Reading with the Grain of Scripture: Resurrection, Canon, Community

Reading with the Grain of Scripture is a collection of Richard Hays’ most important essays on biblical interpretation published over the past twenty-five years. The studies gathered here range across the New Testament canon, dealing with the four Gospels, the historical Jesus, the letters of Paul, and the theologies of individual writings of the New Testament, including Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation. Taking a stand against the corrosive hermeneutics of suspicion that has characterized much late modern and postmodern criticism, Hays proposes a reading strategy centered on the resurrection of Jesus and the New Testament’s message of hope for God’s eschatological transformation of the world. Such an approach seeks to read with, rather than against, the grain of the biblical narratives and to discern the deep figural coherence between the Old Testament and the New. Most importantly, Hays’ close readings of the New Testament texts exemplify the practice of reading from a posture of trust, reading with and for the community of faith that these texts have birthed and sustained.