Review of Richard Hays on Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels

Review of Richard Hays on Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels May 25, 2016

Over at Faith and Theology, Jeff Aernie has a great review of Richard Hays’ new book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels.

Hays has provided another masterful foray into the hermeneutical question of how the New Testament authors read Scripture:Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Baylor University Press, 2016). In this volume Hays turns his attention away from Paul and toward the authors of the fourfold Gospel. His primary aim, in his own words, is to offer “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” (7). Hays describes the key for this interpretive task as reading backwards or figurally—by which he means that the Evangelists’ engagement with the text is primarily retrospective. Again, to quote Hays: “the Evangelists were convinced that the events of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection were in fact revelatory: they held the key to understanding all that had gone before” (358). The re-interpretation or re-narration of Israel’s story for the life of the church is necessarily mediated through Jesus.


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