The Passover
Exodus 12, the lamb and the blood on the door, as the early church read it
On the night Israel left Egypt, every household killed a lamb without blemish, struck its blood on the doorposts, and ate it ready to travel. Where the blood was, death "passed over"; where it was not, the firstborn died. The whole church, following the apostles, has read this as the great picture of the cross: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Corinthians 5:7), "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). Justin Martyr, around AD 155, traces the type detail by detail, even to the shape the roasting lamb took on the spit. His words below, with a plain restatement.
The Father's words are verbatim and attributed (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, public domain; selected from the running prose, footnote apparatus omitted). The box marked "In plain terms" is our own restatement, never the Father's words.
Exodus 12:5-8 · KJVYour lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year… and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening… And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire…
"That lamb which was commanded to be wholly roasted was a symbol of the suffering of the cross which Christ would undergo. For the lamb, which is roasted, is roasted and dressed up in the form of the cross. For one spit is transfixed right through from the lower parts up to the head, and one across the back, to which are attached the legs of the lamb."
Justin MartyrJustin sees the cross even in the way the lamb was prepared: pierced through and held open on two crossed spits, a body stretched out as Christ's would be. The lamb had to be "without blemish," as Christ was "without sin"; it was slain "in the evening," as Christ died toward evening; it was not merely killed but eaten, taken in, as the church feeds on Christ. Every line of the rite, the Fathers believed, was a rehearsal written centuries early.
Exodus 12:7,13 · KJVAnd they shall take of the blood, and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses… And the blood shall be to you for a token… and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you…
"The mystery, then, of the lamb which God enjoined to be sacrificed as the passover, was a type of Christ; with whose blood, in proportion to their faith in Him, they anoint their houses, i.e., themselves, who believe on Him."
Justin Martyr"And the blood of the passover, sprinkled on each man's door-posts and lintel, delivered those who were saved in Egypt, when the first-born of the Egyptians were destroyed. For the passover was Christ, who was afterwards sacrificed… as the blood of the passover saved those who were in Egypt, so also the blood of Christ will deliver from death those who have believed."
Justin MartyrThis is the heart of it, and it carries the long thread of Scripture's deliverances: a people under judgment are spared not by their worthiness but by a blood-marked door. "The passover was Christ." Justin even links it to Rahab's scarlet cord in her window (Joshua 2), another blood-red sign that turned away destruction and saved a household. The Passover is the pattern of every rescue: judgment is real, the threat is death, and the only shelter is the blood of the Lamb, trusted and applied. Faith here is a verb, the hand that strikes the blood on the door and then waits, through the dark night, on the promise "when I see the blood, I will pass over you."
Exodus 12:46 · KJV…neither shall ye break a bone thereof.
One last command sealed the type: not a bone of the Passover lamb was to be broken. At Calvary the soldiers broke the legs of the two crucified beside Jesus to hasten death, "but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs" (John 19:33), and John says plainly this happened "that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken" (John 19:36). The true Lamb, slain at Passover, kept even this smallest detail of the ancient rite. The picture and the reality met on one afternoon outside Jerusalem.
Where this stands among the traditions
This is shared ground, and the New Testament itself lays the track: John the Baptist calls Jesus "the Lamb of God," John's Gospel times the crucifixion to the Passover and quotes the unbroken-bone command as fulfilled, and Paul says outright, "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us." So Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant read Exodus 12 as the foundational type of the atonement, and the church's Easter (Pascha) takes its very name from the Passover. The divergence is not really among Christians but at the edge of belief: the modern tendency to read the chapter only as the founding legend of a Hebrew spring festival, severed from any forward meaning, drains it of the very thing the apostles saw in it. Judaism, of course, keeps the Passover as the memorial of a real historical deliverance from Egypt, and Christians do not deny that history; they confess it was also a shadow cast ahead, of a greater Exodus from sin and death through the blood of the true Lamb. The drift to resist is the flattening that lets the lamb be only a lamb, when Scripture from Genesis to Revelation keeps pointing to "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." (See the suffering servant, the bread of life, and the Lord's Supper.)
Patristic text from Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho (ch. 40, 111), in the Ante-Nicene Fathers (public domain), selected from the running prose with footnote apparatus omitted; nothing added or paraphrased within the quotation marks. Scripture in the King James Version; the plain-language lines are our own restatement. This passage in the Study Bible; Exodus 12 at BibleHub.