202 - Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul

Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul
By Richard B. Hays
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989. 240 pages. $30.

How does one rightly understand and appropriate Paul's Old Testament citations and allusions? Richard Hays of Yale Divinity School surveys a number of conventional approaches and, dissatisfied, proposes to read the Apostle's exegesis as "intertextual discourse" in which biblical stories are "a fund of symbols and metaphors" that shape his writing. If one rightly hears the echoes embedded in Paul's scriptural references, there occurs an "intertextual fusion that generates new meaning." For example, if the phrase, "will turn out for my deliverance" (Phil 1: 19), echoes Job 13:16, Paul appears as the righteous sufferer and his rivals as Job's "friends." To place some controls on such analogies, the author offers tests for discerning the echoes: The source must be available to the author and his reader, should be historically plausible, should catch the eye of other interpreters, and should cohere within the New Testament context. In the best case, it will be a text that Paul uses elsewhere. However, "to limit ... Paul's echoes to what he intended ... [imposes] a severe and arbitrary hermeneutical restriction."

Hays proceeds to explain a number of texts in Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians in terms of "echoes" that he senses in them. For example, Rom. 1:l6f. is evocative of Ps. 97:3 and Isa. 51:4f. where "salvation" and "righteousness of God" also occur. Rom. 3:4 (= Ps. 51:4), with its context of David's sin foreshadows for the alert reader the use of David as an example of justification through faith (Rom. 4:6ff.). In this and other examples, Hays is similar to C. H. Dodd: the New Testament quotation will call to mind the Old Testament "text-plot" from which it

203 - Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul

was taken. This is helpful in reminding us that the meaning of Paul's citations and allusions sometimes lies below the surface. Nevertheless, Hays' approach raises questions.

"True interpretation," he writes, "depends neither on historical inquiry nor on erudite literary analysis but on attentiveness to the prompting of the Spirit." In a certain sense this is true. To understand Scripture is to experience revelation from the Spirit. But while critical method cannot produce the divine truths within a biblical text, it can rule out many wrong meanings and, in my judgment, it offers safeguards absent from an "inner light" exegesis that Hays sometimes approaches. Also, is it true that "Paul offers helter-skelter intuitive readings, unpredictable, ungeneralizable"?

As I read Paul, he did his work within at least two broad categories, a christological hermeneutic and a typology rooted in a salvation-history perspective. Pace Hays, Phil. 1:19 and the focus on the church in Gal. 4:21-31 and elsewhere is not a departure from a christological exegesis since Paul views believers as Christ's body. Also pace Hays, I Cor. 10: 1-13 is not "reading Exodus as metaphor." The seeming confusion of typology with allegory may underlie his lack of interest in the historical framework of Paul's exegesis since he thinks that Paul "reads Scripture primarily as a narrative of divine election and promise."

This book is sometimes insightful, sometimes puzzling, sometimes provocative, but never boring. Everyone can learn from it, but it is not designed for beginners.

E. Earle Ellis
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
Fort Worth, Texas