When did Christians go from interpreting the Bible literally to taking it metaphorically?

 This is actually a very important question, and yet another chance for me to mention a book I think more Christians ought to familiarise themselves with:

The way in which the Hebrew Scriptures were Christianized is a fascinating and core element of the evolution of what the first believers called ‘The Way’. As Barton explains, church fathers such as Origen made very deliberate and transparent efforts to re-interpret the ‘old’ testament in light of the ethos epitomised by Jesus. An archetypal example being the manner in which Psalm 137:9 “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” is removed from any ancient warring context and taken to describe the Christian struggle to stifle budding sins lest they grow into mature evil.

However, as Barton also points out, such a ‘freewheeling’ approach to biblical exegesis is not so distant from rabbinical practices that contributed to the Mishnah, where scriptures were essentially searched deliberately for any possible revelations which could be used to inform ethical or ritual practices. Exodus 23:19, for example (“Do not boil a young goat in its mother's milk”) has been extrapolated to a number of not only culinary but broader economic applications. This is particularly interesting when we consider that some scholars contend that the command refers specifically to the avoidance of sacrificial rites associated with local near-east pagan gods.

Hence, Christians went about adapting the scriptures of their time to ‘line up with the lens provided by the life of Christ’ since at least Paul’s era, and he may well be regarded as an initial practitioner. Is such a process of revisionism justified or unjustified? Personally, I think that depends on how we regard intelligibility in the first place. To my mind, normal vision involves a distinct distortion of the ‘actual’, and all past experiences are constantly re-Integrated into a useful narrative that informs the current scenario. To see what I mean (almost literally) I present the following references:

Memory is prone to distortionsthat can have serious consequences in everyday life. Here we integrate emergingevidence that several types of memory distortions - imagination inflation,gist-based and associative memory errors, and post-event misinformation -reflect adaptive cognitive processes tha …

Technological advances in recentdecades have allowed us to measure both the information available to the visualsystem in the natural environment and the rich array of behaviors that thevisual system supports. This review highlights the tasks undertaken by thebinocular visual system in particular …