Beeson Podcast, Episode 348 Richard Hays July 11, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. We have the privilege of hearing today a lecture by Dr. Richard Hays. He is George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School. The former dean of that school, he is a renowned New Testament scholar, a leading theologian of the church in our time, and the lecture we're going to hear today was given originally in Houston, Texas at a Lanier Theological Library. It's titled “Did Moses Write About Jesus?: The Challenges of Figural Reading.” It's a lecture that deals with the question of intertextuality. He's going to describe what that word means and what figural reading is about in light of how Jesus Christ actually is the center of the whole Bible and that we read about Jesus Christ in the light of God's revelation in Scripture and it illuminates everything that we read there. It's a wonderful lecture, a deep and challenging lecture. “Did Moses Write About Jesus?: The Challenges of Figural Reading.” I want to thank our friends at Lanier Theological Library for giving us permission to use this particular lecture by Dr. Richard Hays on the Beeson Podcast. If you want to find out more about the lectures that are available through the Lanier Theological Library, you can go to their website. It's just laniertheologicallibrary.org. Let's go to Houston, Texas and listen to Dr. Richard Hays. Richard Hays: It's always a great honor to come visit the Lanier Library. One of the things, it's great fun, but one of the perils of being asked to speak here is being introduced by Mark Lanier and having to follow his lively rhetoric. It's my pleasure to be here tonight. I'm also particularly glad and thankful to all of you for showing up because I know you have a choice of entertainment this evening. Not only did we not realize that this would be Memorial Day weekend, but who would have guessed that the Houston Rockets would still be playing in the conference finals and that they would have the lack of consideration to schedule their game in conflict with this lecture? Presumably, you can set your DVRs if you want to watch that game later. Here we are. It's a great honor and a pleasure to be with you and to speak with you this evening about some of the themes I've written about in the recent book that Mark referred to entitled Reading Backwards. You'll see in a few moments why it has that title. I saw a couple of you, as I came in, who actually have copies of the book. I will spend a little time rehashing or explaining some of the arguments of the book, but I want to go on tonight to explore a few things that are not in the book about what the implications might be or where we would go from here after the sort of study of the gospels that I've put forward in that book. Here we go. The title of the lecture is “Did Moses Write About Jesus?: The Challenges of Figural Reading.” I believe most of you have copies of a handout before you. Is that right? Some of the texts I'll talk about are on that handout. The gospel of John presents its readers, both ancient and modern, with an extraordinary hermeneutical challenge. It's a challenge that's expressed succinctly in Jesus's words in John 5:46. "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me." What could John the evangelist mean by advancing such an audacious and extraordinary claim? In what sense can Moses, who lived many hundreds of years before, be said to have written about Jesus? What would it mean for us to believe that such an assertion might be true? Modern critical scholarship has been deeply skeptical of all claims that the Old Testament writings should be read as predictive prophecy or as coded Christological messages. What sort of a hermeneutical landscape might open up before us? What might open up before us if we learn to read Israel's Scripture not only through the filtering lenses of modern critical methods, but also through the eyes of John and the other authors of the canonical gospels? Careful attention to the distinctive narrative design of the New Testament writings leads us to focus on patterns of intertextuality that are deeply woven into these texts. That's one of those $64 words that scholars use. It simply means the way in which later texts incorporate into themselves earlier texts so that you have a weaving together of older and newer texts. Tonight, I want to draw particular attention to the ways in which the four canonical gospels are hermeneutically intertwined with the Scriptures of Israel. The more closely that I've tried to study this remarkable phenomenon, the more I've been drawn to this conclusion: the Old Testament teaches us how to read the gospels and at the same time, the gospels teach us how to read the Old Testament. I want to suggest to you that the key to this dialectic of intertextuality is a practice called figural reading, figural reading. That simply means discerning unexpected patterns of correspondence between earlier and later events or persons within a continuous temporal stream. This term, figural reading or figural interpretation, comes from the German scholar Erich Auerbach. He's a scholar not of the Bible so much, but of world literature in general. I want to read you his concise, though dense, definition of figural interpretation. The few of you who do have the book in front of you, this is on page two in my book where I quote from Auerbach. He writes, I realize this is compactly expressed so I'm going to read it slowly and I may even have to read it more than once because I want to make sure you get this. He writes, ""Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also signifies the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both are real events or persons. Both are within temporality. They're both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension of their interdependence is a spiritual act." Only the comprehension. You see what he's saying? Two poles, an earlier event, a later event, and they cast light in unexpected ways on one another when they're read together. Let me give you a couple of specific examples from the New Testament that I think illustrate this more helpfully than that general definition. Those of you who were here for the panel yesterday heard me offer these examples. One would be in John 2 where Jesus says to his Jewish interlocutors, "Destroy this temple and, within three days, I'll raise it up." They say, "What do you mean? We've been building this temple 46 years. You're going to raise it up in three days?" Then John, the gospel writer, comments that he was talking about the temple of his body. They see what that saying does. It creates a figural linkage between the historic structure, long established of Israel's temple where worship occurs, and the body of Jesus, which is to be raised up in three days. They're brought together in this figural relation. Another example is from the gospel of Matthew, early on where we're told that Joseph and Mary flee with the baby Jesus into Egypt and wait until Herod dies before they can come back to the land of Israel. Matthew comments, "This happened in order to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet saying, 'Out of Egypt have I called my son.'" Now, that's a quotation from the prophet Hosea. It's from Hosea 11. When Hosea writes that, if you go back and look up the context in Hosea 11, he's talking not about a prediction about a coming messiah, he's talking about the calling of Israel out of Egypt at the time of the exodus. Matthew has seen in those words and in that exodus event a prefiguration of something that happens in the life of Jesus. Indeed, it suggests that now Jesus takes upon himself the whole destiny of Israel. Those are two examples of what Auerbach would call figural interpretation. Now, in figural interpretation, the intertextual semantic effects then flow both directions. The earlier text illuminates the later one and vice versa. There's a circular flow that goes on between them, but the temporally ordered sequence of those two poles requires that the understanding can always only be retrospective. It can only happen after the second event has occurred. You never could have anticipated it or gotten it ahead of time. With regards to the New Testament, this means that a figural Christological reading of the Old Testament is possible only looking backwards in light of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection. If that's right, and this is a very important point that I want to make tonight, if that's right, it would be a mistake to read the Law and the Prophets as though their authors were deliberately predicting events in the life of Jesus. Rather, in light of the unfolding story of Jesus, we're enabled to read backwards and to discover in the Law and in the Prophets an unexpected foreshadowing of the later story. I'm going to give you some examples in a few minutes where the New Testament writers themselves say something very much along these lines. In this book, Reading Backwards, I sought to demonstrate the distinctive ways in which each of the four gospel writers performs just this kind of retrospective looking backwards, figural reading of Israel's Scripture. They all do it. They all do it and all of them see Jesus prefigured in this way in the Old Testament. That finding sharpens the question of how we then should receive and evaluate such readings. Now, I'm a New Testament scholar. I often say that I spend a good deal of my time as a New Testament scholar explaining to other New Testament scholars things that are generally obvious to most Christians. For example, the leading German New Testament scholar Udo Schnelle writes that readings of this kind are simply illegitimate. We can't do it. We shouldn't do it. The gospel writers were wrong to do it. Why? Because, "The Old Testament is silent about Jesus Christ." Should we agree with that or should we agree instead with Martin Luther who wrote that the Old Testament is the swaddling clothes in which the Christ child is to be found by those who seek him? One of the ironies of this is that Udo Schnelle is the distinguished professor of New Testament at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, which is Luther's home university. Which of those forks in the road do we take? Further, if the New Testament writings represent the earliest stage in what Rowan Williams has called a century's long task of the reorganization of Israel's religious language, shouldn't we think that that task is now finished, say, with the closure of the canon? Or should we expect that we will continue somehow to participate in that task that the gospel writers began of discovering new, unexpected things in Israel's Scripture? Can or should we continue to practice figural readings of Scripture? Now, these are, of course, massive questions, massive. As I ponder how they might be addressed in a single short lecture, short enough for those of you who want to get home to see the second half of the game, I would say something similar to what the puzzled apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians on the topic of virgins. He said, "Now, concerning virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I'll give you my opinion as one, who by the Lord's mercy, is trustworthy." I'll give you my opinion. In the time we have together this evening, I'm going to give you my opinion about a few things. By the way, I've always loved it that we have this text that we regard as sacred Scripture in which the apostle says, "Now, on this topic, I don't have any command from the Lord, but I'll tell you what I think." Really interesting. What I want to do tonight, and this is now, you may want to glance on the outline on your handout. First, which is really part two on your outline, I want to give a couple of specific examples of ways in which Luke the evangelist reads backwards to generate figural readings. In other words, I'm going to take one gospel and just pull out a few little examples of how I see that gospel writer doing this kind of reading. Second, I want to offer you my opinion by giving you a series of proposals about the ways in which all four of the gospel writers, as interpreters of Scripture, might teach us to become more faithful readers. Then, third, in light of these proposals, I want to give you a single illustration of what I mean by talking about a fresh constructive figural reading of the Old Testament that is not found in the gospels or anywhere in the New Testament, but what would it be to go on doing the kind of reading that the gospel writers did. Fourth and last, I want to venture a concluding reflection about the theological foundation, the theological grounding that makes this kind of reading both possible and appropriate. That's plenty to do in the short time we have here this evening. First, we turn to discuss a few examples from the gospel of Luke of this kind of figural reading. In the final chapter of Luke's gospel, we meet two new characters who haven't shown up in the story before, Cleopas and an unnamed companion. They are despondently trudging away from Jerusalem towards the village of Emmaus. The crucifixion of their leader, Jesus, has dashed their hopes. They had dared to hope that he might be the urgently awaited messianic figure who had at last rescued Israel from oppression, but his swift and brutal execution by the Roman imperial forces had doomed that expectation or so they thought. Luke tells a story of exquisite dramatic irony in which these dejected disciples describe Jesus as a man, a prophet powerful in deed and word before God and all the people. Despite his prophetic powers, Jesus had been put to death by the chief priest and rulers and so they sadly lament, "But we had hope that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." The verb redeem there is lutrousthai, a Greek verb I'll come back and say something about a bit later. "We had hoped he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." Jesus replies and his reply for us reframes the whole story of Luke's gospel. He said to them, "O foolish and slow of heart to trust in all that the prophet spoke, weren't these things necessary for the messiah to suffer and to enter into his glory?" Then Luke says an amazing thing, "And beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he thoroughly interpreted for them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures." Now, remember, the Scriptures we're talking about here are not the gospels, which of course hadn't been written at the time of the day of Jesus's resurrection. The Scriptures are Israel's Scriptures. It's what we call the Old Testament. Now, that sketchy summary is very tantalizing because Luke doesn't go on to explain how all the Scriptures might be read as testimony to Jesus. He doesn't tell us the content of what Jesus taught on the road to Emmaus. Isn't that frustrating? Wouldn't you like to know? You could read the Acts of the Apostles and you'd find some of the hints there. The effect of this story is to bring us up short and send us back to the very beginning of Luke's gospel to reread the whole thing, to reread it in hopes of discerning more clearly how the identity and mission of Jesus might be prefigured in Israel's Scripture. That kind of rereading is also going to require us not just to reread Luke's gospel, but to go back and reread the Old Testament as well. This second reading of gospel and Scripture together will be a retrospective reading in light of the resurrection. We'll be reading backwards, seeking to find previously hidden figural correspondences between Moses and the Prophets and the mysterious stranger who chastises us for being slow of heart, for failing to discover these correspondences on our first reading. Bottom line, the dramatic irony of the Emmaus story implies that if we understand the scriptural witness about the messiah, we're going to perceive that he is much more than quote "a prophet powerful indeed in word before God and all the people” end quote. That is the true but limited preliminary understanding of Cleopas and his friend and it's an understanding that the veiled Jesus now seeks to correct. Yet, here we encounter what, to me, is an extraordinary layer of irony. It has become the conventional view of modern New Testament criticism that the gospel of Luke represents what is often called a low or primitive Christology. What that means, according to this view, is that Luke is portraying Jesus as a spirit-anointed prophet, a teacher of divine wisdom, and a righteous martyr, but lacking in Luke on this view are any doctrines of preexistence and incarnation. Lacking is any clear assertion of Jesus' identity with God. In short, most New Testament critics have ascribed to Luke a Christology exactly like that of the Emmaus travelers who simply say he was a great prophet. The irony of the Emmaus story suggests, however, that the Old Testament might actually provide clues to a deeper understanding of Jesus as a far more exalted figure indeed, as none other than the embodiment of Israel's God. I want to examine just a couple of these clues. These are just extracted out of my book. This is part of a longer chapter that gives lots more examples, but these are a few illustrations of what I mean. The first thing I want to look at is Luke 13:34. Jesus desires to gather Jerusalem under his wings. This text is on your handout. At a couple of places in the narrative, Luke's Jesus disconcertingly speaks as though from the divine perspective. The most striking example of this dramatic device appears in Jesus's lament in the midst of his journey to Jerusalem over the city in which he knows he will perish. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a bird gathers her brood under her wings? And you are not willing." Now, that image derives its particular poignancy from its resonance with a number of Old Testament passages in which it is Israel's God who is depicted metaphorically as a bird spreading wings to protect Israel. In Deuteronomy 32, God's care for Israel, here personified as Jacob in the wilderness, is compared to an eagle's care for its young. Again, on your handout, "He sustained him in a desert land and a howling wilderness waste. He shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of his eye, as an eagle stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, as it spreads its wings, takes them up and bears them aloft on its pinions. The Lord alone guided him. No foreign god was with him." There's a similar image that appears in Psalm 91 in the Psalmist's confident expression of trust in God as Israel's refuge. "You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty will say to the Lord, 'My refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust.' For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his pinions and under his wings, you will find refuge." Now, why is this important? With images like this shaping Israel's understanding of God's providential care, the hearer of Jesus's lament in Luke 13:34 will immediately be struck by two remarkable features of these sorrowful words. First, although Jesus is facing impending violence and death, he does not appeal to God to grant him the protection of God's sheltering wings. Instead, he casts himself, at least metaphorically, in the role of the God whose wings seek to shelter Jerusalem. Second, his lament portrays Jerusalem as rejecting the protection that he, Jesus, has repeatedly sought to give even though Luke's story makes no mention of any previous visits by Jesus to Jerusalem. Just as Israel in Deuteronomy 32 is portrayed as a stubborn people who've forgotten the God who gave them birth, so Jerusalem is said to have repeatedly rejected the protection that Jesus offers. Who then should we understand as the speaker in Luke 13:34? Who is it that wishes to have gathered Jerusalem under his wings? These daring words can hardly be the complaint of a rejected prophet. They're nothing other than a cry from the heart of Israel's God. It's God who desires to shelter Israel under his wings. The authority that's claimed here for Jesus belongs to a much bigger pattern of Luke's storytelling, a pattern in which Jesus is repeatedly said to offer powers and blessings that no one but God could offer. How is it that he can appoint disciples and give them authority over demons and diseases? How can he promise, after the resurrection, to send power from on high on his followers? And then in the dramatic opening scenes of the book of Acts, which will be celebrated, by the way, tomorrow in celebration of Pentecost in our churches, in those dramatic opening scenes of Acts, Jesus fulfills that promise by pouring out the Holy Spirit. Surely, even more than the power to forgive sins or the power to still storms, the power to send the Holy Spirit is a prerogative that belongs exclusively to God. In Peter's sermon on Pentecost, the solution to this riddle is made clear. The outpouring of God's spirit demonstrates that the risen Jesus is seated at God's right hand, where he possesses the divine authority that was prefigured in the mysterious words of Psalm 110. "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand.'" Simply put, Jesus has the authority to send the Spirit because, as David declared long ago, he is Lord. There's the closest possible binding together of Jesus's identity with the divine identity. In view of those sorts of observations and, if we had time, I could give you many more, I would hazard the following conclusion. The so-called low Christology that much New Testament criticism has perceived in Luke's gospel is an artificial construction that can be achieved only by ignoring or suppressing the relevance of the powerful the Old Testament allusions in Luke's story. It's therefore, precisely by attending more fully to these Old Testament texts within Luke's gospel, woven into Luke's gospel, that we gain a deeper and firmer grasp of the coherence between what Luke testifies in his story and what the church's later confessional tradition classically affirmed about the identity of Jesus as one with God the Father. Let's return then to Cleopas and his anonymous companion on the road to Emmaus. "We had hoped," they say dejectedly, "that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." Ho mellon lutrousthai tov Israel. The one who's going to redeem Israel. Their hope, however ill-informed, was not wrong. The plaintiff words of these Emmaus road trudgers point ironically and unerringly to the deepest truth about Jesus. He is the redeemer of Israel. Who, according to the scriptural witness, is the redeemer of Israel? The answer lies in a catena, a whole chain of texts from the book of Isaiah. I want you to read backwards with me and hear these texts afresh, recalling that the chief concern of this mysterious stranger on the road to Emmaus was to elucidate the ways in which, as Luke says, the things about himself are contained in all of Scripture, embedded in Scripture. There are several examples in Isaiah, but I just offer two illustrations. The first one from Isaiah 41:14, again, on your handout. "Do not fear, you worm, Jacob, you insect, Israel." I love this stuff. Don’t you? "'You worm, Israel. You insect, Israel. I will help you,' says the Lord. 'Your redeemer is the holy one of Israel.'" It's lutromenos, again, this same verb, the participial form here. "The one who redeems you is the holy one of Israel." Or again, Isaiah 43 verses 14 and 15, "Thus says the Lord, your redeemer," lutromenos. "Thus says the Lord, your redeemer, the holy one of Israel, 'For your sake, I will send to Babylon and break down all the bars and the shouting of the Chaldeans will be turned to lamentation. For I am the Lord, your holy one, the creator of Israel, your king.'" Who is the redeemer of Israel? The brilliant dramatic irony of Luke's Emmaus road scene nudges us inexorably towards a subtle but overwhelming conclusion. The two disciples are wrong to be discouraged, but they're right to have hoped for Jesus to be the one who would redeem Israel. In their blindness and their puzzled disappointment, they truly name Jesus's identity without realizing what they're saying or who they're talking to. For the redeemer of Israel is none other than Israel's God and Jesus, in truth, is the embodied unrecognized, but scripturally attested, presence of the One for whom they unwittingly hoped. There it is. Luke showing us an example of a way in which it's necessary to read backwards, to read the story. Notice the examples that I gave you are not like Matthew's gospel where Matthew steps out as the narrator and says, "This happened in order to fulfill what was written." Luke very subtly weaves these things into the story, but you don't get what he's saying unless you understand images like sheltering under the wings or being a redeemer of Israel as alluding to these particular Old Testament texts. In light of those examples and hundreds more that could be given from all four gospels, what would it mean if we took upon ourselves the task of trying to learn to read like that, of reading Scripture along with the evangelists? I want to offer you several points at which I think we stand to learn something from the paradigms that they offer. I want to suggest seven ways they might teach us how to read Scripture. Number one, simply to drive home the nail I've already been putting in place, a gospel-shaped hermeneutic necessarily requires us to read backwards, to reinterpret Israel's Scripture in a fresh way in light of the story of Jesus. That kind of reading is necessarily figural. It's a kind of reading that grasps correspondence between two events so that they freshly illuminate each other. That means that, for the gospel writers, what we would call the meaning of the Old Testament text is not confined to the human authors' original historical setting or to any meaning that could have been grasped by the original readers. Rather, Scripture is a complex body of texts given to the church, given to the community, by God and it is God who has scripted this whole complex drama in such a way that these texts have multiple senses, some of which were hidden from earlier readers. They come into focus only in retrospect. Number two, more specifically, Scripture has to be reinterpreted in light of the cross and resurrection. Now, there's no reason to be embarrassed about that because the gospel writers were convinced that the events of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection were, in fact, revelatory. These are not the kind of events that happened and people sat back and said, "Oh, right. I've been waiting for that to happen." No, these are totally unexpected events but they disclosed the mysterious key then to understanding all that had gone before. Of course, this involves reassessment. It involves transformation. What happens in the early church, after the resurrection, is that the community of Jesus followers goes back to reread Scripture under the guidance of the Spirit. When they do that, they experience again and again an “aha” experience, an "oh wow" experience. Their eyes are opened anew like the Emmaus road travelers to see how Moses and the prophets prefigure Jesus. As I've suggested, the gospel of John offers an account of exactly this kind of reading backwards in its interpretation of Jesus words about raising up the destroyed temple. Notice what he says in John 2:22, "After he was raised from the dead, after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken." It's really interesting. John insists it's only after the resurrection that they get it. It's like what John says about the Holy Spirit in Jesus's farewell discourse where Jesus says, "You can't understand it yet, but I'm going to send you another counselor, another advocate who's going to take these things and explain them to you." Luke paints a similar picture, as we've just seen in his resurrection appearance narratives, where it's only the risen Lord who opens the minds of the disciples to understand Scripture. Even Mark, even Mark, the most subtle and restrained of the four gospel narrators, shows us that it's only after the death of Jesus that any human character in the story, in this case, the Roman Centurion, first perceives Jesus's true identity as the Son of God. Point number three, similarly, the evangelists' diverse imaginative uses and transformations of the Old Testament texts summon us to what I would call a conversion of the imagination. We can hear this proclamation only if we allow these gospels to retrain us as readers, if we learn from them how to read, we'll approach reading Scripture with a heightened awareness of story, metaphor, prefiguration, allusion, echo, reversal, and irony. These authors are not writing prose like USA Today. They're writing complex poetic narratives. To read Scripture well, we have to bid farewell to a plotting literalism and rationalism and embrace a complex poetic sensibility. Let me tell you a story about one of my great teachers at Yale and later one of my colleagues, Brevard Childs. He was a very great Old Testament scholar who had huge influence on the way generations of people now have read the Old Testament. He had one particular student who loved Childs and was taking his classes, but no matter what he did, he would work hard, he'd turn in his paper, and he'd get a grade of B+. He was really frustrated. You know, I guess he wanted to go to graduate school or something. He finally made an appointment and he went in to see Mr. Childs and he said, "Mr. Childs, I'm so frustrated. I keep getting a grade of B+ on all these papers. What do I have to do get an A in your course?" The story goes that Childs sat back and looked at him and said, "You need to become a more interesting person." I was not that student in the story, therefore, I can't vouch entirely for its historical accuracy, but it makes the point. The gospel writers are trying to teach us to become more interesting people by teaching us to become more interesting readers. Fourth point, for the evangelists, Israel's Scripture told the true story of the world. Scripture was not merely a repository of ancient writings that contained important laws or ideas or images. It traced out, instead, a coherent storyline that stretched from creation through the election of Israel to the telos of God's redemption of the whole world. One significant implication of that is that we should, when we read Scripture, we should pay attention to the large narrative arcs, the sweep of the storyline rather than treating Scripture chiefly as a source of oracles or proof texts or laws, rather the evangelists who are, themselves, storytellers are much more interested in the Old Testament as story than as proof text or as law. Fifth point, the evangelists' retrospective reinterpretation of Israel's story is in no sense a negation or rejection of that story. It is, rather, the story's transfiguration and continuation. This is one of the features that marks off our canonical gospels from later writings, other extra canonical writings that actually start to ignore or even to repudiate Israel and Israel's God. The canonical gospel writers understand themselves to be standing within the continuously unfolding trajectory of Israel's covenant relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That means not only are these stories emphatically exclude the later Marcionite mutation of Christian theology, but also that in order to understand their account of who Jesus is, we have to stand within the framework of Israel's fierce loyalty to the one God of all the earth, a point to which I will return in the conclusion of this talk. Point number six, because the evangelists are so deeply immersed in Israel's Scripture, their references and allusions to it are characteristically metaleptic in character. Now, this is metaleptic, this is another of these $64 words. What it means simply is this. When they quote or allude to the Old Testament, they're nudging us not just to read the words that are quoted, but to say, "Where did that come from?" And to recover the wider context of what is quoted so that it creates a link to this wider textual frame. In many, many instances, if we do that, if you have one of these study Bibles that has the Old Testament references in the margin or at the bottom of the page, don't just say, "Oh, good. There's a quotation from Psalm 91." Go back and read Psalm 91 and ask, "How is that informing what's going on in the story of the gospel at this point?" It will transform the way you read, I think, hope. This adds important nuance to an otherwise flat surface reading. These kinds of hints make serious demands on the reader competence of the gospel's audience, but they also offer serious rewards for those with ears to hear. Now, I come at last, seventh, to the central substantive thesis that has emerged for me with increasing force the more I've tried to work my way into learning from the gospel writers how to read Scripture. Mark and I were talking about this over dinner. This isn't something I started into this project trying to defend or argue. It just emerged as I tried to trace the threads of how the gospel writers are using Scripture. Here's the thesis. The more deeply we probe the Jewish and Old Testament roots of the gospel narratives, the more clearly we come to see that each of the four evangelists, in their diverse ways, is identifying Jesus as the embodiment of the God of Israel. Now, that runs against the grain of a lot of scholarship which has supposed that the earliest and the most Jewish Christology is a low Christology, a Christology in which Jesus is a prophet, a teacher of wisdom, a proclaimer of the coming kingdom of God, but not a divine figure. The judgment of Bart Ehrman, for example, in a recent book expresses this typical position. Here's a quote from Ehrman, "The idea that Jesus was divine was a later Christian invention, one found among our gospels only in John." At least since the 19th century, it's been axiomatic among critical Biblical scholars that the high Christology of John's gospel is a late Hellenistic development and that the more one ignores John, focuses on the synoptic tradition, and locates Jesus within a monotheistic Jewish context, the more improbable if not impossible it would be to identify Jesus as divine. I've come to think that that couldn't be more wrong, that that is 180 degrees wrong, that on the contrary, it's precisely through drawing on Jewish and Old Testament images that all four gospels portray the identity of Jesus as mysteriously fused with the identity of God. When Jesus calms the storm and the disciples say, "Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" There's only one right answer to that question if you've read Israel's Scripture. Now, this is not to deny that the Jesus of the gospels is a human figure. On the contrary, the very same gospels that identify him as Israel's God simultaneously portray him as a man who hungers, suffers, and dies on a cross. By doing that, they create the stunning paradox that the church spent the next four centuries trying to figure out, trying to address these paradoxes in a way that would create a theological grammar that was adequate to respect the narrative tensions that are inescapably posed by the gospels. This is how we get the doctrine of the Trinity. The gospel narratives, precisely through their reading of the Old Testament to identify Jesus, force us to rethink what we mean when we say the word “God.” The word God cannot be understood, according to these stories, apart from the identification of Jesus as the embodiment and revelation of the identity of God. That means, among other things, that we should stop using the terms I've been using in this lecture of high Christology and low Christology to characterize the picture of Jesus in the gospels because the gospels have a Jesus who is fully divine and fully human. These very categories of high and low Christology presuppose an a priori philosophical account of the word “God” that contradicts what we find in the gospel stories. Well, that's enough theoretical reflection, but I want to draw to a close with what I promised you, which is a proposed fresh reading of a text that isn't ever quoted or alluded to in any direct way in the New Testament and ask what it might mean to read this story in light of this kind of figural hermeneutic I've been talking about. My example here is a passage from 2 Kings, 2 Kings 6. I want to get into that, as I've said we should read backwards, by starting one more time with Luke 24. At the conclusion of the risen Jesus's encounter with the Emmaus disciples, after Jesus has broken bread with them, the scene reaches its dramatic climax in a moment of recognition. It's what Greek dramatists would call anagnorisis, the moment when suddenly the light bulb goes on and there's a recognition. It says, "Then their eyes were opened." Auton de dienoichthsan oi ophthalmoi. "Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him and he vanished from their sight." Now, that story stands on its own and there's no overt allusion here to any Old Testament precursor, no formula text that says, "As it was written," et cetera. In view of Luke's thematic emphasis that Jesus fulfills the things written about him in all the Scriptures, might we hear here a faint allusion to a remarkable episode in the story of the prophet Elisha? Luke, by the way, offers a great many narrative parallels to this cycle of Elijah and Elisha's stories, but I don't have time to talk about that broader range tonight. I just want to talk about one. 2 Kings 6, Elisha finds his city surrounded by the hostile army of the King of Aran. Elisha's servant is dismayed and cries, "Alas, master, what shall we do?" Elisha mysteriously assures the servant that "there are more with us than there are with them." He then prays for God to open the servant's eyes. Then, 2 Kings 6 says, "So the Lord opened his eyes and he saw.” Kai dienoixen kurios tous ophthalmous autou kai eiden. It's the same verb for opened we've seen in Luke 24. "Opened his eyes and he saw and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha." Now, that motif of having blind eyes opened to perceive an overwhelming spiritual reality appears nowhere else in the Old Testament. You might have thought that this motif of having blind eyes opened to recognize the presence of the divine reality might be all over the place in the Old Testament, but it isn't. This is the only place it happens. If Luke's reference to the opening of the disciples' eyes in Luke 24 is indeed an echo of this text in 2 Kings, what would that add to our reading? For one thing, it might suggest that the hostility in Luke of the chief priest and leaders who are surrounding and fighting against Jesus, a circumstance perceived by Cleopas and his companion as an insuperable adversity, that that hostility was in fact a futile assault against the greater divine power that would ultimately guarantee the deliverance and triumph of Jesus. The chariots of fire of 2 Kings, by the way, did you know where the movie title came from? There it is. The chariots of fire of 2 Kings may dimly foreshadow the tongues of fire at Pentecost. They may perhaps also hint at the reason why the hearts of the disciples are said to have burned when their eyes were opened by the Lord. They were, unbeknownst to them, in the presence of a divine flame. Now, was Luke thinking all this? My proposed reading of this hypothetical faint echo, I think, goes far beyond anything that we can ascribe with any degree of confidence to Luke's authorial intentionality. Was Luke deliberately setting out to echo this story from 2 Kings 6? I'm not sure he was. I'm not sure he wasn't, but I'm not sure he was. Yet, in this case, the linkage sheds unexpected light on the story. The plodding Emmaus disciples, like Elisha's servant, are seeing the world through a veil of fear and discouragement, but when their eyes are opened by Jesus, the prophet like Elisha, the veil falls away and a fiery new world opens before them, disclosing the mighty power of God to save. Now, if all that be granted, at least for the moment, grant me as a poetic thought experiment, then we can hardly avoid noticing that this story in 2 Kings continues to a remarkable resolution. In response to Elisha's prayer, here's what happens. The Lord blinds the Aramaean soldiers so that they are taken captive and then opens their eyes. Kai dienoixen kurios tous ophthalmous auton. Opens the eyes to show them their predicament as prisoners of war. The king says to Elisha, "What do you want to do? Should we kill them?" Instead of having them slain, Elisha gives orders that they should be welcomed at table. Here's the end of the story. "And he sat before them a great feast and they ate and drank. And he dismissed them and they departed to their lord." Pros ton kurion auton. "And the bands of Syria came no longer into the land of Israel," 2 Kings 6:23. Strange denouement. Opening the eyes not only of the enemy soldiers, but of us as readers as well. Those who are enemies are blinded, disarmed, but then given new sight and welcomed at a feast precisely by the one they had sought to kill and newly at peace with God's people, they're sent to their lord. The semantic ripples you see run backwards and forwards from that table in the evening shadows at Emmaus, the strange story of Elisha's nonviolent triumph over his Aramaean enemies, now foreshadows the surprising and gracious victory of Jesus over his enemies. The opening of the soldiers' eyes perhaps prefigures not only the opening of the eyes of the Emmaus disciples, but perhaps also the opening of the eyes of the overthrown enemy, Saul, Paul, in Acts 9. Is that too fanciful? It suggests to me that this fanciful intertextual reading indicates how the Elijah and Elisha typology works in Luke-Acts. Jesus is not for Luke the new Elisha, nor does Luke claim that 2 Kings 6 is some sort of prediction that was fulfilled by Jesus. Nothing so over or mechanical, but nonetheless, on this reading, 2 Kings 6 may be one source that contains mysteriously hidden things about Jesus himself all the Scriptures. The intertextual connection consists of many fine threads variously colored and intricately woven and the interweaving yields a surprising pattern of fresh retrospective readings of Israel's Scripture, readings that, in turn, reframe and deepen our understanding of Jesus's identity so each text illumes the other in an unexpected way. I can't read 2 Kings 6 the same way anymore after reading Luke 24 and I can't read Luke 24 the same way anymore after reading 2 Kings 6, once again, reading it backwards. Brief conclusion. What's the basis? Theologically speaking, what's the basis that could justify this kind of reading that I've been talking about all night? It's this: The evangelists consistently approach Scripture with the presupposition that the God found in the stories of the Old Testament is living and active. It is for that reason and only for that reason that the kind of hermeneutics I've been describing can be embraced as truthful. It's not an exercise in literary fantasy like, say, trying to imagine ourselves into living inside the world of the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. I know there are people who do that, but it's not like that. Rather, all of the hermeneutical recommendations I've enumerated here makes sense for one reason. It's because God is the primary agent at work in and through the Biblical story, indeed only because God is in some sense the ultimate author of Israel's story. The one God, the one Lord, confessed in Israel's Shema, "Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord." That one Lord is the same God actively at work in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Apart from the truth of that claim, any talk of the unity of the Old Testament and the New Testament is simply nonsense and we're back with Udo Schnelle saying the Old Testament is silent about Jesus Christ. There's only one reason why Christological interpretation of the Old Testament is not a matter of stealing or twisting Israel's sacred texts. The reason is this. The God to whom the gospels bear witness, the God incarnate in Jesus, is the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Either that's true or it isn't. If it isn't, the gospels are a delusional and pernicious distortion of Israel's story, but if it true, then what I've been calling the figural literary unity of Scripture, the Old Testament and New Testament together, that unity is nothing other than the climactic fruition of this one God's self-revelation to us. As readers, we are forced to choose which of these hermeneutical forks in the road we will take. Thank you. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.