A friend of mine pointed me to the following lectures by Richard B. Hays. If you are considering buying his newest book Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness these lectures cover the same material:
- Can the Gospels Teach Us How to Read the Old Testament?
- Torah Reconfigured: Reading Scripture with Matthew
- Turning the World Upside Down: Reading Scripture with Luke
- The Temple of His Body: Reading Scripture with John
- Opening Our Minds to Understand the Scriptures
Here is a quote from his Reading Backwards (page 4) that summarizes nicely is thesis in these lectures:
I want to suggest to you that we learn to read Scripture rightly only if our minds and imaginations are opened by seeing the scriptural text–and therefore the world–through the Evangelists’ eyes. In order to explore that hermeneutical possibility, we must give close consideration to the revisionary figural ways that the four Gospel writers actually read Israel’s Scripture…Here is a preliminary preview of what we will find as we pursue our exploration: the Gospels teach us how to read the OT, and–as the same time–the OT teaches us how to read the Gospels. Or, to put it a little differently, we learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and–at the same time–we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT.