The first, most prominent point that this review should make is that Richard Hays’ Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels arrives as an instant landmark in gospel criticism – a status magnified by the dramatic health crisis that required the book's hurried completion (with the aid of generous colleagues). Hays analyses the distinct ways that the evangelists work with the Old Testament, and demonstrates connections between their interpretations of their scriptures and their christology and theology more generally; as such, this book serves as an illuminating, convincing account of the extent to which the gospels draw on the Old Testament not only for proof-texts, but all the more for models, allusions, tropes and the metaleptic echoes which are the hallmark of Hays’ literary investigations. He is by all odds the most gifted writer in his field, whose elegant prose underscores and enhances his exegetical and theological conclusions. The paeans which wreathe the book's jacket indicate justly that this will be a defining work in New Testament studies.
The body of the book – four long, careful chapters dedicated to displaying the four evangelists’ distinctive ways of working with their scriptural thesaurus – contains few outright surprises. Herein I found intuitions confirmed, arguments refined and strengthened, conventions called into question, and on every page the first-rate rhetoric and argumentation typical of Hays. The strength of his exposition lies in his synthetic vision of the evangelists’ interpretive habits and their theologies (particularly their christologies). In taking up his account of each evangelist as an interpreter of the Old Testament, he effectively introduces the particular characteristics of each; indeed, Hays here provides the foundations (and many of the load-bearing pillars) of a magisterial New Testament theology. Since so much of his exegesis draws on connections to other passages of the gospel in question, one need not agree with each particular exegetical gesture in order to accede to Hays’ descriptions of the gospels, since each portrait integrates a wide range of evidence. The aggregate of his observations carries a great deal of force even if one or two points have not convinced.
If it be granted, then, that Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels will be a required acquisition and point of reference for scholars and libraries in the discipline of New Testament studies for the foreseeable future, the more interesting questions involve what readers might find unsatisfactory about the book. The first such complaint – predictable from the record of critical evaluations of Hays’ Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul – will be that Hays’ identification of allusions, and especially of metaleptic echoes, lacks the sort of evidential conclusiveness that many scholars take as necessary. Hays does not restate here the criteria by which he identifies ‘echoes’; he has done so several times before, and that debate has taken on a life of its own. Suffice it to say that readers who have been dissatisfied by Hays’ use of ‘allusion’ in the past will not be relieved here. Indeed, it is one of the strengths of Hays’ book that he proceeds with unperturbed confidence to expound the patterns of quotation and allusion that he sees, without digressing to answer every conceivable cavil. The eighty pages of endnotes offer ample argument for the plausibility of his interpretations in general; to those who ask more than this extensive critical apparatus, one can only respond that, even if an evangelist should rise from the dead, neither would they be convinced. Allusion (as Hays affirms) is always a matter of indirection, open to reasonable uncertainty. If one restricts interpretive justification to those allusions in which doubt cannot be removed, one will exclude practically every interesting nuance from the scope of possible echoes, or will smother the vigour of exegetical rhetoric under mountains of qualifications.
That said, Hays’ work will frustrate many readers who require a clear line of demarcation separating methodologically nonpartisan historical exegesis from theological exposition. Their frustration may be intensified by the extent to which many of Hays’ textual arguments do not depend in any way on sharing his theological convictions; why (they might ask) must this comprehensive resource for studying the gospel writers’ practice of literary allusion be obscured with claims that extend far outwith the sphere of textual analysis? (The forced-choice challenge in the conclusion – either the evangelists are ‘stealing or twisting Israel's sacred texts’ or ‘the God incarnate in Jesus . . . is the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ (pp. 364–5; Hays’ emphasis) – provides a case in point.) To this there is no response other than that Hays clearly, ardently, wanted to write this book rather than the more austerely technical book some readers would have preferred. This is not simply a matter of chacun à son goût; the question of the relation of history to theology lurks backstage in these pages when it does not haunt the foreground, and even readers sympathetic to Hays’ faith will be tempted to quarrel with him over the extent to which some of his claims rest on strictly historical judgements. While the precise texture of the distinction between history and theology matters differently to different readers, Hays may be disappointing technical scholars as he invokes theological grounds for particular developments, and losing some theological sympathisers when he ascribes the authority of history to theological convictions they may not share.
Further, while Hays expresses explicit, repeated commitment to the integrity of the Old Testament as Israel's scripture, his positive characterisation of the process by which the evangelists identify Jesus and the church as prefigured in Old Testament narrative, psalmody and prophecy asserts that this amounts to a ‘transformation’ (p. 14) and ‘transfiguration’ (p. 362). There will be readers who construe the affirmation as disingenuous when it comes attached to such consequences. To cite a trivial example, if somebody came to my home and ‘transformed’ my living room, I would hope to be understood if I did not welcome the assurance that the integrity of the space and furnishings had been respected. Hays firmly asserts his awareness of the complications that attend this topic, and his deep antipathy to any Marcionite deprecation of Israel's ongoing covenant with God. Sensitivities on this issue, however, may not accept these demurrers as sufficient balm.
These caveats will not diminish the prominence of Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels in the arguments, footnotes and reference libraries of the discourse of biblical studies. Hays has brought together an impressive range of insights on the evangelists’ uses of the Old Testament, has shown how these cohere with a strong perspective on the christology and ecclesiologies of the gospels, and has articulated them in lambent prose that belies the circumstances of the book's final production. An achievement such as this can fittingly crown a life's work; readers will be thankful that they may hope for further literary, exegetical, theological endeavours from Professor Hays.
