Even when finding plenty of objections to Hays’s exegesis, I was grateful to him for the way he gets one to rethink these familiar texts.Įchoes of Scripture in the Gospels attempts the herculean task of examining each of the four Gospels individually, tracing how each writer employs the OT.
Not only is he an articulate writer, he is a high-level exponent of how to read Scripture.
Not that I am either a convinced adherent of Hays’s approach nor an ardent supporter of his conclusions, but I am an appreciative reader. This 500 page book is the much anticipated follow up to the aforementioned Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul a book that is surely one of the most significant works of hermeneutics of the last fifty years. Though teaching at Duke Divinity School, his approach can certainly be called broadly evangelical as well as Christ exalting. Hays is known for his thoroughgoing analysis of the biblical text and his creative insights in biblical intertextuality. As the two poles of the figural reading are understood, the sense of continuity within the Scriptures is deepened (3). Or, as he says in his conclusion, “the discernment of unexpected patterns of correspondence between earlier and later events or persons within a continuous temporal stream” (347). Figuration differs from prediction in that “correspondence can be discerned only after the second event has occurred and imparted a new pattern of significance to the first.” (3). The “echo” of the OT passage is seen as transformed in Christ by the Evangelists’ reading back into the OT text (essentially as presented in the LXX) truths which they have located in Jesus. “Figural interpretation” or “figuration” here is where a NT author draws comparisons between something in the OT and the life and work of Jesus Christ. Metalepsis in biblical studies is the incorporation and use of the OT in the New, particularly by way of partial allusion, employed in a new context that draws attention to aspects of the larger previous context. He has been at the forefront of the study of such seemingly obtuse but telling elements of the study of the NT as “metalepsis” and “figural interpretation.” Hays has established himself as one of the foremost NT scholars in the world, based on enduring works like The Moral Vision of the New Testament and Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels,* Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017, 524 pages, paperback.
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