NT Resources Blog

Some introductory thoughts re. Hays’ treatment of “echoes”

The best-known attempt to provide warrant for echoes (i.e., informal allusions to the OT in the NT in distinction from quotations or more formal allusions) is Hays’ Echoes of Scripture,* though his work is couched in a non-conservative framework with presuppositions that make use of his system problematic at some points. He has proposed seven criteria for identifying an OT echo. They are certainly worth considering, though most of them are quite subjective in actual usage. His seven are: availability, volume, recurrence, thematic coherence, historical plausibility, history of interpretation, and satisfaction.

The most serious problem with the use of these criteria as Hays presents them is that he works from a reader-response, anti-authorial intent perspective. This can be seen by simply browsing the first chapter and noting the terminology that Hay uses to describe what NT writers are doing in various situations:

• “Paul as … misreader of Scripture” (1)
• “Paul takes possession of Moses’ exhortation and transforms its sense” (1)
• “[Paul’s] revisionary reading of Deuteronomy 30” (1)
• “theologically generative reappropriation of Israel’s Scriptures” (2)
• “Texts will always demand and generate new interpretation” (4)
• “[Paul’s] audacious rereading of Deuteronomy 30” (4)
• Paul’s statements in Rom 10:5–10 represent “misreadings … of Scripture, extending its meaning in new directions” (5)
• “Paul is engaged in the act of reinterpreting Scripture” (9)

This cavalier attitude toward the meaning of Scripture fits well with the modern literary ethos and certainly reflects the way in which many literature classes are taught. This is summarized well in Hays’ concluding paragraphs of his first chapter.
[Here you really ought to read Hays, Echoes of Scripture, 33]

I do not doubt but what texts can be used in this way and that they often do have these effects on readers. The question, however, is not what is possible, but what God intended and what carries his authority.

If Scripture is a revelatory deposit of truth conveyed from God through human writers who were superintended by the Holy Spirit with the result that the product is θεόπνευστος, then our goal must be to determine the meaning intended rather than creatively attempt to see how we can use the text.

Hays is into creative literary criticism and not into validity in the interpretation of divine revelation. He states this very bluntly:

The ideal of a perspicuous authoritative text that contains an unchangeable meaning is untenable because it denies the necessary contribution of the reader and the reader’s community in the act of interpretation. No longer can we think of meaning as something contained by a text; texts have meaning only as they are read and used by communities of readers (189).

Scripture is not a text with a plain meaning. Rather meaning is concealed in the text requiring the eschatological, intertextual ingenuity of the reader to unlock their mysteries since Scripture is “allusive rather than overt in its communication strategies” (155). New meaning is created when the reader draws together two texts, even if that association was not intended by the author: “the most significant elements of intertextual correspondence between old context and new [i.e., the new context created by the reader] can be implicit rather than voiced, perceptible only within the silent space framed by the juncture of two texts” (155). The text itself is silent, the reader creates the meaning which is found, figuratively speaking, in the white space between the two sentences. Meaning is not objective, “not so much like a relic excavated from an ancient text as it is like a spark struck by the shovel hitting rock” (155).

This “living” text “causes words spoken to characters in biblical narratives to miss their original addressees and to fly into the faces of bystanders previously uninvolved in the action” (165). Were that creative description used to portray the Spirit’s use of a legitimate textual meaning in the lives of people who have suddenly realized the significance of the text’s meaning in their own lives, all well and good. But that is not Hay’s intended meaning (pun intended!); it is rather his description of a reader-response hermeneutic in which the reader “plays” with various textual collocations and suddenly finds that he has just tromped in a puddle hard enough to get a face full of textual water. That the text does not mean what the reader thinks it does is of little significance; it is still wet!

Paul’s “helter-skelter intuitive readings” of the OT which are “unpredictable, ungeneralizable” (160), model proper hermeneutics in which “original intention is not a primary hermeneutical concern.” Indeed, such interpretations

can far exceed the conscious design of the author. The scriptural text as metaphor speaks through the author; whether such speaking occurs with or without the author’s knowledge is a matter of little consequence, for Paul’s readings of Scripture are not constrained by a historical scrupulousness about the original meaning of the text (156).