Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel

Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness

In Reading Backwards Richard B. Hays maps the shocking ways the four Gospel writers interpreted Israelâ€™s Scripture to craft their literary witnesses to the Churchâ€™s one Christ. The Gospelsâ€™ scriptural imagination discovered inside the long tradition of a resilient Jewish monotheism a novel and revolutionary Christology.

Modernityâ€™s incredulity toward the Christian faith partly rests upon the characterization of early Christian preaching as a tendentious misreading of the Hebrew Scriptures. Christianity, modernity claims, twisted the Bible they inherited to fit its message about a mythological divine Savior. The Gospels, for many modern critics, are thus more about Christian doctrine in the second and third century than they are about Jesus in the first.

Such Christian â€œmisreadingsâ€ are not late or politically motivated developments within Christian thought. As Hays demonstrates, the claim that the events of Jesusâ€™ life, death, and resurrection took place â€œaccording to the Scripturesâ€ stands at the very heart of the New Testamentâ€™s earliest message. All four canonical Gospels declare that the Torah and the Prophets and the Psalms mysteriously prefigure Jesus. The author of the Fourth Gospel puts the claim succinctly: â€œIf you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about meâ€ (John 5:46).

Hays thus traces thereading strategies the Gospel writers employ to â€œread backwardsâ€ and to discover how the Old Testament figuratively discloses the astonishing paradoxical truth about Jesusâ€™ identity. Attention to Jewish and Old Testament roots of the Gospel narratives reveals that each of the four Evangelists, in their diverse portrayals, identify Jesus as the embodiment of the God of Israel. Hays also explores the hermeneutical challenges posed by attempting to follow the Evangelists as readers of Israelâ€™s Scriptureâ€”can the Evangelists teach us to read backwards along with them and to discern the same mystery they discovered in Israelâ€™s story?

In Reading Backwards Hays demonstrates that it was Israelâ€™s Scripture itself that taught the Gospel writers how to understand Jesus as the embodied presence of God, that this conversion of imagination occurred early in the development of Christian theology, and that the Gospel writersâ€™ revisionary figural readings of their Bible stand at the very center of Christianity.
Country USA
Manufacturer Baylor University Press
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2014-11-01
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Baylor University Press
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2014-11-01
Format	Kindle eBook

Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness

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