Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels by Richard B. Hays

Like Hays, John Piper (as one example) is also fervently committed to preserving an ongoing place in redemptive history for ethnic Israel - but never, for Piper, at the expense of disparaging divine revelation. But he has never, to my knowledge, rescinded these bold accusations made in 1996. Now, he does tone down this language a little in his later books (compare to his 2016 book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 350). The Gospel of John really does adopt a stance toward Judaism that can only engender polemics and hostility. One shudders to contemplate the ethical outworking of such a theological perspective on the Jews. The conclusion of verse 47 articulates the chilling logic of this position: the reason they do not hear the word of God is that they are not from God. The Jews who do not believe must be children of the devil. John makes a fateful theological step: from the empirical fact of the unbelief of the Jews. The dialogue is the most deeply disturbing outburst of anti-Jewish sentiment in the New Testament. Nowhere in John’s Gospel does the superheated animosity toward the Jews come to more vigorous expression than in chapter 8. From this text, in his 1996 book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Hays comes right out and accuses the Gospel of John of anti-Semitism, saying: Specifically, this becomes problematic when Hays addresses John 8:39–47. Israel has yet to play a role in God’s redemptive plan, and this correct impulse leads him to make some horribly incendiary statements that subvert the authority of John’s Gospel when it depicts the unbelief of Israel. Hays is fervently committed to preserving ethnic Israel. (A friend recently asked for my thoughts and encouraged me to share these thoughts online, so here it goes.) Qualification 1 By airing them in the open, I think it will help timid readers read with greater aspiration and discretion.

Hays’s books, I think it’s helpful to keep a pair of qualifications in mind at all times.

Also of benefit are his older books The Conversion of the Imagination (2005), and Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1993). There are a lot of reasons to read his books, and I have profited from four of them in particular: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016), an incredible book I took on summer vacation last year for a season of focused immersion on the life and words of Christ, and Reading Backwards (2014), a smaller version of the 2016 book. Richard Hays is a professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, a distinguished theologian, a prolific author, and a skilled stylist of theological prose - a rich combination of strengths.

Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels by Richard B. Hays