Abstract
The review that follows was prepared for a panel discussion of Richard Hays’s new book, held during the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio, Texas. My task was to respond to the book and to raise issues for debate; readers must look elsewhere for a more adequate summary of its contents.
Two years ago I found myself on another SBL panel, responding to Hays’s Reading Backwards. On that occasion I focused on his surprisingly ambivalent attitude towards the Gospel of Matthew, whose so-called proof-texting was compared unfavourably to Mark’s more allusive style. My response was entitled “In Defence of Matthew,” and in it I argued that Matthew’s prophetic citations should be read more as interpretations of the narratives to which they are attached than as apologetically motivated proofs of Jesus’s divine endorsement. Here I shall take a different tack, focusing on two aspects of Hays’s model of intertextuality and suggesting that we might consider an alternative to both of them.
Hays’s version of intertextuality is, first, intracanonical. It is concerned almost exclusively with canonical evangelists reading canonical Scripture. Thus the Index of Scripture and Ancient Sources devotes twenty-three pages to Scripture and just a page and a half to other ancient sources. Indeed, half the non-scriptural ancient-source references are to texts like Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon that are Scripture to everyone except Protestants. In highlighting this almost exclusively intracanonical focus, I intend an observation rather than a criticism. That is also the case when I describe Hays’s model of intertextuality as ahistorical, or at least as relatively so. The new Echoes of Scripture operates within the framework of a narrative criticism that holds historical problems at arm’s length on the grounds that proposed solutions to them are often inconclusive and that we do better to proceed without much attention to them. So the book describes itself as “an exercise in intertextual close reading,” offering “an account of the narrative representation of Israel, Jesus, and the church in the canonical Gospels, with particular attention to 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” (p. 7). It is “not the aim of the present study” to explore “difficult historical questions” about the events and processes that underlie the texts in their present form (p. 7). So, although Hays states his view of the Synoptic Problem, accepting Markan priority and finding Luke’s use of Matthew more plausible than Q, he adds that “the interpretations developed in the present book do not depend on a resolution of this classic problem in New Testament studies” (p. 13).
These intracanonical and ahistorical parameters mark out a safe space for the analysis of the Gospels’ echoes of Scripture. It is entirely legitimate to operate within that safe space, and there may be good pragmatic reasons for doing so, at least in a seminary or divinity school context. I suggest, however, that there may be benefits—perhaps even theological benefits—in taking a few more risks. Our understanding of the canonical evangelists’ use of Scripture may be enhanced by employing source- and redaction-critical methods, and by exposing the canonical Gospels to critical questioning from their non-canonical counterparts. I shall give two brief case studies in the relevance of the historical and the extracanonical, in which first Luke and then Thomas react to Matthew’s scriptural citations.
(1) Luke responds to a Matthean citation. In Matt 4:12–13, the evangelist tells us how Jesus returned to Galilee after his temptations and how “leaving Nazara he came and dwelt in Capernaum-by-the-Sea, in the regions of Zebulon and Naphthali” (my trans.). The unusual form of the place-name that is otherwise Nazareth, but here Nazara, is important, as we shall see. Matthew’s only explanation for Jesus’s change of residence from Nazara to Capernaum is that it fulfilled Scripture. It took place so that what was spoken by Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled: “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, toward the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles! The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and, for those who sit in the domain and shadow of death, light has dawned upon them.” (Matt 4:14–16, citing Isa 8:23–9:1; my trans.)
I have argued elsewhere that most of Luke 1–4 may be seen as a critical response to Matthew (Francis Watson, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013], pp. 131–48; the context of this section of my book is a detailed argument against the existence of Q). Luke’s closely parallel account of Jesus’s return to Galilee after his temptations is a good example of this. In Luke, as in Matthew, Jesus leaves a place known as Nazara rather than Nazareth, and arrives in Capernaum (Luke 4:16, 30–31). Both later evangelists agree, against Mark, that Jesus’s Galilean ministry begins in Nazara but rapidly switches to Capernaum. Luke, however, seeks to improve on Matthew’s puzzling report, which has Jesus leaving Nazara before he has even been said to arrive there, explaining the move purely on the basis of the scriptural fulfilment. In contrast, Luke’s Jesus arrives at Nazara before he leaves it, and he leaves Nazara for Capernaum not because this was predicted by Isaiah but because he is rejected in his own hometown and nearly thrown over a cliff (Luke 4:29–30). Luke is just as interested as Matthew in the fulfilment of Isaianic prophecy, yet he carefully embeds his own citation from Isaiah within his narrative rather than tacking it onto the narrative as Matthew does: And he came to Nazara, where he had been brought up, and he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16–21, citing Isa 61:1–2; NRSV adapted)
Up to this point all seems well, but Luke now recounts how things went horribly wrong as the people of Nazara became hostile enough to Jesus to try to kill him. That, according to Luke, is why Jesus left Nazareth and dwelt in Capernaum (Luke 4:29–31). The Lukan narrative makes excellent sense as a response to Matthew, and this extends to the two evangelists’ contrasting use of a scriptural citation, one from early in the book of Isaiah, the other from near the end. Read with the help of a source-critical theory, a contrast comes to light between two ways an evangelist can cite Scripture: either providing a citation in his own editorial capacity, as Matthew does, or, with Luke, placing it on the lips of Jesus. Both evangelists use their Isaianic citations to interpret Jesus’s ministry as a whole, as the shining of a great light on those who sit in darkness and as the Spirit-directed announcement and enactment of liberty and justice.
While Luke no doubt thought his own presentation superior to Matthew’s, from a canonical perspective we might judge them to be of equal value and complementary to one another. My point here is that we only reach this juxtaposition of the Matthean and Lukan citations by way of a source-critical hypothesis. We can distance ourselves from such historical hypotheses, as Hays does, pronouncing them to be difficult and uncertain; but if we do so there may be loss as well as gain. An ahistorical approach that takes the text as it stands, without asking how it got to be the way it is, may underplay the interconnectedness of the canonical Gospels and miss out accordingly.
If historical hypotheses are held at arm’s length in Hays’s book, gospels other than canonical ones are nowhere to be seen. They might as well not exist. As a result, an absolutely fundamental question is bypassed: the question why Jesus should need the witness of Scripture at all. This takes us to our second, briefer case study.
(2) The Gospel of Thomas questions the practice of scriptural citation in general, including Matthew’s. Gospel of Thomas 52 reports the following exchange between the disciples and Jesus: “His disciples said to him ‘Twenty-four prophets spoke in Israel, and they all spoke of you!’ He said to them, ‘You have rejected the Living One who is before you and you have spoken of the dead.’” Thomas’s well-meaning disciples are slightly confused. They speak of twenty-four prophets, forgetting that some of the traditional twenty-four scriptural books have the same author (e.g., the Pentateuch) and at least one of them has multiple authors (the Book of the Twelve, i.e., the Minor Prophets). Yet the disciples’ belief that the whole of canonical Scripture speaks of Jesus was enthusiastically endorsed by all four canonical evangelists—as Hays’s book ably and amply demonstrates. But Thomas’s Jesus dissents sharply. He stands before his disciples as the Living One, complete and sufficient in himself, having no need of those twenty-four dead prophets to bear witness to him. He is all his disciples need. As Colossians put it, “In him all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge lie hidden” (Col 2:3). It is not simply that Thomas rejects the Old Testament. From this evangelist’s standpoint, the issue is rather with disciples like Matthew who exalt the Old Testament and who thereby detract from Jesus. This extracanonical testimony to an all-sufficient Jesus who does not need the prophets is a serious theological option, even if it is seriously wrong.
Right or wrong, the Gospel of Thomas poses some questions to Matthew, to his canonical companions, and indeed to Hays himself. Why does Jesus need the prophets? Why is he not sufficient in himself? How can there be anything lacking in his own words, which, as a canonical evangelist tells us, are “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68)? Such questions can and should be answered, but they will not be answered if they are not first heard. And they will be neither heard nor answered if one remains within the safe intracanonical space in which four Gospels and twenty-four prophetic books are so comfortably accommodated.