TYPOLOGY.
ASTRUC, Jean (1684-1766)
An early French forerunner of modern Pentateuchal criticism. By vocation a physician, his main literary work was De morbis veneris. But in 1753 he published anonymously and, according to the preface, with some diffidence, his ideas on the origin of the book of Genesis in a work titled: Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il parolt que Moyse s’est servi pour composer Ie Livre de la Genese. Avec des Remarques, qui appuient ou qui eclaircissent ces Conjectures. He did not then assail the Mosaic authorship of Genesis but simply propounded the thesis that Moses had availed himself of earlier documentary sources (a supposition which had been ventured by C. Vitringa, 1689) and that these sources, pieced together by Moses, can now be readily distinguished (a fantasy which over two centuries of higher criticism belie).
Astruc’s chief but not exclusive criterion for detecting the sources was the variation in divine names. This technique had been anticipated by H. B. Witter (1711). Astruc saw further evidence of the composite documentary character of Genesis in its occasionally nonchronological arrangement of the history, and in what he regarded as duplicate accounts of various events. He was thus a founder of the older documentary hypothesis, further represented by Eichhorn and Ilgen. The complexities which were to plague Pentateuchal source analysis and are indicative of its essential falsity are betrayed in Astruc’s supposed discovery of some dozen documents plus interpolations in Genesis alone.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
J. Astruc, Conjectures sur les Memoires originaux donI il parou que Moyse s’est servi pour composer Ie Livre de la Genese (Paris, 1753).
J. Astruc, Dissertation sur l’immortalite et sur l’immate- rialite de l’ame (Paris, 1755).
E. Boehmer, RE6 II (1897), 162-70, s.v.
A. Lods, “Astruc et la critique biblique de son temps,” RHPR 4 (1924), 109-139,201-227.
A. Lads, Jean Astruc et la critique biblique au XVlIle siecle (Paris, 1924).
A. C. Lorry, Eloge historique de M. Astruc (Paris, 1767).
W. Osgood, “Jean Astruc,” The Presbyterian and Reformed Review 3 (1892), 83-102.
J. de Savignac, “L’oeuvre et la personnalite de Jean Astruc,” La Nouvelle Clio 5 (1953), 138-147.
R. de Vaux, “A propos du second centenaire d’Astrucs Reftexions sur l’etat actuel de la critique du Penta- teuche,” VT Suppl I (1953), 182-198.
E. J. Young, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, 1949), 109 ff.