Abstract
Building on the insights of Jon Levenson's work, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible, this article endeavors to show that a similar approach, which could be labeled "theophanic," has traditionally guided the Christian—perhaps especially the Eastern Orthodox—entry into the Bible. Relating the Sinai theophany and the transfiguration on Tabor was crucially important for early Christian theology. It underlay their appropriation of the Scriptures of Israel as "OT," it lent itself to polemical use against dualism and monarchianism, and it was eventually absorbed into Byzantine festal hymnography and thereby into the mainstream of theology as performed and experienced in liturgy. Similar interpretive strategies are at work in early Christian works and later Byzantine festal hymns and icons that take up theophanies centering on God's throne in Zion. After discussing hymns and icons dealing with Sinai, Zion, and Tabor, I argue that this type of exegesis is difficult to frame within the categories commonly used to describe patristic exegesis and that a more suitable category would be that of "rewritten Bible," current among scholars of the OT pseudepigrapha. I then examine the relationship between the Christology emerging from the hymns under discussion and the normative conciliar Christology. Finally, I sketch a few ways in which today's readers can benefit, both exegetically and theologically, from Byzantine hymnographic and iconographic exegesis.
