Richard Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) was a ground-breaking work in the field of “intertextuality” (or inner-biblical exegesis, or whatever you want to call it) in biblical studies. Most research before had paid attention to explicit citations and quotation formulas, while allusions and “echoes” were given some attention but never in a formal way with sophisticated principles of determining their validity. He did so in this Paul work, and he has now extended this work to the Gospels.
In 2014, Hays published a set of lectures, Reading Backwards, which gave a preliminary review of his larger project on allusions and echoes in the Gospels. That larger work, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, is now published (2018), but I’m here reviewing only Reading Backwards without having read his larger Echoes.
Hays’s aim is to survey how the four Evangelists compare and differ in their use of the OT. He is more concerned with “figural reading,” which according to Erich Auerbach “establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first.”
After an introductory chapter, he spends on chapter on each Evangelist, surveying their tendencies in using the Old Testament and then surveying some major themes and test-cases to support his broader claims. In the concluding chapter, he considers the merits and drawbacks of each Evangelist’s hermeneutic and gives ten principles on how to read the Old Testament like them.
Mark delights in veiled, indirect allusion and views Israel’s Scripture as a mystery. The strength of his hermeneutic is being restrained yet evocative with his use of the OT. The drawback is that readers may miss the message of Jesus’ divine identity, as even many modern New Testament critics have done.
Matthew is more explicit in his use of the Old Testament and works with a pattern of prediction and fulfillment. Jesus as Immanuel is at the heart of the Gospel. The strength of his approach is to give great clarity about how to approach the Old Testament and about Jesus’ identity. The drawback is that his approach can be harshly polemical against others (as in Matthew 23), and it is unclear how to systematize his fulfillment schemes: how can Jesus be the true Israel, a new Moses, and God?
Luke works with promise (not prediction) and fulfillment. He uses a tapestry of Old Testament imagery that creates a moving stream in the background against which the Gospel’s events are told. Jesus is presented as “Lord of all” and is the promised redeemer of Israel. The strengths of his approach are the historical continuity between Israel’s past, present, and future, and his vision for seeing “all the Scriptures” being about Jesus. But this continuity may be over-emphasized in a way that misses the apocalyptic nature of the cross.
John uses fewer explicit citations and allusions, using instead sustained Old Testament images and institutions to portray Jesus as assuming and transforming them. Reading backwards for John is possible because Jesus was the Logos who was present before creation. Positively, John is straightforward about figural reading, which allows for a sweeping re-appropriation of Israel’s sacred texts, which has apologetic merit. Negatively, his reading of the Old Testament is polemical and may be taken as anti-Jewish or supersessionist.
Hays suggests the following ten ways that the Evangelists teach us to read Scripture:
- We must read backwards, reinterpreting Israel’s Scripture in light of the story of Jesus, and we must do so figurally and retrospectively.
- Scripture is to be reinterpreted in light of the cross and resurrection, which themselves were revelatory.
- We must have a conversion of the imagination, reading Scripture with a heightened awareness of story, metaphor, prefiguration, allusion, echo, reversal, and irony.
- For the Evangelists, Israel’s Scripture told the true story of the world.
- The Evangelists’ retrospective reinterpretation of this story is not a negation of it, but a transfiguration and continuation of it.
- The Evangelists approach Scripture as a unified whole, but their reading of it is not undifferentiated.
- Since the Evangelists generally quote from the Septuagint, perhaps there is merit in considering whether the Septuagint might be better considered the Christian Old Testament.
- The Evangelists’ use of the Old Testament is often metaleptic, meaning they urge the reader to consider the context of the text in use, which will shed more light on how the Evangelist is using it.
- Each of the four Evangelists, in their diverse portrayals, identifies Jesus as the embodiment of the God of Israel
- The Evangelists believe the God of the Scriptures is living and active, which is why their hermeneutic can be embraced as truthful, not purely literary.
Hays has provided a useful engagement with the Evangelists’ use of the OT, although in this work (as opposed to his work on Paul), he is not breaking as much new ground. Largely because of his influence, many of the allusions and citations that he surveys have already been well-worked over. On the whole, his treatment of individual test-cases provides a good model for engaging in the NT’s use of the OT.
One issue is that, while Hays correctly notes broad differences in the way the Evangelists weave Scripture into their writings (e.g., the way plēroō is used in Matthew versus John, and where the formulas occur), his test-cases are selective and omit various types of uses of the OT (e.g., see the twelve types suggested in G. K. Beale’s Handbook on the NT Use of the OT). By focusing on instances that fit his “figural” reading, he ignores instances of direct prophecy, direct appropriation, irony, and others.
As for reading backwards in a way that is necessarily retrospective, this seems novel but really I believe it can hardly be any other way. If in figural interpretation the correspondence being evaluated involves two temporal poles (an OT event and a first-century event), how can one evaluate the correspondence until the latter temporal pole is established? It is necessarily retrospective in that the apostles could not evaluate correspondences between the OT and events in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection until they happened.
The problem with his emphasis on retrospective reinterpretation is that he considers this to rule out (or at least seriously delimit) predictive prophecies or events. As he says, “from the perspective of figural interpretation, it would be a hermeneutical blunder to read the Law and the Prophets as deliberately predicting events in the life of Jesus” (p. 94).
But I do not think retrospective reinterpretation precludes that the OT in its original meaning, in various places, and as a whole, points forward or predicts events in the life of Jesus (or at least of a future Messiah). First, some direct prophecies in the OT are clear (e.g., Micah 5:2 in Matt 2:5–6, even recognized as a direct prophecy by the chief priests and scribes). Second, one should not confuse reality with epistemological access to it. Simply because the Evangelists did not recognize how the OT pointed forward until after the resurrection does not mean the OT does not point forward. Third, various NT authors show awareness of the OT being intentionally written to point forward for the benefit of future readers (e.g., John 12:37–43; Rom 10:6; 1 Pet 1:12; Eph 4:8 and 5:14 [the use of dio]).
Positively, I think Hays does a service to continue demonstrating how the NT authors read and use the OT contextually, even if there is a kind of appropriation of that Scripture in the process (which seems to be the case in almost every instance of intertextuality, once a text is placed in a new context).
Hays also helpfully emphasizes the different tendencies in the Evangelists’s use of the OT. He compares their methods to voices in a choir that create a harmony, but that sometimes create dissonance as they conflict with each other. I suppose whether one “hears dissonance” depends greatly on one’s presuppositions about the NT’s use of the OT, and on how one understands the uses that supposedly conflict.
Perhaps the main point of the book is to show how the Evangelists identify Jesus as God by their use of OT texts. Although a larger treatment of the relevant passages would have made his case even more convincing, I think he shows enough in this small collection of essays to make a strong argument for this overarching thesis.
Finally, while Hays believes he is un-flattening the Bible by suggesting we not treat it as a repository of proof-texts and isolated types, I believe he is unwittingly flattening it himself by taking the story approach with figural reading as the dominant means of reading Scripture. But that is not the only way that the NT authors use the OT, nor is it the only way that the OT authors use earlier OT authors. The Bible is far too rich a work to be read in only one way. We should celebrate the variety of ways that the NT authors use and interpret the OT, and realize that this variety comes from the richness of Scripture as saints throughout the ages have been able to use it and appropriate it in their own varied circumstances for their own spiritual purposes.
