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The Miracle of Names In the Old and New Testaments


When people from the Old and New Testaments share the same name their stories often contain amazing parallels. For example, consider King Saul versus the apostle Saul, also called Paul. The apostle Paul went to Damascus where he planned to arrest Christians. As he approached Damascus he was struck down by the power of God (Acts 9:1-6). This is very similar to the Old Testament story of King Saul who was approaching Ramah hoping to arrest David when he was similarly struck down by the power of God (I Samuel 19:18-24).

Another example, is that both the Old and New Testament Josephs were lead by dreams and both brought their families to Egypt.

These parallels or typologies can be found for many of the major figures of the New Testament. In this essay I will explain typologies involving Jesus, Paul, Simon-Peter, Joseph, John the Apostle, John the Baptist, and Judas. All together they can make a powerful argument or apologetic for Christ and God's Word.

I have shown this work to several distinguished Biblical scholars and they were impressed, actually amazed. I sent the material to a brilliant scholar Garry Matatics who studies Biblical typology, which is what this essay is. When he first read it, he claimed it was absolutely impossible that I had done this. As he pointed out people have been trying to do this for the last two thousand years. On second reading he decided that I had indeed done what I claimed.

I also took this material to the Graduate Theological Union, GTU, in Berkeley just north of the University of California. It is as distinguished in its own field as the University of California at Berkeley is as a great scientific university. GTU is a union of religious schools from many denominations.

Several professors were so impressed by this that they insisted that they were not worthy to look at it and I must present it to the most distinguished Biblical scholar at GTU. Imagine that, this is the result of my first reading of the Old Testament. They had spent their adult lives studying God's Word and risen to the level of professors at one of Americas top institutes in the field, and I had to see someone more distinguished.

I took it to Wilhelm Wuellner, GTU's most distinguished Biblical scholar at least in this field, and one of the top in the world. He thought that it was amazing that I had found this, not by spending a lifetime as he had in libraries but by generating it from the raw data, the Bible and a concordance. I told him that it took a half hour, but that was an exaggeration it must have taken a couple of hours or so.

The parallels may not have been so obvious to many people because the Old Testament was translated directly from the Hebrew to English, while the New Testament comes to us through the Greek. Translating directly from Hebrew to English we get Joshua the Messiah, but from Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek to English we get Jesus Christ, or the Old Testament Jacob becomes the New Testament James.

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This helps me see if people are reading beyond the introduction, so I can improve it.