The re-interpretation or re-narration of Israel’s story for the life of the church is necessarily mediated through Jesus. 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). 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.
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). In this volume Hays turns his attention away from Paul and toward the authors of the fourfold Gospel. Nearly thirty years later, 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). Teachers and students were required to read Paul again-to hear afresh the way the apostle called forth Israel’s narrative within early Christianity. Hays’ careful theological and exegetical analysis of the way the Scriptures of Israel reverberated through the corridors of the Pauline epistles sparked a hermeneutical conversation across the theological landscape.
Richard Hays’ 1989 publication Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul was-without exaggeration-a watershed moment in New Testament studies.
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