In an interview by Westminster Theological Centre, Richard B. Hays, Dean and George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, talked about his recent book Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness.
The book is a response to strand of New Testament criticism since the Enlightenment which says that:
…Jesus was a simple Galilean prophet…and it wasn’t until two generations later or more that the Church began to develop these notions of Incarnation and Jesus as being somehow consubstantial with God and this represents an acute Hellenization and mythologizing of Christianity and it’s a corruption of the original simple Jesus of history.
Hays’ book argues that this view is “just wrong” and that the earliest accounts of Jesus evoked the Old Testament to prove that Jesus was the God of Israel. The events of the New Testament are harkening and referencing back to parts of the Old Testament that confirm the divinity of Jesus. These passages would be familiar to not only the authors of the particular Gospels but also the early Christians themselves.
Hays is also critical of the idea that we should expect the Gospels, written later than the letters of St. Paul, should have a “higher” Christology than the explicit claims of the epistles. In 21st century, Hays says we tend to have an “evolutionary” or “Victorian” model inherited from 19th century biblical criticism that “history is moving into higher and more exalted insights into the truth.”
His next work will be a more comprehensive examination of the use of the Old Testament by the authors of the New Testament.
The entire interview can be watched here.
Comment by Palamas on January 9, 2015 at 1:40 pm
Good for Richard Hays. Nice to hear that someone in mainline theological academia is calling out the hogwash for what it is.
Comment by Horatio Hornblower on January 9, 2015 at 11:45 pm
its a good book. watched some lectures on you tube