Converted Imaginations? The Reception of Richard Hays’s Intertextual Method

Abstract

Richard Hays’s 1989 work Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul defined the terms and established a method for the study of Pauline intertextuality. Neither the method (Hays’s well-known sevenfold criteria for identifying intertextual allusions) nor the terms (‘echo’ and ‘allusion’) have proved uncontroversial, however, and so this article surveys their reception, outlining and critiquing the major attempts to amend, replace or overthrow them. Concerns relating to the stability of the criteria themselves or to the theoretical framework in which they operate do not nullify their usefulness. Criticisms of Hays’s terms, and the inconsistency with which they are deployed, are, on the other hand, more easily sustained, and so rival taxonomies are reviewed and recommended.