It's not just the anagogical foreshadowings that for Catholics can only be identified in retrospect with the aid of the Church. The literal, allegorical, and moral senses of scripture, for Catholics, can also only be identified in retrospect with the aid of the Church. The three other posts on the senses of scripture all took pains to be clear that it's not about what the actual text says, it's about what the Church says. If the Church teaches something, then Catholics are free to find support for it in the Bible wherever they like, as literally or figuratively as they like. If the Church teaches the negation of something, then Catholics are forbidden to find support for it in the Bible, often negating the literal sense of a text by giving it an alternative figurative sense. And if the Church is silent on something, then Catholics are permitted to speculate based on the Bible mostly as they please so long as they don't stray into any interpretive novelty. Many atheists are more familiar with the Protestant approach by which scripture is the primary source, but that familiarity can trip them up when conversing with Catholics.

Documented?

Actually, the Old Testament says nothing about a Messiah. The concept arose within Judaism after the Old Testament was completed. Christians, accepting Jesus as the Messiah, go back to the Old Testament and look for what they believe to be references to Jesus (in Isaiah, for example) and then claim to have found references to the Messiah in the Old Testament. But if you use one of the sites that allows you to search the whole Bible, such as Bible Gateway, you can do a search of the entire Bible and see that the word messiah is not found in the Old Testament.

I agree. The Old Testament would seem to suggest that at best, one would expect a Jewish messiah, not an omni-messiah.

Also the following:

And it is not until Christ reveals it that we are clearly informed that the stake for which we are playing—have always been playing—is nothing less than Heaven or Hell.

The piece neither justifies the premise or the textual analysis nor does it explain how to undertake this form of textual interpretation. Other than the implied premise that if you do not presume God exists and that the Old Testament is harmonious with the New, there will be conflicts.

Ultimately, this post and the others go to explain how, once you accept God, how you can interpret away the conflicts between the Old and New Testaments that are otherwise obvious indications that there is no unity between these texts. For those who have not accepted that any Gods exist or that Jesus is God, this approach is silly. Jews who met Jesus and fervently believed in Yaweh were not convinced that his story was foretold by the Old Testament are are not to this day.

Mark might have been speaking a little hyperbolically. But I think there's still a valid point. My reading of that quote is that our lives are nothing to be complacent about. A person can sleep their way to Hell thinking that nothing is a "big deal." Instead, we would have to "wake up" and see that even our throw-away moments contain an implicit decision to embrace Heaven or Hell.

My understanding is that the translation in Hebrew proceeds from the alphabet to the number, that the letter represents the number because there is no notation for the latter. This account of Barnabas thus seems to be a bit 'backward'. Yes?

Christians seem to believe that the Old Testament is full of references to Jesus, but that they can only be discovered after the fact with the aid of supernatural help. And yet the Jews are blamed for not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah because the Old Testament is filled with prophecies of his coming.

It would seem that the Old Testament did a very poor job of foreshadowing the coming of the Messiah when, as it turned out, nobody expected that kind of Messiah.