WHEN the history of biblical scholarship within the twentieth and twenty first centuries involves be written, a powerful case will likely be made for seeing Richard B. Hays because the leading American New Testament scholar of his generation. The word “leading”, sometimes utilized in a vague, arm-waving fashion, is supposed here in its precise sense. Many careful and clever scholars have provided food for thought and further study. There are usually not so many who’ve opened doors that others had not even noticed, shining a light-weight down an unanticipated but exciting pathway, and enticing others to follow.
The reason why Richard Hays saw doors where others had only seen partitions owes a great deal to his particular combination of underlying theology and early training. Theologically, Richard recognised (as Reformed theology usually has long done) that an easy-going use of the phrase “justification by faith” could easily give the impression that “faith” — saying a prayer, coming to consider in Jesus, whatever — was a type of “work”: something which an individual “does” to earn God’s favour. For Paul, nevertheless, the vital move — the salvific motion — was not something “we” do, but something God does, in and thru the work of Jesus: the faithful work of Jesus.
This (formerly very much a minority) opinion, that pistis Christou might mean not “faith in the Messiah” but “the faithfulness of the Messiah”, tied in with Richard’s lifelong theological intuition that the connection between Israel’s scriptures and the New Testament is primarily one in every of continuity slightly than discontinuity, even when mapping that continuity is at all times a fragile and difficult business. All this amounts to a fresh pathway into Paul.
RICHARD was enabled to make this theological move through his early training, which was neither in theology nor in philosophy, but in literature. You don’t must read very far in his many books and articles to sense his lifelong love of poetry, plays, and novels. And at the guts of that could be a well-modulated sense of what stories are, and the way they work. So much Pauline exegesis in the center years of the twentieth century had targeting microscopic linguistic evaluation and the attempt to seek out parallels for this or that phrase or idea within the Greek culture of the time, all inside an assumed theological framework which owed much to the existentialist Lutheranism of Rudolf Bultmann.
Richard’s lifelong rejection of the Bultmannian framework (not least due to ways through which it allowed American scholars to take a seat loose to central teachings just like the resurrection of Jesus) was thus facilitated by his deep understanding that what mattered for Paul was not a set of abstract theological formulae, to be appropriated in a dehistoricised and non-narrative fashion, but precisely the story of Jesus — particularly of his crucifixion, and the ways through which that story related to the larger story of God’s dealings with Israel.
RICHARD had studied at Yale within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, when progressive Yale scholars like Hans Frei were reminding the Biblical Studies guild that the scriptures are primarily narrative, not encoded dogma. The resulting movement at all times ran the chance of manufacturing a latest type of ahistorical reading: just live inside this story, never mind whether or not it happened! But Richard didn’t take that route. Instead, migrating to Emory for his Ph.D., he was encouraged into the tactic of narrative evaluation popularised by the French scholar A. J. Greimas.
This, too, could have led into an abstract evaluation, detached from history. That it didn’t, but slightly brought remarkable illumination to Hays’s doctoral study of Galatians, is due once more to his combination of theological acumen and literary perception. When Paul was summarising the story of the gospel, in passages like Galatians 3.10-14 and 4.1-7, the fine-grained evaluation of how those micro-stories actually worked pointed back, so Richard argued, to the larger story of God and Israel: the story which was then focused specifically on “the religion” — that’s, the faithfulness — “of Jesus Christ”.
Without Richard’s dissertation, The Faith of Jesus Christ (published in 1983 and still in print), it’s doubtful whether the thought of Paul as a narrative theologian — and, inside that, the fresh reading of pistis Christou — would have made its way into mainstream translations and commentaries, where an entire latest way of understanding Paul has been opened up, and we’re still exploring the pathways it reveals.
RICHARD’s combination of theological insight and literary sensitivity emerges perhaps most strikingly in his other famous early work, and in its way more recent sequel: Echoes of Scripture within the Letters of Paul (1989), and Echoes of Scripture within the Gospels (2016). The key point here may be simply stated: when the early Christian writers echo, and even allude to, the scriptures they knew so well, they’re often doing way over proof-texting or providing decorative adornment for his or her arguments or narratives. They are demonstrably, in an amazing many passages, evoking the larger contexts through which not only citations but in addition echoes and allusions are to be found.
This is the literary trope of metalepsis, where an writer, gesturing to a different work (on this case, a New Testament author gesturing to Israel’s scriptures) is inviting the reader to grasp the larger context of that work as a part of the presently intended meaning. In the way in which Richard has developed it, metalepsis is way more than a clever way of hinting at extra points over and above what appears on the surface of the text. It has to do with the intended continuity between the larger narrative world of Israel’s scriptures, and the brand new world — and story — through which the early Christians believed themselves to be living as followers of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus.
These seminal ideas have been “leading” within the sense of pioneering latest ways of reading over-familiar texts, and thereby encouraging others to follow in similar ways, not simply (be it said) by agreement, but by fresh dialogue. Leadership at a distinct but vital level has also been provided by Richard’s commentaries, notably his Galatians within the New Interpreters Bible and his First Corinthians within the Interpretation series. And, if and when churches come to grasp that one cannot do ethics by slogans, as if all problems with behaviour were simply functions of binary political stances, then The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) will likely be there to assist them find a greater way, nuanced and multi-faceted as it should must be.
IN AND through all this work, Richard Hays has demonstrated that it shouldn’t be only possible but often clever and right to mix the critical instinct — refusing to take received opinions as a right; at all times able to read well-known texts in fresh ways — with a hermeneutic of trust. Suspicion is essential but, as Chesterton insisted, the purpose of an open mind, just like the point of an open mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Notoriously, a great deal of biblical scholarship (particularly but not at all exclusively in North America) has come from scholars whose relationship with the church — often particularly the church through which they grew up — has been, so to say, conflicted. This has produced an instructional climate through which almost any conclusion may be tolerated so long as it has the flavour of épater les bourgeois: of showing that “bizarre Christians” (particularly those fundamentalists, whether Catholic or Protestant, from whom the scholar wishes to distance him- or herself) are out of touch, backward-looking, socially or culturally inept.
The scholar who, while squarely facing all of the arguments and evidence, continues to consider in, and to follow, the crucified and risen Jesus, and to show the Bible from that perspective — while offering, as a creative scholar must, quite fresh angles of vision on well-known themes and texts — is facing a difficult task indeed. The climate of the times favours the hermeneutic of suspicion; Richard has many times stood up for trust. This shouldn’t be (as a sceptic might suppose) a matter of blind adherence to dogma. It has nothing to do with ignoring counter-arguments or awkward evidence. This is scholarship at its best. A latest generation, seeking to Richard Hays for such a lead, has taken courage and is making its way into latest and artistic areas.
TWO vignettes illustrate all this. At the Society of New Testament Studies annual meeting in 1998, Richard presented a paper which, against the then popular view that the Corinthians had understood Paul’s eschatological teaching only too well and had embraced an over-realised eschatology which Paul then needed to oppose, argued that in truth Paul was attempting to teach the Corinthians to think Jewishly, slightly than fit the gospel into their existing Hellenistic categories; and particularly to consider themselves because the renewed people of God, to reshape their identity in the sunshine of Israel’s scriptures.
As we left the session, I bumped into an old friend who had taught 1 Corinthians for a few years. “There are some conference papers”, he said, “that make you go away and alter a couple of footnotes here and there. There are others that make you tear up your entire lecture-course and begin again.”
AND then, on the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in 2016, a panel discussed Echoes of Scripture within the Gospels. The session was memorable for a lot of things, not least when Richard illustrated the ways through which poetic texts could possibly be adapted to latest situations by modifying the tip of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” in order that it now read:
And what rough beast, its hour come round finally,
Slouches towards Washington to be inaugurated?
which, in the sunshine of recent years, seems to have been greater than a bit of prophetic. But essentially the most dramatic moment got here when one in every of the participants pressed Richard as to why, in a piece of careful scholarship, he had allowed himself to wear his heart so obviously on his sleeve. Having argued rigorously throughout his book that every one 4 Evangelists, each in his own way, really does claim that Jesus was, and is, the embodiment of Israel’s God, he had concluded: “Either that’s true, or it shouldn’t be. If it shouldn’t be, the Gospels are a delusional and pernicious distortion of Israel’s story. If it’s true, then the figural literary unity of Scripture, Old Testament and New together, is nothing apart from the climactic fruition of that one God’s self-revelation. As readers, we’re forced to decide on which of those hermeneutical forks within the road we’ll take” (Echoes of Scripture within the Gospels, Baylor University Press, 2018).
Most people present knew that Richard had suffered a seriously life-threatening illness within the second half of 2015, and that he had made a very remarkable recovery. But the book had been accomplished when the likely prognosis was very grim. Richard’s response thus challenged those present — participants in the customarily avowedly “secular” academy of “biblical literature” — as to what these texts are really all about. “When I wrote that section,” Richard replied firmly, “I assumed it would well be the very last thing I’d ever write.”
Happily, it wasn’t. But that example gave fresh heart to many who were hoping and desiring to follow Richard in a life-path that will bring faith and scholarship along with full integrity, and work at the various questions that will then arise. Richard’s example, in life as in scholarship, has pointed the way in which and given hope.
The Rt Revd Dr N. T. Wright is Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity, within the University of St Andrews, and Senior Research Fellow of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
This is customized from the foreword to A Scribe Trained for the Kingdom of Heaven: Essays on Christology and ethics in honor of Richard B. Hays, edited by David Moffitt and Isaac Morales (Fortress Academic, 2021).
