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Gunning Lectures 2011-12
Professor Richard B Hays, Dean and George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament, Duke Diviity School, Durham, North Carolina will talk on:
"Israel's Scripture through the Eyes of the Gospel Writers"
- Lecture 1: "Can the Gospels Teach Us How to Read the Old Testament?"- 4 pm, Monday, 16 January, Martin Hall
- Lecture 2: "Unexpected Echoes: Reading Scripture with Mark" - 4 pm, Tuesday, 17 January, Martin Hall
- Lecture 3: "Torah Reconfigured: Reading Scripture with Matthew"- 4 pm, Thursday, 19 January, Martin Hall
- Lecture 4: "The One Who Redeems Israel: Reading Scripture with Luke"- 4 pm, Monday, 23 January, Martin Hall
- Lecture 5: "The Temple of His Body: Reading Scripture with John" - 4 pm, Tuesday, 24 January, Martin Hall
- Lecture 6: "Retrospective Reading: The Challenges of Gospel-Shaped Hermeneutics" - 4 pm, Thursday, 26 January, Martin Hall
In this year’s Gunning Lectures, Professor Richard Hays will investigate the surprisingly different ways in which the four Gospel writers interpreted Israel’s Scripture, and he will ask what it might mean for us to attempt to read Scripture along with them, through their eyes.
One reason for modernity’s incredulity towards the Christian faith is the charge that Christian proclamation rests upon twisted and tendentious misreadings of the Hebrew scriptures. These alleged misreadings are not late or incidental developments within Christian thought; rather, the claim that the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection took place “according to the Scriptures” stands at the heart of the New Testament’s 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: in his narrative, Jesus declares, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” (John 5:46). But modern historical criticism characteristically judges, to the contrary, that the New Testament’s christological readings of Israel’s Scripture misrepresent the original sense of the texts.
This finding has created a cluster of quandaries for Christian theology. Why do the Gospel writers read the scriptures in such surprising ways? Does Christian faith require the illegitimate theft of someone else’s sacred texts? The lectures will highlight the “conversion of the imagination” engendered by the Gospel writers’ revisionary readings of biblical texts and explore the challenges posed by attempting to follow the Evangelists as readers of Israel’s Scripture.
This article was published on Jan 4, 2012