Hays Richard – Reading with the Grain of Scripture

Richard B. Hays – Reading with the Grain of Scripture

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells a parable about a landowner who finds that his field has unexpectedly produced a mixture of wheat and weeds. His workers ask whether they should pull out the weeds, but the owner decides to let them grow together with the wheat until the time of harvest, when the reapers will be instructed as follows: “Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matt 13:30b).

When I retired from the faculty of Duke Divinity School in the summer of 2018, I began the formidable task of weeding out multiple file cabinets full of correspondence, notes, manuscripts, and such. Much of it needed to be gathered into bundles—not to be burned, but to be consigned to the shredder for recycling. But as I sorted through this corpus mixtum of materials, it gradually occurred to me that amidst all the weeds, there were some stalks of wheat worth harvesting. The present volume of collected essays represents my attempt, at the end of a long career of teaching and writing, to harvest some of the wheat and gather it into the barn.1

The essays selected for inclusion in this collection span a period of twenty-five years, though the majority of them appeared in print since 2008. The pieces chosen here, all but one previously published, were singled out from the others in my file cabinets because they represent major themes of my work; they stake out positions I have taken on key controverted issues in the field of New Testament studies.2 More importantly, all these essays illustrate, in one way or another, how I have sought to carry out scholarly work as an aspect of discipleship—as a process of faith seeking exegetical clarity.

If it is true that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, and if it is true that Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day, it follows that all our reading and thinking must be reshaped by those truths. For the past forty years I have been seeking to learn how to read closely and faithfully the testimonies of the early authors who wrote about these world-shaking events. The essays gathered here are the fruit of my effort to listen carefully to their testimony-bearing texts.