Paul Ad Hoc: The Rock was Christ

Earlier I began to explore a view of the inspiration of the Bible that would allow biblical writers greater room for personal creativity and would explain certain phenomena in the biblical texts as human literary activity rather than Divinely-communicated truths. Later I wish to say a few more things about the implications of this, but presently I will discuss a better example of what I consider to be theological creativity, one less threatening and easier to see. In 1 Corinthians Paul identifies Jesus as “the rock” of the Israelites’ desert journey. Was Paul moved by God to say this? Were these events in the Torah meant to prefigure Christ in a way that was only understood by Christians in retrospect?

For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they were all drinking from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. But God was not pleased with most of them, for they were cut down in the wilderness. These things happened as examples for us, so that we will not crave evil things as they did. —1 Corinthians 10.1-6, NET Bible

Contextually the issue is Christian conduct. Paul warns that they are in a position similar to the Israelites and that, as the latter failed, so could they. There are a few issues in this passage I’d like to deal with briefly. I think that Paul was using a classic interpretive method to draw in the Scriptures for his immediate needs, but not allegorizing deeply. I find his use of typoi (τύποι/τύπος) to be non-technical. However, it isn’t currently important to decide if Paul meant this as mere example or strict typology. Though, if the view of inspiration I’ve been articulating is correct, then the understanding of New Testament typologies would be affected; many would be ‘reduced’ in some sense to an intertextuality. Further, whether or not the apostle was influenced by Philonic Wisdom theology¹ or by a rabbinic interpretation of Numbers 21.17² are interesting questions but are not decisive, and I think more conservative views of inspiration could account for them. I must nonetheless point out that both of these issues are more easily accounted for by a more liberal bibliology.

That Paul was composing by the seat of his pants becomes clear as he reads Christian theology back onto the Torah, “baptized into Moses.” Here at least it’s quite clear that Paul is speaking poetically: the Israelites most certainly were not baptized in any recognizable way. Paul intertwines the Christian sacrament with Tanakhic imagery. Spiritualizing the food, the drink, and the rock, he uses these as metaphors for the spiritual life of his audience. In saying that the rock followed the Israelites he may be drawing from rabbinic tradition helpful to his aims or even conflating the rock-spring with the ‘YHWH the rock’ trope. This is perfectly consistent with his interpretive methodology. In fact, it is his purpose and audience that should be studied here, not his hermeneutics. In verse seven he does ‘work’ with the Scriptural text, but here he only uses it to paint a picture.

The clause “the rock was Christ” is especially ad hoc. Depending on how Paul came up with the “rock that followed them,” it seems to be an odd bit of theologizing, unconnected to the context and unnecessary. I don’t think there is much weight behind it. It could easily have been a rhetorical flourish, just Paul getting caught up in his own metaphor. If it was more than an off-hand remark the connection might be with 1 Corinthians 1.10-17, meant for unifying them around Christ in light of their schisms, or rooting his ethical appeal to the believing community on solid ground. Either way, to insist that the apostle was giving new revelation about the rock-spring is to miss what Paul was after. Better, I think, to accept that he was not looking to make historical identifications for them, but to identify current realities.³ Paul was doing theology broadly, not exegeting or conveying special knowledge.

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[1] Philo, Legum Allegariae 2.86, ‘the flinty rock is the Wisdom of God.’

[2] The rabbinic texts behind this, and whether the Rabbis combined this with Exodus 17 or Paul meshed his text with this tradition, are unknown to me.

[3] James Dunn doesn’t even see this a good proof-text for Jesus’ preexistence, much less a literal identification of the rock. See Christology in the Making, 183.