Abstract
A masterpiece of New Testament literary studies and biblical theology, Richard Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels is a monumental follow-up to his 1989 study of intertextuality in the Pauline Epistles. In narrating the story of Jesus, according to Hays, the authors of the canonical Gospels engaged in a revolutionary form of figural exegesis, reading elements of the Jesus story backward into Israel’s Scriptures while also dialectically reading the Jewish Scriptures forward into the Jesus story. The result is that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are permeated with subtle refrains from the Old Testament—a word or phrase here, an especially potent image there. He calls these textual refrains “echoes.”
Hays devotes a single chapter to each of the canonical gospels, averaging about 100 pages each, in which he carefully examines the ways in which each of the Evangelists uniquely appropriates Jewish Scriptures. Mark indirectly reveals Jesus’ divine identity by sagaciously navigating Israel’s Scriptures and pointing the reader toward traits and behaviors that Yahweh and Jesus share in common. In Matthew, Torah is transformed to reveal the true purpose of the Law in Jesus’ teachings, most remarkably by the recurring insistence upon mercy as the hermeneutical key to interpreting Israel’s Scriptures. Luke employs quotation after quotation from the Hebrew Bible to indicate that in Jesus, the Lord’s promised redemption has finally arrived in the history of Israel. In contrast to the Synoptic Gospels, John reads the Old Testament symbolically, finding in the rich narratives of the Jewish tradition prefigurations of the incarnate Logos who was “in the beginning with God.” Hays’s research does not necessarily offer radically new or innovative readings of the Gospels; rather, what makes Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels so exceptional is the sheer volume of examples that saturate each chapter.
Hays plays his methodological cards close to his chest, however, making it difficult to discern his criteria for exactly what constitutes a scriptural “echo,” and because he demurs from engaging in a robust discussion of canon, the reader is also unsure exactly what constitutes “Scripture.” For instance, aside from a few echoes of apocryphal texts like Sirach, one wonders if other non-canonical texts might have subtly found their way into the canonical gospel writers’ respective works. Alas, such a question appears to be outside the scope of Hays’s work.
As it weighs in at just over 500 pages including notes and indexes, the reader also may be hard-pressed to know exactly what to do with Hays’s magnum opus. The book is likely too lengthy to use as a course text, and yet too broad in its treatment of each gospel for an easy off-the-shelf reference work. Still, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels is a terrific work with profound consequences for the way we read the Gospels. It deserves a place in the library of every student of theology and the New Testament.