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Allegorical interpretation of the Bible

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “approach which assigns a higher-than-”. Today it says “interpretive method”. Sections present on October 6, 2023 no longer exist: “Four types”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2010 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2010

Allegorical interpretation Historical-grammatical method Inspiration Literalism Alcohol Conspiracy theory Ethics Capital punishment Homosexuality Humor Incest Muhammad Prophecy Rape Serpents Sex Slavery Violence Warfare Women Perspectives Gnostic Islamic Quranic Inerrancy Infallibility Criticism of the Bible Biblical authority Outline of Bible-related topics Bible portal v t e In a biblical context, Allegorical interpretation is an approach assuming that the authors of a text (e.g., the Bible ) intended something other than what is literally expressed.1 The method has its origins in both Greek thought (who tried to avoid the literal interpretations of ancient Greek myths ) and in the rabbinical schools of the Land of Israel . Most notably of pre-Christian authors Philo of Alexandria expressly refers to its use by his predecessors and uses it himself to discover indications of different doctrines of philosophy in the stories of the Pentateuch. The traces of allegorical and typological interpretation can be found later in the New Testament but are further developed in the Epistle of Barnabas and especially by Origen . In the Middle Ages Typology was the dominant Christian allegorical interpretation, which developed sets of correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, believing that the events described in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament had occurred in order to pre-figure events in the life of Christ in the New. But there were other classes of allegory in the Middle Ages .2

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 366765707.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “approach which assigns a higher-than-”. Today it says “interpretive method”. Sections present on October 6, 2023 no longer exist: “Four types”. Read the current article and compare.
2005201020152020Oct '232025
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What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2005, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

approach which assigns a higher-than-

Now

interpretive method

Sections that no longer exist

Present on October 6, 2023, absent today, with no near-matching heading in the current article and the article shorter overall, so this is not a renamed heading or a topic absorbed into a fuller treatment. 1 section of 400 characters or more gone since October 6 2023, with the article 2,697 characters shorter.

  • Four types
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