Over the holidays I re-read one of the first books I tacked for this PhD, namely, John David Dawson’s Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity.

Dawson’s tightly written book is one of the more intriguing comments on supersessionism I know. And as an exploration of its core concern, Christian figural reading, I know nothing else quite like it. It sets three modern concerns about figural reading—the body (represented by Daniel Boyarin), history (Erich Auerbach), identity (Hans Frei)—all against a treatment of Origin, that ancient, infamous allegorizer, chosen for what he has to say to those who would read Hebrew Scripture as the Christian Old Testament. The book repaid a second reading every bit as much as the first.