Hays’s study will be a work to use and to reckon with for every Pauline scholar and for every student of Paul’s use of Old Testament traditions. In Reading Backwards Hays demonstrates that it was Israel'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 writers' revisionary figural readings of their Bible stand at the very center of Christianity."A major work on hermeneutics. Hays also explores the hermeneutical challenges posed by attempting to follow the Evangelists as readers of Israel's Scripture-can the Evangelists teach us to read backwards along with them and to discern the same mystery they discovered in Israel's story? 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 thus traces the reading strategies the Gospel writers employ to "read backwards" and to discover how the Old Testament figuratively discloses the astonishing paradoxical truth about Jesus' identity. The author of the Fourth Gospel puts the claim succinctly: "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me" (John 5:46). All four canonical Gospels declare that the Torah and the Prophets and the Psalms mysteriously prefigure Jesus. As Hays demonstrates, the claim that the events of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection took place "according to the Scriptures" stands at the very heart of the New Testament's earliest message.
Such Christian "misreadings" are not late or politically motivated developments within Christian thought. 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. Christianity, modernity claims, twisted the Bible they inherited to fit its message about a mythological divine Savior.
Modernity's incredulity toward the Christian faith partly rests upon the characterization of early Christian preaching as a tendentious misreading of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Gospels' scriptural imagination discovered inside the long tradition of a resilient Jewish monotheism a novel and revolutionary Christology. Hays maps the shocking ways the four Gospel writers interpreted Israel's Scripture to craft their literary witnesses to the Church's one Christ.
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