Another book I recently read is this rather beautifully written work by Richard B. Hays
an American New Testament scholar and Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.

He addresses a question that I have pondered over for many years: the gospels and the letters of Paul claim that the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection took place ‘according to the Scriptures’, namely that the Torah, Prophets and Psalms mysteriously speak of the Christ who was to come in Jesus.

Hays’ discussion is based on a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 2014 and now combined in this single work. So his intended audience is academic rather than the man in the street.

In a sense the book can be seen as a sustained commentary on Jesus’ words in John 5:46

If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.

Hays asks some profound questions on p 93:

‘What could John the Evangelist mean by advancing such an audacious claim? In what sense can Moses be said to have written about Jesus? And what would it mean for us to believe that such an assertion might be true? What sort of hermeneutical landscape might open before us if we learned 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?’

The key to an answer is Hays’s model of “figural reading.” Hays offers examples of how the New Testament teaches us to read the Old Testament. Hays states that, “The Gospels teach us to read the OT for figuration” (p. 15). He contends that “the Gospel writers summon us to a conversion of the imagination,” and that “we will learn to read Scripture rightly only if our minds and imaginations are opened by seeing the scriptural text . . . through the Evangelists’ eyes” (p. 4). For Hays ‘figuration’ is not the same as prediction. Recognizing figuration is always a retrospective exercise, “the discernment of unexpected patterns of correspondence between earlier and later events or persons within a continuous temporal stream” (p. 93).

Here is the crucial substance of Hays argument:

A figural christological reading of the OT is possible only retrospectively in light of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Thus, from the perspective of figural interpretation [the central contention of Hays’ book], it would be a hermeneutical blunder to read the Law and the Prophets as deliberately predicting events in the life of Jesus. But in light of the unfolding story of Jesus, it is both right and illuminating to read backwards and to discover in the Law and the Prophets an unexpected foreshadowing of the later story.

Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness by Richard B. Hays, p. 94.

I purchased this book from Amazon with a mind open to the possibility that there was after all a convincing scholarly solution to the problem I had stumbled across long ago, namely: that on a historical and contextual reading (ie without Christian presuppositions) no one would have read the texts the gospels cite, allude to, or echo as pointers to the promised Messiah, let alone as pointing to a future person who would embody Israel’s God. A well known example is Hosea 11:1 as cited in Matthew 2:15.

Do I find Hays’ scholarly arguments persuasive? I have to honestly report that No, I do not. Look again at Jesus’ words in John 5:46:

If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.

Moses actually wrote about Jesus! This is the claim that John places on the lips of Jesus. But where is the evidence in Moses? Where does he plainly write of the One who is to come, the Incarnation of Israel’s God? Where does Moses mention Jesus’ life, death and resurrection? Nowhere that I can see. Exegesis does not give us the NT faith. But eisegesis definitely does! Eisegesis, as a wag once put it, is pronounced “I see Jesus”.

Definition: ‘Eisegesis is the process of interpreting text in such a way as to introduce one’s own presuppositions, agendas or biases. It is commonly referred to as reading into the text.’ source

If the eisegesis as practiced by the NT writers is a true and acceptable hermeneutic then Christianity is true in its claims to be the fulfillment of Israel’s scriptures. Contrary to Hays, the NT does indeed claim that the OT predicts in advance its conceptualisation of the Messiah Jesus. But in reality, the NT only succeeds by reading its Christology and soteriology into the Hebrew Bible. Many people will find this procedure morally unacceptable and unpersuasive. Jews have for most of the past 2000 years protested against this figural reading of their Scriptures. I am inclined to sympathise with them.

Themelios has an interesting review by a fellow evangelical scholar

Categories: Christianity, Jesus, New Testament scholarship, Recommended reading