Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels by Richard B. Hays

This section feels less like a merely formal introduction and more like some privileged access to Hays’s private notes and outlines. As mentioned above, the book’s introduction explicitly outlines what the reader should expect to find in the remainder of the book: it includes a lengthy explanation of what he calls “figural interpretation” (2– 6), Hays’s thesis (7), an outline of each chapter (8–9), and finally a brief-albeit thoroughly informative-description of Hays’s interpretive methodology (10). It is apparent that Hays is taking up a gargantuan interpretive task in this book, and his ability to unclutter the convoluted language of New Testament scholarship while maintaining scholarly precision should be lauded. In fact, these references may precisely be the means by which those who have ears to hear will hear. Hays concedes that the Gospels are largely intelligible without reference to these “echoes,” but nonetheless suggests that their recognition will unlock deeper levels of meaning in the texts and in their portrayals of Jesus. If someone were to mention the quality of mercy, for instance, readers steeped in Shakespeare would understand this “echo” without any explicit mention of the Bard. Here, Hays defines an “echo” as a type of reference that is slightly more discreet than a direct quotation. By closely reading certain key passages in the Gospels, Hays makes explicit their “echoes” of Israelite Scripture and highlights the ways that their use enriches the meaning of the Gospel passage. Though subsections within each chapter are meant to draw special attention to how Scripture informs the evangelists’ Christologies and ecclesiologies, Hays’s method of analysis remains largely uniform throughout the book. The structure of the book-which is helpfully delineated in the introduction (8–9)- mirrors its thesis: each chapter is dedicated to the intercanonical analysis of one of the four Gospel accounts. Hays does a fine job of establishing the link between this thesis and each of his subsequent points without being unnecessarily hampered by theoretical or cumbersome asides.

The book’s introduction concisely describes its central aim: to examine “the ways in which the four Evangelists reread Israel’s Scripture-as well as the ways in which Israel’s Scripture prefigures and illuminates the central character in the Gospel stories” (7). In this long-awaited sequel to his 1993 book Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, Richard Hays again takes up the task of intercanonical criticism with remarkable erudition and clarity. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016, 524 pp.

Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels by Richard B. Hays