The Upper Register

Review of Wagner, Heralds of the Good News, Pt 2

I mentioned in Part 1 of this review that, while I liked J. Ross Wagner's approach to Paul's use of Isaiah, I had some disagreements with other aspects of Wagner's thesis. My disagreements were triggered early on when I came to his view that Romans 1:16-17, as the thematic statement of Romans, asserts God's covenant faithfulness toward Israel, and through Israel, to the Gentiles. He writes:

In this compact sentence, Paul asserts that the "righteousness of God" -- that is, God's faithfulness to rescue his covenant people Israel and to vindicate them before their oppressors -- is revealed in what God has now accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The promises of redemption and restoration for Israel are at long last being realized. Moreover, the benefits of Israel's redemption are available to Jew and Gentile alike on precisely the same basis. Paul unpacks the significance of these claims in the chapters that follow (p. 44).

Wagner does not attempt to prove this definition of "the righteousness of God" in Paul but relies on other scholars whom he cites in a footnote, including James D. G. Dunn, E. P. Sanders, Richard B. Hays, Ernst Käsemann, and Peter Stuhlmacher. 

Now one can have a legitimate disagreement over the proper exegesis of Romans 11, especially the phrase, "all Israel shall be saved" (Wagner takes it, unsurprisingly, as a future large-scale conversion of Jews to Christ), without making the additional major claim that Wagner and other scholars identified with the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) generally make. This additional major claim is that the entire Epistle to the Romans is to be subsumed under the thematic statement of God's covenant faithfulness. So not only does Wagner interpret Rom 11:26 as predicting a future conversion of national Israel, because of his take on Rom 1:16-17, he reductionistically makes this the theme of the whole epistle! 

At this point, I should point out something that really annoys me. Wagner, like many NPP scholars, quotes Rom 1:16-17a but leaves out 17b, which says, "... as it is written, 'He who is righteous by faith shall live.'" He literally has ellipses (...) at the end of 17a ("for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith ...") (p. 44). As Francis Watson points out in Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, the statement of Paul concerning the righteousness of God in 17a is generated by the Scripture quotation in 17b, and the lexical linkage between the two (the noun "righteousness" [dikaiosyne] and the adjective "righteous" [dikaios]) demands that the verse be read as a whole and in fact constitutes rather strong evidence against the "covenant faithfulness of God" interpretation. For how, on this view, should the adjective be interpreted? "For in it the covenant faithfulness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, 'He who is covenantally faithful by faith shall live'" just doesn't make any sense. The only way it could perhaps be given a shred of tolerable sense would be to interpret "he who is dikaios" as a reference to Christ himself, a view that was held by some commentators but which is generally not considered to be a truly likely option given Paul's emphasis in Romans on sinners being "righteous by faith." In other words, if Rom 1:16-17 is the thematic statement, then it should correspond to the way that thematic statement is explained later in Rom 1-5, which clearly has to do with individuals being justified by faith, i.e., "righteous by faith."

The NPP approach to Romans makes the issue of Israel's corporate future in chapters 9-11 the climax of the argument to which the individual soteriological concerns of chapters 1-8 are subordinated. The central concerns that Luther and Calvin saw in the text -- how can unrighteous sinners be accepted before God and escape divine wrath? -- are regarded as less interesting and less important than the corporate questions of God's faithfulness to his covenant people and the redefinition of that covenant people in Christocentric terms so as to allow for Gentile inclusion without the need for observing the Jewish ceremonial law.

Wagner's indebtedness to the NPP is also evident throughout this work in other ways. For example, he says that he agrees with E. P. Sanders's claim that Judaism was not a legalistic religion and that therefore what Paul was concerned with in his polemic against "works" was not legalism but Jewish exclusiveness as evidenced in its insistence on the "boundary markers" of the Sabbath, the kosher laws, and circumcision (pp. 122-23 note 10).

Accents strongly characteristic of the NPP also come strongly to the fore in Wagner's exegesis of Rom 9:30--10:4 (pp. 152-55). He argues that what Paul faults is not Israel's pursuit of the Law, but her pursuit of the Law in such a way as to miss the telos (= goal) of the Law, which is Christ. Israel failed to see that the goal of the Law was Christ, and so they pursued the law in the wrong manner, that is, by works (i.e., with a spirit of excluding Gentiles by being zealous for the boundary markers), rather than by faith. They were attempting to establish "their own righteousness," in a corporate sense, a righteousness that Israel could boast in as a corporate entity in distinction from the Gentiles, rather than submitting to "the righteousness of God" revealed in Christ, that is, God's plan of being faithful to his covenant people through the death and resurrection of Christ and thereby extending covenant inclusion to the Gentiles.

This is all standard NPP stuff -- see Dunn and Wright. Wagner's unique spin is to see these themes adumbrated in Isaiah's call to Israel in Isaiah 8 and 28-29 to trust in God rather than enter into treaties with foreign nations to stave off God's judgment. In fact, God, according to Isaiah, would bring ultimate deliverance to Israel only as she submitted to God's strange ways (e.g., being punished temporarily by oppressive Gentile regimes such as the Assyrians). According to Wagner, Paul's explicit use of Isa 28:16 + 8:14 ("Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling") in Rom 9:33 is calculated to spark an implicit allusion to these broader Isaianic themes:

Just as God's dealings with foreign nations -- particularly his choice of Assyria as an instrument to discipline his own people -- scandalized the majority of Israel in Isaiah's day, so now the gospel Paul proclaims to the Gentiles has caused Israel to stumble badly. Whereas Israel had long associated God's righteousness with the markers of the covenant (pursuing the Law ex ergon), Paul now proclaims the news that in Christ God's righteousness is extended to Jew and Gentile alike on the same basis of faith. For Israel to hang on to its covenant markers now and to refuse to recognize God's acceptance of Jews and Gentiles solely on the basis of pistis would be to reject God's righteousness in favor of "their own righteousness" (pp. 154-55).

The Isaiah insights aside, this is a strongly NPP reading of a key text, Rom 9:30--10:4. Perhaps the Isaiah insights could be rescued and reformulated along more Old Perspective lines, but that is not my concern in this review.

In sum, Wagner's dissertation has some valuable and helpful things to say about Paul's use of Isaiah, not just the explicit quotations but Paul's allusions to broader Isaianic themes. Yet the book is marred by Wagner's reliance on the NPP as a grid for interpreting key texts.

Hurtado's The Earliest Christian Artifacts

In a recent post, I quoted from Larry Hurtado's book, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins. Here is a helpful review by Jim Hamilton that highlights the main topics and arguments of the book. (HT: Justin Taylor)

I just finished reading the book a few days ago and found it very stimulating and exciting. It is exciting because these manuscripts give us a rare window into the earliest period of post-apostolic church history, ca. 100-300, and bring that period alive to us so that we can almost literally touch it. Through these ancient manuscripts of Scriptural texts (both OT and NT), we are able to get some idea of what Christians of this time were thinking at least in terms of their fixation on sacred Scripture.

Implications for the Canon

From the physical textual remains, both in terms of quantity and physical layout, we can also get an idea of how they viewed various non-canonical or apocryphal Christian writings. For example, we can discern that the mainstream 2nd-3rd centurdy church focused primarily on the four Gospels that we now regard as canonical, as well as the Pauline letters, and perhaps a Johannine corpus. But the apocryphal "gospels" and other early Christian writings, many of them pseudepigraphical, were viewed differently. There are manuscripts in which all four Gospels (or the Gospels + Acts) appear to have been collected together into a single codex, but none that have a different selection in which, say, Matthew and the Gospel of Thomas are bound together. The Gospel of Thomas only occurs as a separate stand-alone entity, and even then it occurs not exclusively in the codex form but also in the scroll format, a format that the early Christian scribes never used for texts they regarded as Scripture. Books like the Gospel of Thomas and the Shepherd of Hermas appear to have been viewed as edifying but non-inspired religious literature.

Implications for personal Bible reading

One thing that surprised me was the evidence that some codices of NT books or book collections appear, based on their small dimensions, to have been made for portable private use. I have often heard it said, and have probably even repeated it myself, that the early Christians only had access to Scripture by hearing it read in public worship. Hurtado's arguments should give us pause before we repeat that claim. He, of course, recognizes that there are also extant manuscripts which are larger and which give indications of having been prepared for public reading. Nevertheless, if some early Christians also had personal copies of Scripture, then we should be careful not to exaggerate the differences between ourselves and the early Christians. We aren't all that different in terms of our piety of Bible-reading. The main difference would seem to be that all Christians now have access to the totality of the canon, whereas various early Christians may have had access only to portions of it, depending on their location. Nevertheless, the core of the NT canon, the four Gospels, Acts, and the Pauline collection, were widely disseminated throughout the Empire, as evidenced by the fact that most of these manuscripts were discovered in Egypt.

Implications for Jesus devotion

I also appreciate Hurtado's perspective that the early Christian fixation with Scriptural texts, especially the Gospels, was part of their Jesus devotion. This is evidenced by the fact that the Christian scribes used various contractions when writing the names of Jesus (Iesous, Christos, Kyrios) as they occurred in the text, contractions that were also used for names of God (theos, Kyrios), thus indicating a binitarian theology in which Jesus was exalted as divine. In addition, whenever the noun for "cross" (stauros) or the verb "to crucify" occurred, they made a tau-rho in the contracted version as a way of visualizing the crucified Jesus, where the tau symbolized the cross and the loop of the rho represented Jesus' head on the cross.  From these sorts of features evidenced in the earliest Christian manuscripts, Hurtado concludes that the Gospels were viewed as "Jesus books" and early Christian devotion to Jesus was promoted by the preoccupation with the Gospels, especially Matthew and John. The early Christians constantly read the Gospels, in both private and public worship. They did so, not merely to learn the facts of Jesus' life or to be instructed in what is expected of disciples of Jesus, but in order, through prayerful meditation on the Gospel texts, to adore Christ himself. 

Martin Hengel 1926–2009

I know I'm a little late on this, but I have to note Professor Hengel's passing because of his indirect influence on me via my advisor, Don Hagner. I never met Professor Hengel, but Dr. Hagner knew him well and spoke glowingly of him, particularly his carrying on of the Schlatter tradition of NT scholarship that wedded the historical-critical method to a believing stance toward the NT.  According to Dr. Hagner, Hengel had a picture of Schlatter hanging in his study.

One of Hengel's sharpest students, Roland Deines, has a good obituary on the SBL site.

Here's a round up of more obits and remembrances.

David Neff has a good piece in the CT blog, The Champion Who Debunked Bultmann.

Also, Justin Taylor has an excellent quote by Larry Hurtado (summarizing the same sentiment that Dr. Hagner has expressed) and a link to an interview Hengel did last year for CPX.

Hengel was part of the evangelical revival at Tübingen, along with Peter Stuhlmacher and Otfried Hofius. Dr. Hagner was a visiting scholar there sometime in the 80s I believe, where he got to know Stuhlmacher and Hengel personally and became good friends with them. He is deeply influenced by their approach to NT scholarship.

Dr. Hagner tells a story of one of his visits to Germany for a NT conference at which Hengel was a speaker. Afterward, on the train ride home he overheard some German scholars of a more radical critical bent complaining of the "fundamentalism" that had lamentably taken over the NT faculty of the once-great Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (remember, modern historical-critical NT scholarship basically starts with F. C. Baur at Tübingen in the 19th century).

Another Hagner-told Hengel story. Hengel was a great proponent of ironically using the historical method against those who purported to use it to attack Christianity or the reliability of the NT.So once, when asked about some recent sensational claim (I don't remember which one, maybe it was something from the Jesus Seminar), he raised his right hand repeatedly and brought it down in a swinging motion, "Es ist nicht wissenschaftlich! Es ist nicht wissenschaftlich!" spoken in harsh teutonic tones with the word nicht emphasized.

My other mentor at Fuller, Dr. Seyoon Kim, also has great respect for Hengel and Stuhlmacher, not only in terms of method, but in their approach to Paul as well. Hengel's book The Pre-Christian Paul (co-authored with Roland Deines) is brief but very helpful.

When the Fuller NT faculty was looking to hire an experienced NT professor, Roland Deines was the candidate that Dr. Hagner wanted most, because it would have promoted his dream of Fuller becoming a kind of American Tübingen at least in the field of NT studies. I didn't work out and Joel Green was hired instead. Joel Green is a competent evangelical NT scholar doing good work in the NT use of the OT, but he doesn't seem as interested in carrying on the kind of detailed work with the sources of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity that Hengel was renowned for (and Deines as his protege). Another reason the choice of Green over Deines is disappointing is that Green is not clear and firm on the doctrine of substitionary atonement as Hengel was.

I think Hengel's legacy will ultimately be his example as an evangelical Christian who was a scholar of the heavyweight category. He took the time to master the primary sources in the original languages. If you want to be inspired to make that sort of linguistic effort, read Hengel's 2001 piece in Christianity Today exhorting today's young evangelical scholars to master the sources of ancient Judaism, Greco-Roman literature, and the church fathers.

Well, a great scholar has run the race and finished the course and gone to his reward. He will be missed by many.

Which books of the Bible should we read?

I think we need to read the Bible more.

Everyone, I'm sure, will agree. But in spite of our good intentions, we struggle with Bible reading. Here's what happens to me. I get convicted that I'm not reading the Bible as much as I should, especially devotionally. So I start with one of the many "read the Bible in a year" plans. Some have you read straight through in canonical order. Others, mercifully, break the canon up into four parallel tracks so that you are reading from various portions of Scripture, both OT and NT any given day or at least throughout the week.

But the problem is I always get stuck somewhere in Deuteronomy. 

I think that we just have to admit to ourselves that not all of the Bible is equally helpful spiritually. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't read the entire Bible. It's a Christian duty to be familiar with it all, including the dry historical parts. Every Christian should read the entire Bible at least once, and hopefully much more than once, in their lifetime.

My point is there is a difference between reading the entire Bible in order to get the whole story and reading the Bible for daily spiritual nourishment. We tend to confuse the two goals or tasks. I'll call them "canonical Bible reading" and "devotional Bible reading." Canonical Bible reading is very often dry, historical, and close to academic in the sense that we are trying to learn the contents of Scripture. Devotional Bible reading has a different agenda -- the goal is not learning so much as being spiritually nourished and encouraged. The goal is the daily strengthening of our faith, hope and love. We do devotional Bible reading, not to learn the list of the kings of Israel and Judah, but to be convicted of sin and brought to repentance, to be spurred on to greater conformity to Christ, and to commune with the Father through the Mediator by his Spirit.

If this is the case, then we should focus our devotional Bible reading on the books of the Bible that are most suited to spiritual nourishment. Of course, I know Paul says that "all Scripture" is profitable, and I'm not denying that. But even Paul quoted certain books more than others, and rarely or never quoted others. I have recently grown in my appreciation for that gem, the Book of Esther. It has some lovely things to teach us about the providential care of God for his people. But neither Paul nor any other NT writer quotes it or alludes to it.

The early Christians seemed to have had a similar practice of emphasizing certain books of the Bible.

Larry Hurtado, Professor of NT Language, Literature and Theology at the University of Edinburgh, has provided some interesting information about the earliest Christian manuscripts, that is, those which appear to have been copied and used within Christian communities (as opposed to Jewish, pagan, or Gnostic groups) prior to AD 300. Although there were other texts copied and used besides Scripture (e.g., the Shepherd of Hermas was very popular), the following are the top eleven texts based on the number of manuscripts (or surviving portions of manuscripts) that we have for that Scriptural book. Again this is for manuscripts dated pre-300, that is, the first two centuries of post-apostolic church history (ca. 100-300):

Psalms (18)
John (16)
Matthew (12)
Genesis (8)
Exodus (8)
Luke (7)
Acts (7)
Isaiah (6)
Revelation (5)
Romans (4)
Hebrews (4)

Professor Hurtado comments:

"The popularity of the Psalms surely occasions no surprise. Other evidence indicates that the Psalms were cherished and pondered by Christians from earliest days. Importantly, the Psalms are the most frequently cited portion of the Old Testament in the New Testament" (p. 28).

"It occasions no real surprise ... that witnesses to Matthew and John outnumber those for any other Christian writing .... These two seem always to have been the favorite Gospels in Christian usage, both liturgically and in private devotion" (p. 30).

Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Eerdmans, 2006).

The rest of the books listed above -- Genesis, Exodus, Luke and Acts, Isaiah, Revelation, Romans, and Hebrews -- are also foundational for Christian belief, worship, and practice. Of course, the manuscript counts are in no small measure influenced by the historical accidents of manuscript preservation and discovery. Nevertheless, it is not a bad list of the top books that we as Christians should read most often, meditate on, and become most familiar with. In particular, I wonder how it would help us spiritually if we made the top three -- Psalms, John, Matthew -- the focus of our devotional reading.

The spiritual benefit of the Psalms is pretty obvious -- it provides us with language for prayer, lament, confession of sin, thanksgiving and praise. The Gospels of John and Matthew are also very helpful spiritually in focusing our attention on the person of Christ, his words and deeds, and ultimately the passion narrative. The Gospel of Matthew has much valuable teaching for disciples of Jesus organized in large chunks but interspersed throughout the narrative of the life and ministry of Jesus. The Gospel of John has a mystical quality to it that draws us into a sense of union with Christ, the one who came down from heaven, sent by the Father, to reveal the Father and give us eternal life. Both Gospels have a strong emphasis on the deity of Christ, not merely in terms of proof-texts, but in terms of the way they attempt to persuade us that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that we must follow him in faith, trust and commitment.

I have personally found it helpful to listen to the Bible on my iPod during my daily commute. I use the ESV Hear the Word Audio Bible read by David Cochran Heath and produced by Crossway Bibles. It is helpful to listen to large portions of Scripture at a time, e.g., I listened to Matthew 1-8 on my way home from work a couple of days ago. The Sermon on the Mount is magnificent, but it takes on added meaning when heard in its broader narrative context.

However you choose to do it, "let the word of Christ dwell in you richly." And don't feel guilty if you make certain books more central to your devotional Bible reading than others. The book of Leviticus is terribly important theologically for understanding the New Testament, due to its foundational theology of atonement, so you should definitely read it, but it is not so crucial for your growth in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that you must read it once a year.

Faith: accept no substitutes

In Philippians 2:5-11 Paul quotes an ancient Christian creed that dramatically rehearses the central events of the historia salutis:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (ESV).

Do we believe that this grand, cosmic drama really happened in this world, in our world, and that Jesus really is God’s obedient and exalted bond-servant? It may seem easy to believe the basic facts of the gospel. How hard is that? And yet, when you reflect on it further, you realize how little we really do believe. We go about our daily lives, going to work, taking care of our kids, watching TV, surfing the web, listening to our iPods, Facebooking and Twittering, and so on. But how firmly do we really believe these amazing, earth-shattering facts? We spend so much of our lives acting as if, for all practical purposes, these things are not true, or at least only true in some vague spiritual way, but not absolutely factually true in the same way that our daily lives are real. We think we believe, but believing is harder than we think. It is hard to believe the facts of the drama of salvation. The incarnation, humiliation and exaltation of Christ are not easy facts to accept. They are totally alien to reason and experience.

Since real faith is too hard, we grasp for faith substitutes, things that are close enough to faith, that we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we really do believe when in fact we struggle with unbelief. There are three main substitutes: Church activity, piety, and theology.

Church activity

We throw ourselves into serving at church. We keep ourselves so busy with church activities, that we don’t have time to stop and reflect on the person of Christ. We are going a mile a minute, running to this church meeting and that church activity, doing Bible studies and evangelism and missions and small groups and children’s ministries. But often we’re so busy, we’re running on fumes. Our hearts are empty, so we pour ourselves even more into church activity to make up for it. When Mary sat at Jesus’ feet listening to his teaching and Martha was distracted with much serving, Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42). There is nothing wrong with serving the church. But it is no substitute for faith.

Piety

The second substitute for faith is piety. Many Christians are addicted to having certain spiritual experiences and feelings, because it makes the faith seem more real to them if they can feel it and see it. Some Charismatics take this to great extremes. They think the Holy Spirit is a physical force that literally knocks them to the ground or fills them with ecstasy. They get into a trance-like state as they speak in tongues or sway to the powerful beat of the music. There is nothing wrong with spiritual emotions, and from time to time God grants us deeply moving experiences. But they are no substitute for faith.

Theology

The third substitute is theology. We think that if we study theology carefully and come to all the right doctrinal positions, then we will be safe and right with God. This one hits closer to home for me. There have been times in my Christian walk where the only thing I had was theology. The emotions and spiritual experiences had waned, so I spent all my energy on studying theological issues, reading different views, and seeking the truth. But what I was really seeking was not the truth itself, not Christ himself, but the self-satisfied feeling that I had figured out a complex issue and grasped the absolute truth of God. Again, theology certainly has an important role to play. But it is no substitute for faith.

Paul said, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). In other words, faith comes from hearing the message, the good news, concerning Jesus, his self-emptying love for sinners to the point of death on a cross and his exaltation by God. Faith arises in your heart when you hear this awesome story of the drama of redemption, and you find yourself attracted to this humble, obedient, and exalted bond-servant. You find yourself drawn to him, drawn by his love, by his humility, and by his grace. You are enthralled with the fact that he is now exalted as Lord, not merely as if he were a master with his boot on your neck, before whom you cower in fear. Rather, your heart is ravished by the beauty of this humble bond-servant, who did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped and used for his own advantage, and who, because of his self-surrendering obedience in love for humankind, deserves to be exalted to the highest place. Because of his utter lack of grasping after glory, he deserves the highest glory. Because he made himself nothing for us, he deserves everything from us. We do not submit to his Lordship simply because he is Lord and demands it. We gladly submit to his Lordship, we gladly hail him as our loving King, because he has won our hearts - creating faith within us - by his humble service in our behalf.

Review of Wagner, Heralds of the Good News, Pt 1

J. Ross Wagner is an associate professor of NT at Princeton Theological Seminary. He did his Ph.D. at Duke under the supervision of Richard B. Hays. His dissertation was published by Brill as part of Supplements to Novum Testamentum in 2002 under the title Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul "In Concert" in the Letter to the Romans. It's an excellent study of Paul's quotations of and allusions to Isaiah in Romans 9-11, utilizing Hays's theory of intertextuality set forth in his groundbreaking and influential work Echoes of Scriptures in the Letters of Paul. 

Here is a good summary of Wagner's thesis in his own words:

Paul's citations and allusions to Isaiah are not plunder from random raids on Israel's sacred texts. Rather, they are the products of sustained and careful attention to the rhythms and cadences of individual passages as well as to larger themes and motifs that run throughout the prophet's oracles. Paul finds in Isaiah a fellow preacher of the gospel, the message that reveals God's righteousness for all who believe ... Through adopting as his own the stories Isaiah and his fellow scriptural witnesses tell about God's unquenchable love for his people, Paul finds assurance that God will be faithful to redeem and restore his covenant people Israel, so that Jew and Gentile together can sing the glories of God's name (p. 356).  

The above quote aptly summarizes two of Wagner's main points:  (1) that Paul was not a proof-texter (as Christopher Stanley claims) but one who carefully studied and interpreted Isaiah as a whole, and (2) that Paul relied on Isaiah's prophecies because they supported his belief that "all Israel shall be saved" in accordance with God's covenant faithfulness to his people (= "the righteousness of God" according to Wagner).

I like the first argument but not the second. I'll get to the second point in a moment, but a word about the first argument first. It seems as if Wagner's dissertation is in some ways one large argument against Christopher Stanley's view that Paul was a proof-texter who quoted verses of Scripture out of context to score rhetorical points with a largely illiterate Gentile audience who knew next to nothing about the Scriptures. One of Stanley's articles is titled, "'Pearls Before Swine': Did Paul's Audiences Understand His Biblical Quotations?" (NovT 41 [1999]: 124-44), to which his answer is "basically, no." (See also Stanley's Arguing With Scripture: The Rhetoric of Quotations in the Letters of Paul, although this came out two years after Wagner's dissertation was published.)

Against Stanley, Wagner does a good job showing that, in the case of Paul's use of Isaiah in Romans 9-11, at least, there are very good reasons to think that Paul was quite familiar with the larger context of the passages he quoted, even to making unmarked intertextual allusions to broader themes.  A good example of this is Paul's use of the Suffering Servant material. He quotes Isa 52:15 in Rom 15:21, as well as the very next verse, Isa 53:1, in Rom 10:16. He also alludes to Isa 53:5, 11-12 in Rom 4:25--5:1 (there are four verbal parallels in Greek -- look it up in the LXX and see if you can find them!).

Wagner (p. 335 n. 107) cites Hays favorably at this point:

[Paul] hints and whispers all around Isaiah 53 but never mentions the prophetic typology that would supremely integrate his interpretation of Christ and Israel. The result is a compelling example of metalepsis:  Paul's transumptive silence cries out for the reader to complete the trope (Echoes, p. 63).

Many other examples can be cited to support the notion that Paul had immersed himself deeply in Isaiah and knew it backwards and forwards. Wagner suggests that he may have even committed large parts of it to memory.