A REVIEW OF RICHARD HAYS’ ECHOES OF SCRIPTURE IN THE GOSPELS, (BAYLOR, 2016)
(A fuller and annotated version of this review will appear as an Appendix in my forthcoming book Isaiah, Old and New).

I was teaching in Nova Scotia in June of 2015 and with the encouragement of a friend and the exhortation in Is. 55.1b in mind, I visited the local winery where they produce ice wines. What are ice wines you may ask? They are wines that come from the practice of leaving grapes on the vine into the winter when the grapes freeze, shrink, and the sugar content somehow intensifies, producing dessert wines of exceptional sweetness.

Something similar has happened in the process of Richard Hays’ producing this very fruitful and interesting book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Richard had been working on the manuscript for some time when he had to put it on ice so to speak, in his filing cabinet, because he was unexpectedly called upon to be the Dean of Duke Divinity school for a good number of years, an all consuming task, and then life also intervened in the form of a health crisis. He feared the manuscript would never be completed or see the light of day, but by the grace of God and help from his doctoral students and friends, including his friends at Baylor Press, this manuscript has been brought out of the deep freeze and turns out to be an example of ‘saving the best wine for last’ (John 2). This is clearly Richard’s best book, the most engaging, probing, challenging, and detailed of all his valuable writings. In short, this is vintage Hays, well-aged and worth the wait. It bears the good marks of long reflection on a particular topic, leading to well argued results. I expect it to get nominations for Biblical studies book of the year, and I would gladly amen that.

As Richard makes clear in his introductory remarks, this Echoes book was actually the source material for the book that was published earlier, Reading Backwards. The egg showed up before the chicken, mirabile dictu! Echoes gives us a larger set of examples of what Richard’s approach to intertextuality and metalepsis look like, dealing with Gospel material where the OT is frequently cited, alluded to, and echoed. What the theory assumes is an audience (or at least members in an audience) that has an encyclopedia of reception large enough to recognize echoes of OT texts in the Gospels, and even places where phrases in a quote text are (deliberately) omitted such that they know to go back and search the Scriptures to appreciate the larger context and resonances of the quoted portions of, say, Isaiah.

This sort of ‘figural’ reading actually requires a retrospective approach for one cannot really talk about an earlier text foreshadowing later events and texts before the later texts and the events they report existed. The recognition of intertextuality of this sort requires hindsight. One wouldn’t know for instance that Isaiah 61 (see Lk. 4) was foreshadowing an event in the life of Jesus before the event actually happened. One especially wouldn’t know or anticipate this in advance since the oracle in Isaiah 61 was poetic and metaphorical in character, and because of its poetic qualities could have a surplus of meaning. I think this figural reading approach, which could be said to be a sub-heading under a type of allegorizing approach, is a fruitful one if we allow that it is actually only one of the ways the Gospel writers approached the OT.

I say this not least because it is clear enough in various places in the NT that these same NT writers believed in ‘predictive prophecy’, which is to say that the prophets deliberately and intentionally spoke about messianism, about a suffering servant, about future salvation which would even include Gentiles, about a new heaven and a new earth, and so on. In their views, they were not simply transformers of previous texts, giving them new meaning, they were interpreters of the Word once given, encouraging us to read the text forward as well as backwards.

And even when the NT writers were transforming the OT text in creative ways, for example as Paul does in Gal. 4, these improvisations presuppose a stable text to which one can return again and again, and use in a variety of ways. I would use the analogy of say John Coltrane’s famous version of the Sound of Music song ‘My Favorite Things’. ‘Trane was not trying to faithfully ‘exegete’ that song, he was rather using it as a taking off point for a creative improvisation, but at the same time he was well aware of what playing the tune straight amounted to and sounded like, and he presupposed that his audience did as well (they could look at a copy of the original sheet music or put on the recording of the Sound of Music), so they could appreciate where he was, so to speak, playing outside the lines on the staff paper. I think, in other words, that figural interpretation was only one of the tools in the hermeneutical toolbox of the Gospel writers, and it was not one they always used, certainly not to the exclusion of other ways of using the OT.

Richard gives us lengthy treatments of each of the four Gospels, and helpfully demonstrates how they each approach the use of the OT somewhat differently. He works from probably the earliest Gospel (Mark) to probably the latest (John), comparing and contrasting what is going on in each case. In the case of Mark, while there are sometimes quotations from the OT, more often hints and allusions are the order of the day that fit his more apocalyptic portrayal of the story of Jesus. The hints and allusions “project the story of Jesus onto the background of Israel’s story. As Mark superimposes the two stories one on another, remarkable new patterns emerge, patterns that lead us into a truth too overwhelming to be approached in any other way…[Mark] proclaims a message that leads us into mystery.” He adds “the story is intelligible, at one level, for readers who do not hear the scriptural echoes. But for those who do have ears to hear, new levels of complexity and significance open up.” He sees the Scriptural allusions as like what is said about the parables, concealed for many but revealed to some who know how to listen. We will say more about what this suggests about the original audience in due course.

By contrast with Mark, Matthew’s approach to the use of the OT is much less covert and much more overt and didactic. The Evangelist tells us why certain things took place in the life of Jesus, namely to fulfill this or that OT prophecy. To the ten obvious formula quotations one can add texts like Mt. 2.5-6, 3.3; 13.14-15 and Jesus’ own words in Mt. 26.56. “Cumulatively, these passages frame Israel’s Scripture as a predictive text pointing to events in the life of Jesus.” Richard calls most of these examples ‘authorial voice overs’. He adds “Nonetheless, these instances of prediction and fulfillment are only highlights on a larger map, only fragmentary features of a much larger intertextual reality. For Matthew, Israel’s Scripture constitutes the symbolic world in which both his characters and his readers live and move. The story of God’s dealing with Israel is a comprehensive matrix out of which Matthew’s Gospel narrative emerges. The fulfillment quotations, therefore, invite the reader to enter an ongoing exploration of the way in which the law and the prophets in their entirety find fulfillment (Matt 5.17) in Jesus and in the kingdom of heaven.” This sort of approach suggests a Jewish audience, many of whom are well-versed in the OT.

Luke takes yet another and different approach than either Mark or Matthew. Hays sees Luke as the most skillful in joining the story of Israel seamlessly to the story of Jesus. Luke uses the language of fulfillment a great deal, in fact some fifteen times in the first four chapters to set up the theme of the story of Christ as a story of fulfillment of OT texts and stories and institutions. In Luke, direct quotations are almost always in the mouths of the characters in the narrative, they are not authorial comments. “This narrative device imparts to Luke’s intertextual citations a dramatic character; readers are required to interpret the intertextual relations in light of the narrative’s unfolding plot…Luke ‘ripples with intertextuality’ because it constantly unfolds Old Testament patterns into its story.” For example the story of the raising of the widow of Nain’s son uses some of the language of the similar story in the Elijah cycle.

Of course it is possible that the reason Luke has the characters in the narrative do the quoting of the OT is because he doesn’t want his audience to be distracted with the task of going back and finding OT scrolls to figure out what’s going on in the Gospel story. Hays argues that presenting the OT material this way creates a sense of historical continuity with the past, the characters in the story insist on it by quoting the OT, without additional authorial commentary.

However frequently what is being cited is not ‘the old, old story’ at all, but rather previous prophetic oracles used to explain the current story and how it is a fulfillment of the promises and prophecies of old. I am thus doubtful that the reason Luke doesn’t retell the old stories is because he assumes they’ve already been read. More likely, he is hoping that these quotations will peak the curiosity of Theophilus to go back and explore where the Scripture quotations came from, with the aid of the learned lector who reads these large documents to him.

Yet again, John is a horse of a different color. “John contains relatively few direct citations of the Old Testament. If we tabulate John’s Old Testament references in comparison to those of the Synoptics, including allusions, the totals are striking, Matthew 124; Mar, 70; Luke 109, and John 27.” John, just “as he condenses the traditions of Jesus’ healing and miracle working activity down to a few selected episodes that are given more extended development than in the synoptic tradition, so also John focuses on a smaller number of Old Testament quotations”, between 13 and 17 explicit quotations. As Hays goes on to demonstrate, John relies more on images and symbols from the OT rather than quotations to tell his Gospel story, and this is in part because Jesus is depicted as fulfilling the institutions, symbols, as well as prophecies of the OT.

Interestingly, John relies more on the Psalms and less on sources like Isaiah in comparison to the approach in the Synoptics. Hays puts it this way, “John understands the Old Testament as a vast matrix of symbols prefiguring Jesus. In contrast to Luke’s reading of Scripture as a plotted script showing the outworking of God’s promises in time, John understands Scripture as a huge web of Christological signifiers generated by the pretemporal eternal logos as intimations of his truth and glory.” There are many more positive things that could be said about the richness of this approach to the Gospels’ use of the OT, an approach which a scholar like myself or Richard loves to immerse ourselves in, savoring the complexity and diversity of the Gospel texts. But were these Gospels written for folk like us, Biblical scholars?

As I intimated in the discussion with Richard about Reading Backwards (found earlier on this blog) there are some problems with: 1) assuming an audience of ‘readers’ rather than hearers; 2) assuming a literate much less a Biblically learned audience capable of catching nuances, echoes of Scripture, omissions in citations. Let us list some of the historical issues with this approach, focusing on Richard’s treatment of Luke-Acts.

From all the evidence we have, the vast majority of people in the Greco-Roman and early Jewish world were not literate in the modern sense of the term (maybe 15-20% tops in major cities). Is it possible of course that Luke-Acts, for example is written for a socially elite person, Theophilus, who may be the patron of Luke, and for his small literate circle? Yes, it’s plausible. But does one really want to make the case that the Gospels are elitist literature?

The historian would say Luke is probably not creating readers or reading circles of people learned in the OT, but addressing listeners because these are oral texts, texts meant to be read out loud, and if they are mainly Gentile listeners, they are likely mainly listeners for whom intertextual echoes of and allusions to the OT will be missed again and again. The intertextuality approach of Richard can more nearly be said to work if we are talking about an intertextuality of production, in the head and in the articulation of the author, rather than an intertextuality of reception, because the latter presupposes far too much about the audience and their literacy and knowledge of the OT, an audience who is largely unknown.

The Gospel story may be told in arcane language and may occasionally quote arcane texts but that language and those texts are now part of a new story, a new discourse, and must make sense without scurrying back to the OT again and again to get the full gist of the story because probably only a tiny minority of the audience, probably only a few Jewish Christians or God-fearing Gentile Christians, are learned enough and sophisticated enough to catch and then probe the allusions or echoes, or even for that matter to know where to look for the quotations.

After all, even the extant scrolls of say Isaiah did not have chapter or verse markings, or even separation of words. Finding the source of allusions and discovering the metalepsis resonance would be like looking for a needle in a very large haystack in the first century A.D. And imagining that many people in Luke’s audience had a huge amount of the OT memorized is assuming too much, unless one is going to argue that this Gospel was written for devout and for that matter learned Jewish Christians. This is not likely.

Theophilus would not have needed the sort of account Luke says he’s giving in Lk. 1.1-4 if he already knew the Gospel story and the OT to boot. Possibly he was a God-fearer, like Luke himself may have been. So perhaps a minimal competence in some key OT texts could be presupposed, but alas the way Luke uses the OT presupposes a much greater reading competence and sophistication than that, when it comes to the OT. So perhaps Luke is writing well over the heads of most of his audience, but he hopes they will catch enough of the drift to be saved and become curious to probe more about the backstory and about Israel’s Scriptures.

Perhaps the Gospels are not texts meant to just be heard or read, but rather to be ruminated on for years, as Richard has so ably done in this book. But in antiquity only the socially elite, the literate, with servants to boot, were likely to have time for such rumination. The notion that Luke has created a story of such complexity and subtlety that it requires an audience who: 1) can read; 2) can recognize the source of the quotes, allusions, and echoes; 3) have the time, resources (scrolls!!) and energy to read carefully and patiently again and again to full benefit from such a subtle story-telling that there are allusions at every turn and metalepsis keeps happening, will strike many historians and classics scholars as suggesting that this is not ‘the Gospel for all Christians’ but to the contrary the Gospel for the well-educated scribe or scholar or patron with plenty of time on his hands to ponder elegant documents like Luke-Acts.

For me personally, the dilemma is I think Richard is to a real degree right about the richness and complexity of the intertexual situation in the Gospels. Not always, but often enough to raise serious questions about the character and audience of these documents. My conclusion then is that in terms of original audiences, the Gospels were not written for just anyone, they were written for the learned, and not just any learned but especially those who were already competent in the OT, or knew those who were. They were written for quite specific persons and communities, which presupposed and required a significant quotient of literate readers and interpreters of these texts within these communities. The Gospel of John may be something of an exception, but probably not.

And this brings up one final point. E.A. Judge long ago made the case that early Christianity was not led by the illiterate, the poor, the slaves, or average women for the most part. The leaders of the fledgling communities were ‘socially more pretentious’ (to use his terms), of a higher social status than perhaps most of the community, and they were more likely to be literate, and in rare cases, like Paul or the author of Hebrews, learned. If this is not the case, then it would seem that the very character of this literature violates the principle and desire to share the Good News with all people, at least by means of this literature itself. Perhaps the approach to preaching was different than the approach found in our Gospels, but from all the evidence we have, for example in Acts, this is doubtful.

I will stress again– the vast majority of people in the Greco-Roman and early Jewish world were not literate in the modern sense of the term (maybe 15-20% tops in major cities). Florian Wilk, in a helpful discussion about Paul’s use of Isaiah says the following and he is worth quoting at length:

“Christianity arose on the basis of historical events, which are recounted, attested, interpreted, and reflected in a primary fashion in the New Testament. The New Testament books thus bind Christianity permanently to its historical beginning. Accordingly, they must also, indeed, first, be perceived as texts that were written in specific historical situations, and intended for specific historical situations….With regard to the connections between Paul’s letter and the book of Isaiah, however, the perspective on the author is more important and fruitful than that of the addressees. The difficulty of a reception-oriented perspective in this case consists in the fact that we know nothing about the degree of knowledge of Scripture that the Christians to whom Paul wrote had… Therefore, one can only assume a communicative function of scriptural connections on the basis of explicitly marked citations. ….The extent to which they would identify inexplicit connections with Isaiah as such must remain completely open….One can hardly imagine, however, that [even if they felt obliged to do some searching of the Scriptures] such a learning process led the addressees to the point where they would track down unmarked references to Isaiah to a significant degree. This would require scriptural knowledge available only to specially trained persons.”

With this reasoning I entirely agree, and would add that we have even less knowledge about the audiences of the Gospels than about the audience of the Epistles or Revelation. We do not know what their encyclopedia of reception was when it comes to the OT. I think it is plausible that a Gospel written mainly to Jewish Christians, such as Matthew’s Gospel may have been, could assume some things about some of the audience, but it is striking that even in that Gospel the Evangelist goes out of his way often, and from the outset to specifically quote the OT and use citation formulas. Not for him the more allusive approach of Mark.

Perhaps then these Gospels were meant to be used as teaching tools by the literate and learned, not to be used as tracts to hand out to just anyone. If so, then the figural reading approach is plausible as one hermeneutical tool the Gospel writers used in their approach to the OT. Figural reading is helpful, but the limitations of that hermeneutical approach should not lead us to think it is the only way the NT writers themselves read the OT, nor should it lead us to limit ourselves to just figural or historical-critical readings. And there may be another kind of problem with over-doing the figural reading approach, from a narratological point of view.

Let’s suppose for a moment a literary critic of Richard’s approach argues as follows: ‘The problem with all this metalepsis and urge to read the OT backwards, is that in fact this is the sort of scholarly endeavor that goes in the opposite direction of the trajectory and flow and purpose of the Gospel narrative. What is actually happening in the Gospels from a narratological point of view is the using of old Scriptural language to tell a new and forward moving story. That is, the author is not wanting us to scramble back to the OT and look at those words in their original contexts. To the contrary he wants us to follow the story going forward to its eschatological conclusion and pay attention to how all this Scriptural language is being used now in its Gospel context, pointing forward to the conclusion of the salvation historical story.’

‘The author believes he lives in the eschatological age of fulfillment and while he is affirming that old stories, old ideas, etc. are being fulfilled in the Christ story, the point is not to urge people to find the OT allusions and echoes in this material and then do a close scrutiny of all sorts of old texts, but to the contrary the point is to hear and embrace what God is doing now and yet will do in Christ. Like a movie which has homages to various previous classic films in it and is not implicitly urging the audience to go check them out so they can understand the current film, rather the Gospel writer wants to tell its own story that stands on its own, and wants to have the audience focus on the use of the material in its new context, following the tale told to the end.

‘The Gospel writers point us into the future not the past, and none more so than Luke, who plants lots of seeds in his Gospel that he deliberately doesn’t bring above ground until Acts, the second volume of his work. So, each Gospel should be judged on its own merits in its own context and the words in it have meaning in their immediate literary contexts, whatever they may have meant in previous contexts. The Gospel writers did not expect their audiences to do detailed research on or remember large quantities of the OT to understand the meaning of their Gospel stories.’ This I think makes some valid points well worth considering when pondering the cogency of Richard’s case and his approach to intertextuality.

It is the sign and measure of an excellent book that it raises profound questions about things we think we have known all along about the Gospels, and not just about the Gospels, but about the whole enterprise of the use of the OT in the NT. From now on, figural readings and metalepsis had best be terms and concepts we become familiar with, because the Gospels suggest that such approaches shed light even in dark corners of the NT text. Well done Richard. Thank you for letting us share some of your fine, well-aged, wine. We are so very glad you were able to bring this out of your wine cellar, and offer it freely to us all.

(The full review of the book will come in tomorrow’s blog post).

“Richard B. Hays, The George Washington Ivy Chair of New Testament, Duke University, one of world’s most important and celebrated New Testament scholars, will release his most important book in June (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Baylor University Press [add link]). I had the chance to discuss the book with Dean Hays.”

http://baylorpr.es/sEchoes

BEN: Richard this book has been long in the making, as you explain in your introduction. And you had to make a significant shift in your research and writing foci to do this project. What was it about the Gospels that so fascinated you when it came to the subject of intertextuality? After all, it might have been easier and more natural to compare and contrast your Pauline findings to what is going on in Hebrews?

RICHARD:

The Gospels are at the heart of Christian proclamation. Over the past 35 years of my teaching career, I have repeatedly taught exegesis courses on each of the Gospels. So I have long known that after focusing on Pauline theology in the earlier part of my scholarly work, I wanted to move on to write more extensively about the Gospels. One underlying question that has particularly fascinated me is whether I would find in narrative texts some of the same strategies of intertextual allusion that I had identified earlier in Paul’s letters. I had sought to show that there was a narrative substructure in Paul’s theology, and I had also tried to demonstrate that Paul’s references to Israel’s Scripture were not atomistic, but that they presupposed a deeper and wider attention to the context, including narrative context, of the citations. Consequently, I wanted to see whether the Evangelists were working with similar perceptions and similar techniques of intertextual reference. As readers of the new book will see, I think I have demonstrated that this is indeed the case—though each one of the Evangelists carries out this sort of intertextually inflected narration in an interestingly distinct way.

As for Hebrews, it is very evident that OT quotations play a major role in the development of the argument of that text. Hebrews is unusual in its strong emphasis on reading the Psalms as “intra-Trinitarian” dialogue between God the Father and the Son (analogous to the reading of Ps 110:1 that appears in Mark 12:35-37 and parallels). Readers interested in my take on Hebrews may want to consult my essay, “ ‘Here We Have No Lasting City’: New Covenantalism in Hebrews,” in R. Bauckham, D. R. Driver, T. A. Hart, and N. MacDonald (eds.), The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 151-73. In that essay, I revised some earlier judgments about Hebrews that I had made in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul.

BEN: You tell your audience early on in the study that you are focusing on an ‘intertexuality of reception’ as opposed to an ‘intertextuality of production’. What do you mean by these phrases, and why focus just on the former?

RICHARD:

Your question appears to refer to an early footnote in the book (p. 367, n3). That note refers readers to a helpful essay by Stefan Alkier, where these terms are explained and discussed. In brief, attention to “intertextuality of production” would focus on ways in which the author of an earlier text A was generating meanings that pointed forward to a later text B, whereas “intertextuality of reception” would refer to the way in which the author of a later text B is retrospectively discovering meanings in an earlier text A. I think it is important to note that my footnote does not describe my own critical method as an “intertextuality of reception.” Rather,

my footnote is simply giving a definitional account of “figural interpretation.” That sort of interpretation is always retrospective, and therefore necessarily concerned with reception of earlier texts. My book simply seeks to offer an account of how the four Evangelists were practicing this sort of retrospective interpretation of Israel’s Scripture. You will note that the major subhead in the book’s table of contents for the central meat of the book is: “The Evangelists as Readers of Israel’s Scripture.” That describes the central project of the book, which is nicely signified by the book’s cover, artfully designed by Hannah Feldmeier using images from the stained-glass Lamentation Window in Cologne Cathedral.

BEN: As something of a way of narrowing things down, you focus on three major questions to be answered in regard to each Gospel— How does X employ Scripture to re-narrate the story of Israel? How does X draw on the OT to narrate the identity of Jesus? How does X evoke the PT to narrate the church’s role in the world? Why just these three questions? Why not, for example, How does X use the OT to narrate the future of human history and its goal and end? (see. e.g Revelation’s use of Is. 65-66 to do that)?

RICHARD:

No book can answer all questions. I was particularly interested in showing how the Gospels receive and carry forward the story of Israel—not least because Christian theology and NT criticism have sometimes unfortunately posited a sharp break between Israel and church—or even between Israel and Jesus. My interpretation seeks to trace narrative continuities that are grounded in the Evangelists’ continuing appropriation of OT stories and images to narrate the identity of the Christian community in their own time. Your question about the future, including the eschatological future, is an interesting one. Perhaps it will inspire someone else to follow up on my work by writing a whole book on just that topic. But I do think that readers of Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels will find some discussions of the goal and end of history in the on my work by writing a whole book on just that topic. But I do think that readers of Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels will find some discussions of the goal and end of history in the concluding sections of each of the four central chapters. The reason for that is simple: the identity and mission of the church are eschatologically ordered, and therefore several Gospel texts that narrate the church’s role draw on OT to explicate this. To give just one example, see my discussion of Matthew’s images of Gentiles in the eschatological judgment, and his use of Daniel 7 in the climactic “Great Commission” text of Matt 28:16-20 (pp. 181-85 in my book).

BEN: You use the term ‘pre-figured’ a lot in both of your last two books, as opposed to the more familiar term ‘foretold’. What in your mind is the difference between saying something is pre-figured as opposed to something is ‘foretold’? Would the term ‘foreshadowed’ be a better synonym for what you are getting at with the term ‘pre-figured’? Does this reflect a concern about avoiding a more narrow term like ‘predicted’?

RICHARD:

It is not clear to me why “foreshadowed” would be “better” than “prefigured.” I would see them as nearly synonymous. You are correct to say that the term “predicted” is not adequate to describe the manifold subtle evocation of the OT in the Gospels. The story of Jesus stilling the storm (Mark 4:35-41) echoes Psalm 107, but it would be strange to assert that the author of that psalm intended to be making some sort of prediction about Jesus. And indeed the Christian tradition has not ordinarily made claims of that kind. The term “foretold” is closely linked to

ideas of “prediction.” I do not mean to say that the OT never contains foretelling of future figures or events. Clearly, there are some passages that envision a future king or deliverer who will set things right. But such examples constitute a surprisingly small slice of the Gospel writers’ fascinating and complex engagement with Israel’s Scripture.

BEN: In a figural reading of the OT, one has to read backwards first, in order to see the connections I imagine, and in this regard it is much like typology. No one would have seen Melchizedek in the Pentateuch as a type of a later historical figure if they had not also read a source like Hebrews. It appears to me that your take on figural readings focuses on narrative comparisons, and the presence of absence of key terms or phrases in such narratives, as opposed to the comparison or development of abstract ideas. Right? How would you distinguish your figural readings from traditional typological readings? It seems clear that this whole approach, while not a-historical in character, is more literary (even narratological) and canonical in its presuppositions– right? RICHARD:

I actually don’t think there is any significant difference between typology and figural reading, if typology is rightly understood. I have generally preferred to speak of “figural interpretation” because I find Erich Auerbach’s delineation of the term so helpful as a descriptive critical tool. Also, sometimes discussions of “typology” have gotten bogged down in fruitless arguments about the historical factuality of the earlier pole of the typological relation. But Auerbach himself notes that the literary phenomenon he is describing has often been designated as typology. The critical point is the assertion of correspondence between earlier and later figures/events “within the flowing stream which is historical life” (see the full quotation from Auerbach on p. 2 of my book). Precisely because of this imbeddedness within temporality, the correspondence can be discerned only retrospectively. (Your example of Melchizidek is a good one.) But for the same reason, whether we call it typology or figural interpretation, this kind of reading is necessarily concerned with concrete personages or terms/images rather than “abstract ideas.” Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels is not tracing a “history of ideas;” rather, it is investigating the specific reception/interpretation of OT texts in the Gospels. In that sense, the project is very much an exercise in canonical interpretation. And the theological findings of the project presuppose that the full biblical canon, when read intertextually, does indeed disclose a coherence and theological richness that would be inaccessible to many modernist, reductive historical methods.

Q6a.BEN: One factor that I would say your analysis overlooks in dealing with 1 Tim. 2.8-15 is that Paul is correcting existing problems— the men are grumbling, the women are over-dressing and interfering with whoever is (presumably Timothy) the person Paul left behind as leader and teacher of these new converts. The problem is an abuse of the privilege of teaching, when in fact the women in question first need to be quiet and listen and learn, and be in submission to the teaching (nothing is said here about women being in submission to men). You bring out the evidence about the word that occurs exactly once in the NT, authentein, and its semantic field, but you don’t deal with the fact that it means ‘to usurp (even by violence) authority over someone’ in a corrective context, and by contrast in a non-corrective context it means to exercise authority. Would you not agree that Paul is correcting problems in this 1 Tim 2 passage?

A6a.GARY: Rather than say “correcting existing problems” I would suggest that the author of 1 Tim desires to “chart a counter-cultural course for worship and life” for Ephesian men and women who have come to Jesus. When I say, worship and life, I am echoing the research of scholars like Steven Chang and Philip Harland who demonstrate that life and worship were interconnected in ancient embedded societies. As the focus of my research centered on the function of terms and themes, I believe the author of 1 Tim cares deeply for the Ephesian Christians and desires, boulomai, them to live lives of purity and modesty in a pagan context.

I must also note that 1 Tim 2:8 was outside the scope of my research as presented in BBRS 11, which centered on passages with the handling of wealth in view, specifically as 1 Tim 2:9-10 in the context of 1 Tim 2:9-15. What I would say about 1 Tim 2:8 in the Ephesian context just by considering biblical evidence, such as the riot scene described by Luke in Acts 19:23-41, is that men are presented as both angry and loud, shouting “Great is Artemis of Ephesians” for two hours. Though such behavior may have been the norm or acceptable for men who served Artemis, the author of 1 Timothy desired them to abstain from such behavior, but rather be seen as men of prayer with purity and self-control.

The author of 1 Tim also envisions life and worship for women in a new light (very different from the social and cultural norms set forth in Ephesiaca and other evidence), which why I like to say that 1 Tim 2:9-15 demythologizes life and worship for them. Rather than recount chapter 3 of BBRS 11, I will summarize it in this way: No longer is life and worship all wrapped up in learning in noisy contexts with recitation. No longer is it linked to plaited hair and sumptuous adornment like the goddess. No longer is it associated with promoting the Artemis/Isis/Diana myth that the goddess was the author of all life, and that sin came into the world through man. No longer need they fear death in childbearing for ceasing to serve the goddess of childbearing.

I think too many readers of this text have made assumptions about what it means without exploring the ancient evidence, without reading the myths that were prominently proclaimed, and without understanding what life was like for Ephesians before coming to know Christ. As those religious realities come into view, the text sounds less as a corrective text and sounds more like the deep desires of the apostle who ministered among the pagan Ephesians from about 52-54 and saw many come to faith in this bustling Mediterranean metropolis. With this teaching, they have a counter-cultural course for life and worship mapped out for them.

Gary Hoag continues——
Texts like 1 Tim 2:9-15 reveal that social and cultural expectations linked to the decorum and deeds of women in God’s house must change dramatically (see chapter three of my BBRS volume). Ephesiaca was instrumental in helping me suggest that the prohibited hairstyle may point to the coiffure that all young ladies were expected to wear to exhibit their piety to the goddess Artemis. This hairstyle was coupled with sumptuous adornment in Ephesiaca revealing that the counter-cultural instruction to women appears to target cultural fixtures in this context. Ephesiaca presents young women going to the temple precincts daily to recite prayers learning in anything but silence and they also participated in promoting the Artemis-Isis-Diana myth. Consequently, the function of this text demythologizes life for Ephesian women.

They were taught from their youth that Artemis was the author of all life and that sin came into the world through man. Worst of all, the social and religious pressure on women was to serve the goddess of childbearing (to get this designation in the ancient Greek mind, Artemis had helped her mother Leto deliver her twin brother Apollo) or else…death (cf. Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon 8.6.11–14, Athenaus, The Deipnosophists 15.694D). For women who continue in the faith by choosing counter-cultural service to God will be saved through childbearing, or in plain terms, they need not fear Artemis who was a goddess of vengeance.

Moving into chapter 1 Tim 3, ascension and anticipation of positions of cultic service in Ephesian evidence and Ephesiaca can be linked to wealth and family prominence. While the construct of the qualifications list can be located in ancient evidence as noted by Dibelius and Conzelmann, et al, I demonstrate how those sources reveal that noble birth rather than character was the prevailing cultural pathway to priestly service. In this light, the call for character as a qualification for leadership in God’s house appears as counter-cultural.

Later in that chapter (3:16) we see yet another counter-cultural statement that reads opposite the chant recorded in Acts 19:28, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians,” and it boldly proclaims: “Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness (eusebeias) springs is great: He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.” All one has to do is read a few dozen inscriptions in Die Inschriften von Ephesos to see that the wealthy prominent citizens were lauded for their eusebeia to the goddess, Artemis, and to honor any other deity supremely was unthinkable in this setting. The riot of Ephesus is additional evidence for this.

From there, 1 Tim 4 brings the “deceitful spirits” and “doctrines of demons” into view. It was common for Ephesians in crisis to call the cultic leaders for aid. Ironically, Xenophon of Ephesus presents them as pious pretenders whose rituals to placate the demons are fake. More counter-cultural instructions against views that can be linked to the Artemis-Isis-Diana cult come into view in this chapter, such as the prohibition to marry. The author of 1 Timothy states plainly in response the proper course for God’s people. Again in this chapter the living God is the “Savior” of all people. Before doing my research when I heard “Savior” I thought “the God who accomplished my go-to-heaven salvation.” Then when I found it only appears, I think, six times in all the NT and three times in 1 Tim, it seems to have a very intentional function: redefining who the Savior of all in the minds of ancient Mediterranean people.

By 1 Tim 5, we see the counter-cultural treatment of widows. When I researched the Ephebes instruction and learned that prominent citizens would have been taught not to render honor and service to those who could not reciprocate, the instructions to care for widows appears counter-cultural. In 5:9-10 we see those that widows who are to receive aid have a reputation that reflects a lifestyle contrary to the way of living celebrated in ancient sources. Spiritually forming kids, washing feet of the Lord’s people, among other good deeds are services never celebrated by ancient sources in this cultural setting. They reflect Christ-like living and service.

As you can imagine, 1 Tim 6 is a fitting climax to this set of counter-cultural instructions known as the first letter to Timothy. As my research suggests, the false teachers, come into view as the prominent cultic leaders who honor Artemis supremely and the Roman emperor. Around 44 CE, the edict of Paullus Fabius Persicus points out the inappropriate conduct of priestesses and priests of Artemis. They had used the house of the goddess as a front for activities for personal gain (cf. 6:5). It is leading to their destruction and Timothy and others must flee from this thinking. It pervaded the social and cultural context, especially among the rich who were ensconced in power. For Ephesians, you honored the goddess and the emperor and a pantheon of Gods, or else suffer the consequences. In this setting to call God, “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords” (6:15) would be again, squarely attacking the purity rules of this setting.

There are many more points I could make if I went verse by verse, but these come to mind. If people lived in the manner presented by the author of 1 Tim, idol sales would suffer, costly magic books would be deemed worthless, and a riot might ensue…and according to Luke’s Acts, that’s exactly what happened. Elsewhere we learn that Timothy followed these counter-cultural orders and was martyred for speaking out against the practice of pagan feasts (c. 97 CE).

There are many things that one could put on the desideratum list when it comes to swords and sandals cinematic epics involving the story of Jesus. At the top of the list would be— ‘Please dear God, let them get the story right this time’. Despite some reviews already out, it is not entirely correct to say ‘they got the story right this time’. For one thing they indulged the medieval legend that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Nope. To the contrary she was demon possessed, not a prostitute. She is not to be identified with either the woman in John 7.53-8.11 or the sinner woman in Luke 7. Mary Magdalene doesn’t show up in Luke’s story until Lk. 8.1-3, not before, and there we are told that seven demons were cast out of her by Jesus. So enough with the ‘Mary the prostitute’ fantasy caused by blending of discrete Biblical stories together in somebody’s mental cuisinart. For another thing, like the series A.D. last year, once again we hear the total myth that ‘Santa Claus’ is coming to town, by which I mean the Roman Emperor Tiberius is coming to Jerusalem during the reign of Pontius Pilate just after Jesus’ death. Nope. Tiberius had not interest, inclination or plans to leave Capri or Italy. This is total mythology, and in the case of the movie ‘Risen’ it is unnecessary mythology. It is a story line that comes to nothing, and is of no consequence to the ‘Risen’ plot. Also clearly wherever this movie was filmed, it was not Jerusalem and Galilee. For one thing there are not huge mountains surrounding the eastern shore of the sea of Galilee. For another thing Jerusalem did not look that much like a desert in April after the winter torrents. And perhaps most importantly, there doesn’t seem to have been any ongoing manhunt for the body of Jesus after Easter by either Roman or Jewish officials. The story in Matthew of course is that the guards were bribed by the Jewish officials to keep silent about what happened at the tomb that Sunday morning (cf. Mt. 28.11-15). End of story, no manhunt. That’s all on one side of the ledger, but fortunately there is another side to the story.

On the good side of things the following can be listed: 1) Joseph Fiennes is terrific as the tribune set the task by Pilate to track down the body of the Nazarene. He is the younger brother of the more well known Ralph Fiennes, but those of you who saw and loved ‘Shakespeare in Love’ from 1998 may recognize him as he played William Shakespeare! Fiennes’ performance is worth seeing all by itself. It is convincing, and at least Kevin Reynolds the producer cared enough to get the Romans mostly right in this story. Peter Firth is also quite good as Pilate. 2) finally, finally we have a Middle Eastern looking Jesus on film, played by Cliff Curtis. He is actually from New Zealand, and appears to have some Maori blood in him. But at least they have forsaken the ridiculous blond haired blue eyed Jesus of previous films; 3) most of the disciples are believable, except the overly giddy Bartholomew. This does give a lighter touch to the film, but at the cost of making him seem silly, except for his honesty about doubting Jesus’ prediction about his resurrection beyond death. The portrayal of Mary Magdalene by Maria Botto is o.k., if she was just not depicted as a prostitute, whom many Roman soldiers seem to have known intimately. Much better is the portrayal of Peter as an older man, at a loss for words to explain what has just happened to Jesus. I would have been at a loss for words too. 4) the risen Jesus is depicted as a tangible human being, not a spirit, not a ghost, and the appearances of the risen Jesus are well done and believable, not depicted as visions. The writer, Mark Aiello along with Reynolds apparently couldn’t resist throwing in an extra miracle by the risen Jesus in Galilee, healing a many with leprosy. 5) the cinematography is well done, nothing cheesy about it, nor do they overdo the C.G. 6) the movie doesn’t have any real dead spots, and at a sleek one hour and 47 minutes, the plot moves along quickly, as basically a tale about how one of Pilate’s tribunes could actually become a follower of Jesus, and a witness to the risen Lord. Since Jesus did in fact appear to a nonbeliever like Saul of Tarsus, the story is plausible— a sort of Cornelius story, before Cornelius. I do have to say however that the story is probably set a bit too late— A.D. 33, rather than A.D. 30, but that much is debatable.

On the whole, and with the provisos and caveat emptors listed, this is a good film for Christians and their friends and family to see at Easter, very much better than some films of this ilk. It gets the most crucial parts of the story right, and does not provide us with a jaundiced anti-miraculous approach to the material. Kudos to Affirm Films (a subdivision of Sony) for taking this story on, and telling it in a faith friendly way. I understand that there are always trade offs in a story that is partly fiction but intends to be historical fiction, with the history part being the most crucial part. On the whole there is more to commend and less to object to, than some of the things we saw last year in the A.D. TV series. Stay tuned for the Anne Rice ‘Out of Egypt’ film next month, a tale of ‘the Young Messiah’ which mixes the Gospel with later apocryphal material from the Apocryphon of James and elsewhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQmllwTKtqU

‘The Finest Hours’ starring Chris Pine and Casey Affleck, is certainly one of the finest ‘rescue’ movies ever made. It tells the true story of a dramatic rescue of more than twenty men hanging on for dear life to the second half of a tanker that split, in gale force winter winds and thundering tides on Feb. 18, 1952 off the coast of Chatham And Wellfleet Massachusetts. The movie is one hour and 57 minutes long, but it seems much shorter as this film is full of suspense. What one doesn’t expect is that this is also the story of true love, of a romantic relationship between Bernie Weber (played very well by Chris Pine, with a passable New England accent) and newcomer Holliday Grainger as Miriam his fiancee. It is not just two dozen stranded men that are rescued, but a marriage to be, that as it turned out lasted for 58 years (Weber died in 2009 at 81).

The Coast Guard is the most neglected of all our military services, and yet it has often done some of the most courageous deeds, as this movie demonstrates. What I especially appreciate about the Coast Guard is that their primary mission is not destroying our enemies but rather protecting and rescuing our own. Other than the violent seas in this movie, there is no violence in this film, only a tale of love and courage which both triumph in the end. My wife grew up in Attleboro Mass. not far from where these brave acts took place in 1952. She was only four at the time, but her parents knew all about this incredible story of heroism. It happened basically in their backyard, and was later chronicled in a 2009 book by Casey Sherman with the same title as the current movie.

This movie is available in HD if you enjoy swallowing a lot of ocean water with your popcorn, but the regular screening is just as effective and shows what a few good folk, dedicated to saving lives can accomplish. As Weber says ‘The Coast Guard says we have to go out, they don’t say we have to come back.” Their motto is ‘bring ’em back alive’ and what incredible risks they regularly take all in the line of duty.

It would be hard to over estimate the significance of Jerome (345-420 A.D.) when it comes to the establishing of Christian commentating on the Bible, including on Isaiah. Ironically, despite all his erudition and thorough knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, it is his translation of the Bible into Latin, the so-called Vulgate (done between 391 and 404 and largely based on the Hebrew text of the OT), which is to say a move away from any of the Biblical languages, which has had the biggest impact on the church in the long term. Latin became the language of the Western church and of Scripture for over 1,000 years thereafter. This influence was felt well into the 20th century. When my wife, raised Catholic, was a child. The mass was still in Latin! In fact it did not officially become optional until November 1971.
Only late in life, between 408 and 410 did Jerome turn to writing a commentary on Isaiah. He died a decade later. Jerome begins his scholarly career as something of a disciple of Origen, but by the end he was attacking Origen’s views of various things. His approach to the Biblical text is rightly described by Childs as eclectic, because he studied with both Alexandrians and Antiochians, including the Cappadocians, and so he benefited from both schools of interpretation.
The Isaiah commentary proved to be Jerome’s longest, not least because he saw it as a sort of Gospel, addressing all the mysteries of the Christian faith, including all the aspects of Christ’s life and ministry. He believes one needs to affirm and understand both the historical and spiritual sense of the text but he emphasized that the central function of interpretation is to get at the historical meaning of the text. But by literal, Jerome often means that the prophecies in Isaiah are literal predictions of NT events, especially Gospel events. ‘However, Jerome is very critical of Christian commentators (e.g. Clement) and the millenarians who neglect a passage’s historical moorings and project a heavenly scene of the last days”.
Because of his considerable linguistic abilities, Jerome is able to begin his commentary on each section of Isaiah with a fresh translation of the Hebrew text which he prefers (and he denies that Jews have deliberate distorted the text, in fact drawing on the work of Jewish exegetes) but he holds the LXX in high regard, and he exploits the differences between the versions, regularly commenting on the differences. For example, in dealing with the hardening passage in Is. 6.9 he notes that the Greek uses the indicative mood, thus foretelling the future rejection of the Gospel by Jews, whereas the Hebrew has the imperative indicating God’s command is the cause of the hardening.
Jerome shows a willingness to recognize and accept the ambiguity of the Hebrew. Is. 6.6 can be read to refer to the angels covering God’s face or their own. Is. 16.1 can be read to refer to a ruling lamb or a lamb of the ruler. But when a major doctrinal point is at stake, for instance in Is. 7.14, Jerome brings out his full linguistic arsenal to demonstrate that the Jews are wrong about almah. It doesn’t just mean young woman or even merely virgin but rather ‘hidden away virgin’ of marriageable age, that is a ‘kept young woman’. He plays on the fact that the word in question can mean both nubile and concealed. Jerome had a great interest in the historical particularities of the Biblical text— its geographical references, its names, its animals, its agricultural practices and he often pursues and tracks down the meaning of obscure historical terms. While he often focuses on the historical background of an OT text, including the prophecies, his default assumption is that the full context cannot be recognized without the use of the NT. OT prophecy is fulfilled in NT realities. So for example the prophecy of judgment on Jerusalem in Is. 3 is seen as fulfilled by the Romans in A.D. 70 rather than the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C. and indeed Is. 6.11-13 is not only fulfilled by Titus but again fifty years later by Hadrian, or Is. 40 is immediately identified with the ministry of John the Baptizer. Basically the NT provides the spiritual meaning and sense of the OT prophetic text whereas the OT provides the historical sense. The hardening of Israel mentioned in Is. 6 is used by Jerome to explain why Jewish exegetes can’t move beyond the historical or carnal sense of the OT text. Sometimes his focus on the spiritual or figurative sense of the text leads to pure allegory based on etymology, so for example when he turns to Is. 15, the prophecy against Moab, in his Isaiah commentary, he trots out the view that ‘Nebo’ means prophecy, ‘Medeba’ means forest, ‘Heshbon’ means knowledge, ‘Elealeh’ means ‘ascension’ and so on. He makes not attempt to link the figurative allegorical sense with the literal sense in this exposition. But he is aware of the difficulties of linking the two senses and seeing their continuity.
Childs attributes to Jerome the accomplishment of forcing Christian interpreters to have to deal with the literal or historical meaning of the text first before jumping to the spiritual or allegorical sense of the text. Perhaps it could be said that Origen at times and Eusebius at times also made clear that the historical sense should not be neglected. It is a long way from Clement to Eusebius in terms of approach to the text. As Childs notes, sadly even Jerome, for all his dependence on Jewish helpers and exegetes seldom recognizes in the Jews of the OT signs of genuine faith (see his exegesis of Is. 53.1ff). The Old Covenant is not viewed as a faithful witness to God in its own right, but only a foreshadowing of the NT and the salvation that comes from Christ. It is not really until we get to Augustine (Of Christian Doctrine) that a sophisticated treatment of the relationship and linkage between the literal and figurative senses of the text is brought forth. Childs attributes to Jerome a lack of understanding of Biblical eschatology. I think this complaint is mostly fair since regularly Jerome interprets texts like Is. 11.6-9 not to refer to the final eschatological state, but rather to the harmony that exists within the church between rich and poor, powerful and humble. Childs adds “without a multifaceted understanding of the intersection of the divine and human within an unfolding divine drama, he was left with a flat, empirical history as a form of chronicle and a non-historical realm of spiritual truths that float above the ‘real’ history of the world.” This same complaint of course could be made of much Christian preaching and inductive Bible study today as well.

Eusebius (ca. 260-340 A.D.), is of course best known for his work Ecclesiastical History for which he came to be dubbed the ‘father of church history’. It is only in more recent decades that research has focused more on Eusebius as a Biblical commentator, and still more recently his Isaiah commentary has been unearthed, analyzed and made available (1999). It is clear enough that Eusebius is cognizant of earlier approaches to interpreting the Bible in the Christian tradition, but his teacher was taught by Origen, and so he does indeed stand in the line of the Alexandrian exegetes though he lived in Caesarea Maritima in the Holy Land, and was bishop there. He, like Origen, is concerned with various Greek translations of Isaiah, and textual variants, and he does not think that the deep meaning of the Biblical text necessarily lies right on the surface of the text. He is supercessionist and apologetic in his interpretation of Isaiah, wanting to demonstrate that it was prophesied all along that the church was to be God’s people, though he concedes that before Christ there were faithful Jews who were God’s people. While Jerome was later to accuse Eusebius of lapsing into allegory like Origen, in fact Eusebius focuses on two sorts of senses he found in the Biblical text—literal and spiritual, and sometimes they were intertwined. Childs thinks that Eusebius saw the spiritual sense as a metaphorical extension of the literal sense.
Eusebius demonstrates a clear concern to get at the literal meaning of the text, and interestingly he uses etymology for that task, not to get at a deeper spiritual meaning of the text. As a genuine scholar, Eusebius compared and contrasted four Greek versions of the Biblical text— the LXX, Theodition, Symmachus, and Aquila arguing that the latter was closest to the Hebrew text. This sort of careful scholarship was undertaken precisely because Eusebius wanted to understand the literal sense of the text. His tendency was to prefer the reading which provided the most coherent meaning. Eusebius did not see the spiritual sense of the text as a ‘second’ meaning but rather as the inner and supernatural dimension of the historical events which the text literally reported. For example, the defeat of the Babylonians by Cyrus is shown to be a historical event but the deeper meaning has to do with the defeat of idolatry and the Devil. Both OT and NT and early church events are seen to be prophesied in the Scriptures (including the Roman peace through Constantine). There is much less allegory than in Origen, but references to water and animals usually prompted allegorical reflections, in the former case about baptism or the Holy Spirit. Not surprisingly, he brings a Christian and Christological perspective to the interpretation of both testaments, and Childs avers that this is the hermeneutic that is really driving interpretation for the most part. Childs is right as well that in a sense Eusebius reflects a combination of the Alexandrian and Antiochian approaches to the text, concerned with both the spiritual and the literal meaning of the text. It is interesting as well that after Nicaea Eusebius focused more on realized than on future eschatology (there are less references to the second coming in his Isaiah and later work), seeing the no long persecuted church as the fulfillment of prophecy and the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. We are on the road to Augustine’s City of God.
There are three works of Eusebius which reveal his approach to Isaiah, the Prophetic Selections, the Proof of the Gospel, and finally his commentary on Isaiah, written in that order, with the last being written somewhere between the time of the first and second sessions of Nicaea, so after 325. Unlike Marcion and the Gnostics, Eusebius sees the OT as fully inspired and speaking always of the Biblical God who is the Father of Jesus. The prophecies in Isaiah receive a literal fulfillment in Christ. In fact Eusebius defends the historical substance and validity of the prophecies, including those in Isaiah.
Eusebius uses the whole of Isaiah to present the Gospel, with texts being applied to everything from the virginal conception (Is. 7.14 of course), to the death and resurrection (Is. 52-53 of course), to the return of Christ and the kingdom come fully on earth (Is. 62-66). We will focus on his interpretation of Is. 7.14 for a moment. He is well aware of the Jewish rebuttal of the Christian interpretation of the text, namely that it refers to an ordinary birth of Hezekiah. He responds: 1) that the LXX translators knew what they were doing when they used parthenos which is more technical than ‘young nubile woman’ (neanis) and anyway Deut. 22.27 shows that even the latter word could mean ‘virgin’; 2) that a normal birth is hardly a ‘sign’ but Isaiah calls it that; 3) Immanuel can hardly be Hezekiah since he was already sixteen when Ahaz began to reign. Whereas Prophetic Selections works its way through Isaiah, interpreting in a Christian manner, Proof of the Gospel sets up theological categories and slots texts into them, providing proof-texts for a Biblical theology. “Eusebius chooses to concentrate on chapters 6,7,8, and 9, which he immediately sets within the context of John’s prologue in chapter 1 and he continues to weave his Isaiah texts with New Testament citations to produce a sort of ‘biblical theology’ of the Incarnation.” In other words, Eusebius is indeed ‘reading backwards’. He starts with John 12.41 which says Isaiah saw Christ glory, and says this (described in Is. 6) with the guidance of the Spirit is what led Isaiah to prophesy Christ’s birth from a virgin, and also in Is.6 the hardening of the Jews, which includes the continual opposition by Jews to the Gospel in the church age. Eusebius also sees a perfect and literal fit between Is. 35 and the ministry of Jesus in which the blind did really receive their sight, as well as a literal fit between Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and what Is. 9 and 11 say (with help from Micah 5 and Ps. 132).
It is Eusebius, who’s commentary on Isaiah set a precedent, that established the practice of line by line commenting on a Biblical book. In interpreting Is. 2.2-4 coupled with Is. 66.18-23 Eusebius sees a prophecy of universal salvation with the nations flowing to Zion in search of the law of Christ which replaces the law of Moses. Interestingly, in his Isaiah commentary, Eusebius even suggests in his exposition on Is. 7 that some explanation must be given for why Isaiah speaks in the singular ‘you shall call his name Immanuel’ whereas Mt. 2.23 has the plural ‘they will call his name’. Eusebius takes this to mean that the prophecy originally was directed only to the house of David, whereas the plural in Matthew indicates it is now for everyone. Immanuel then becomes a foreshadowing of Jesus. The notion of double fulfillment seems to be in play here. Part of the problem here is that Eusebius seems to take Immanuel to be an actual name, rather than a title or throne name.
Eusebius interprets the stump of Is. 11 to refer to the dead end destiny of the race of David, whereas the shoot of Jesse is a reference to Jesus, humble and poor but equipped with wisdom, understanding and might to rule. Interestingly, in his treatment of Is. 35 in the Isaiah commentary he focuses less on Jesus as a healer, and instead sees the church’s baptism as the bath of regeneration transforming the land. And yet, Eusebius is apparently the first Christian writer to treat the Cyrus prophecy in Is. 44-45 at length in a historical manner (though there are scattered hints in Origen) over against Barnabas, Irenaeus and Tertullian who read ‘to Christ my Lord’ rather than ‘to Cyrus’. Eusebius repeats the legend found in Josephus Ant. 11.1-7 that Cyrus knew the prophecy of Isaiah because it was shown to him by Jews. Interestingly, Eusebius spends much time pondering the Incarnation on the basis of Isaiah, for example he joins Is. 61.1 to 60.22b and sees a reference to the two natures of Christ, one referring to ‘the Lord’ (i.e. the divine side of who he was) and the other to the recipient of the Spirit, and so he interprets Luke’s use of Is. 61 in Lk. 4.16ff. to refer to the divine anointing of Jesus by the Spirit.

It is the approach of Childs which involves both critical engagement and also empathy with the sources he examines that distinguishes his work to a real extent from that of Sawyer who is too focused on abuses of the OT. The next church father Childs gives attention to, quite rightly, is Irenaeus (130-200 A.D.), particularly because we now have to hand a version of his long lost book The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. It is something of a mercy that the focus of attention of Christian writers after the middle of the second century moved from controversies with Judaism to dealing with the rising crisis of Gnosticism. Here in Irenaeus for the first we hear about a New Testament (composed apparently of four Gospels, Acts, numerous apostolic letters including Paul’s especially). Irenaeus cites this ‘new testament’ in written form as just as authoritative as the OT. Irenaeus in addition has a clear belief in a passing down of an authoritative apostolic doctrinal tradition and a perpetual succession of elders, not apostles or popes (advers. Haer. 1.3.4).
It appears to have been Irenaeus who first articulated clearly the notion of a regula fidei, a summary of apostolic faith which was central and crucial to the church’s belief system and confession. “The rule was not identical with scripture, but was that sacred apostolic tradition, both in oral and written form, that comprised the church’s story… a holistic rendering of the apostolic faith according to its proper order (Dem. 52; A.H.1.9.4;2.27.1)” Irenaeus also knows and recites an early form of ‘the Symbol’ i.e. the Apostle’s Creed (A.H. 1.10.1).
Irenaeus does indeed operate at a level of sophistication never glimpsed in Justin’s work. He has both a hermeneutic of progressive revelation and a theology of salvation history. As Childs shows, he interprets the material in the narrative of the OT starting with Genesis quite literally, but when he gets to the prophets, it is here especially that he finds the theology of God’s eternal salvific purposes, especially of course in Isaiah (Dem. 30). “Israel’s history forms an indissoluble theological unity with that of the church and is not viewed as simply a background for the real event of Christ’s incarnation.” Sometimes this leads to a ‘this is fulfilled in that’ literal approach to the OT (e.g. Is. 50.5-6 is a description of the scourging of Christ, or the promises to Abraham were fulfilled in Christ). More often typology is used— the first Adam is contrasted with the last, Eve and Mary are compared and contrasted, the tree in the garden foreshadows the cross. Irenaeus simply cites the NT as a written Scripture and the OT text he thinks is fulfilled in it to accomplish his purposes, something Justin was not truly able to do. Modern interpreters may be surprised to hear Irenaeus say that the pre-existent Christ is speaking in Is. 45.1 and 49.5ff., particularly in the former case, because Irenaeus, like Justin before him reads ‘Lord’ (kyrio) instead of Cyrus (kyro). These texts are used to justify the notion that the pre-incarnate Christ was the person involved in various OT theophanies to Abraham, Jacob, and even to Moses at the burning bush. Again, this is an interpretative move that most modern commentators, including conservative Christian ones whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant, would reject as a legitimate exegesis of those texts. It is Cyrus who is indeed mentioned in Isaiah 45.
More congenial to some modern exegesis is the attempt to extrapolate from Is. 7.14-16 the theological implication not just of a virginal conception but of the true humanity of Jesus, he was born as an infant, ate food, was tangible etc.(Dem. 53) and from Is. 9.5-7 he draws the notion of the eternality of Christ and the fact that he was begotten (A.H. 3.16.1ff; 3.19.1ff). As Childs points out allegory was one of the hermeneutical tools in the tool box of all the early church exegetes, and Irenaeus was no different, for instance seeing in the ‘blood of the grape’ in Gen. 49.11 the blood of Christ Dem. 57). Here again is a place where I would say ancient exegetes rush in where modern ones fear to tread.
I would nuance things as follows— allegory, if used in the service of making some Christian theological or ethical point simply using an OT Biblical story, for example as Paul does in Gal. 4, is o.k. but not as exegesis, not as a claim that this is what that text always meant. This is rather a use of some OT Biblical material to draw out the meaning of some other Biblical theological or ethical truth that is not in fact actually discussed in the scriptural text used but does arise in some NT material somewhere.
I would not say this is an example of applying the OT text to a new situation. That would simply assume the same meaning applied to a different setting. Nor would I say this involves drawing out the latent significance of the original meaning. The original meaning of the ‘blood of the grapes’ in Genesis has nothing to do with the blood of Christ, despite the ingenuity of Irenaeus. I would say we are dealing with the mere use of Biblical images, ideas, metaphors, not even in a ‘figural’ way (see Appendix B), to aid in making other valid Biblical theological or ethical points. That’s all. And as such it should not be critiqued as bad exegesis, as it is not an attempt at exegesis any more than when John Wesley called himself a ‘brand plucked from the burning’ after his rescue as a child from the Epworth parsonage fire he thought he was properly exegeting the text of Zechariah 3.2 that generated this image.
Clearly, as Childs demonstrates, Irenaeus was a global thinker, and he does not use the OT or the nascent form of the NT in an atomistic manner usually. He believes the Scriptures present a unified story and vision of God’s salvific plan. Did he Christianize the OT? Childs prefers to say he transformed the witness of the OT by extending its witness to speak of the Good News of Christ.