Texts in Conversation
In Genesis, Noah enters the ark with his wife, three sons, and their wives as the flood begins. In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin interprets these eight survivors as a picture of the eighth day, when Jesus rose from the dead.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 7:13
Hebrew Bible
7 Noah entered the ark along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives because of the floodwaters. 8 Pairs of clean animals, of unclean animals, of birds, and of everything that creeps along the ground, 9 male and female, came into the ark to Noah, just as God had commanded him. 10 And after seven days the floodwaters engulfed the earth. 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month—on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And the rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights. 13 On that very day Noah entered the ark, accompanied by his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, along with his wife and his sons’ three wives.
Date: 5th century BCE (final composition) (based on scholarly estimates)
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 138.1
Early Christian
1 “You know, then, sirs,” I said, “that in Isaiah God said to Jerusalem, ‘I saved you in the flood of Noah.’ What God meant by this is that the mystery of saved humanity took place in the flood. For righteous Noah, along with the others at the flood, that is, his wife, his three sons, and his sons’ wives, eight in number, were a symbol of the day that is eighth in number, on which our Christ appeared when He rose from the dead, though in power it is always the first. 2 For Christ, being the firstborn of all creation, also became the beginning of another race, the one reborn through Him by water, faith, and wood, which holds the mystery of the cross, just as Noah was saved by wood, riding on the waters with his household. So when the prophet says, ‘I saved you in the time of Noah,’ as I said before, he is speaking to the people who are likewise faithful to God and have these symbols. For Moses too led your people through the sea with a rod in his hand. 3 But you think He was speaking to your nation alone, or to the land. Yet since the whole earth, as the Scripture says, was flooded, and the water rose fifteen cubits above all the mountains, it is evident that God was not speaking to the land but to the people who obey Him, for whom He also prepared a place of rest in Jerusalem beforehand, as was shown earlier through all the symbols of the flood. I mean that by water, faith, and wood, those who prepare themselves beforehand and repent of the sins they have committed will escape the judgment of God that is coming.
Date: 155–160 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
“... (3) Christians observe Sunday because being the eighth day it “pos-
sesses a certain mysterious import, which the seventhday did not possess.56
For instance, Justin claims that circumcision was performed on the eighth
day because it was a “type of the true circumcision by which we are circum-
cised from error and wickedness through our Lord Jesus Christ who arose
from the dead on the first day of the week.”57 Further, the eight persons
saved from the flood at the time of Noah “were a figure of that eighth day
(which is, however, always first in power) on which our Lord appeared as
risenfrom the dead.”58 ...”
Bacchiocchi, Samuele
From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Early Christianity
(p. 226) The Pontifical Gregorian University Press, 1977
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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