Person

Richard B. Hays

American New Testament scholar who taught at Yale Divinity School and then at Duke Divinity School, where he was George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament and dean from 2010 to 2015. He shaped three debates at once: the reading of pistis Christou in Paul as "the faithfulness of Christ," the study of how New Testament writers echo Israel's Scripture, and the method of New Testament ethics.

The codex uses Hays mainly as a witness on the New Testament use of the Old. His claim that the apostles and evangelists read Scripture as a whole story, hearing its wider context behind a short citation or allusion, answers the charge that they lifted proof-texts out of context. He should not be confused with J. Daniel Hays, the Old Testament scholar the codex cites on race and ethnicity in Scripture.

Life

Born 4 May 1948 in Oklahoma City.
B.A. in English, Yale, 1970; M.Div., Yale Divinity School; Ph.D. in New Testament, Emory University, 1981. He also taught high school in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, from 1971.
Taught New Testament at Yale Divinity School for ten years, receiving tenure in 1989, and joined the Duke Divinity School faculty in 1991.
Dean of Duke Divinity School, 2010-2015, stepping down after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He returned for a final semester of teaching and retired in 2018 as George Washington Ivey Professor Emeritus of New Testament.
An ordained United Methodist minister.
Received the British Academy's Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies in 2022, and honorary doctorates from Goethe University Frankfurt and St. Mary's Seminary and University, Baltimore.
Died of pancreatic cancer on 3 January 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, aged 76.

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Major works

The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11 (Scholars Press, SBL Dissertation Series 56, 1983; 2nd ed., Eerdmans, 2002), his Emory dissertation, the leading case for the subjective-genitive reading of pistis Christou.
Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (Yale University Press, 1989), the founding study of scriptural echo in Paul.
The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), named by Christianity Today one of the 100 most important religious books of the twentieth century.
First Corinthians, Interpretation commentary (John Knox Press, 1997).
The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Eerdmans, 2005).
Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Baylor University Press, 2014).
Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Baylor University Press, 2016), the sequel to the 1989 book, on the four evangelists.
Reading with the Grain of Scripture (Eerdmans, 2020).
With Christopher B. Hays, his son, The Widening of God's Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (Yale University Press, 2024).

Thought

The faithfulness of Christ. In The Faith of Jesus Christ Hays argued that Paul's concern in Galatians is not human faith set against "works of the law" but Christ's own faithfulness, as the expression of God's commitment to the promise to Abraham, and that a story about Christ lies beneath Paul's argument. On this reading pistis Christou is a subjective genitive. The objective reading, "faith in Christ," remains the traditional one and the debate is open.
Echoes of Scripture. When Paul quotes or alludes to the Old Testament he evokes the wider passage and its story, so that a short phrase can carry its whole context. Hays proposed seven tests for judging a proposed echo: availability, volume, recurrence, thematic coherence, historical plausibility, history of interpretation and satisfaction (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 29-32).
Reading backwards. In Reading Backwards and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels he argued that all four evangelists read Israel's Scripture figurally, discovering in the Torah, Prophets and Psalms a prefiguring of Jesus, and that each of them, in different ways, identifies Jesus with the God of Israel. He placed this reading at the heart of the earliest Christian preaching, not as a late development.
New Testament ethics. The Moral Vision of the New Testament reads the New Testament's diverse ethical voices through three focal images, community, cross and new creation. Its chapter on homosexuality took the traditional position, while holding that gay and lesbian people should be welcomed into the church.
The 2024 revision. In The Widening of God's Mercy, written with his son, Hays argued that Scripture shows God's mercy repeatedly widening to include outsiders and that the church should fully embrace LGBTQ people, and he publicly revised the position of The Moral Vision. The book drew sustained criticism from traditionalist reviewers, among them Robert Gagnon in Themelios (2024), who faulted its exegesis and its treatment of Jesus' teaching on marriage, and favourable reviews from affirming readers.

How the codex uses him

Scriptural echo. Philippians 1.19 notes that Paul's clause touto moi apobēsetai eis sōtērian reproduces word for word the Septuagint of Job 13:16, an echo Hays drew attention to in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul.
The pistis Christou question. Philippians 3.9 and Philippians 3.8-9 set out the objective and subjective readings and name Hays as a defender of the subjective. The lexicon entries G4102 - pistis, G5218 - hypakoe, G5219 - hypakouo and H0530 - emunah place him in the same debate.
Christ the goal of the Law. Romans 10.4 lists Hays among scholars who read telos as both goal and end.
The New Testament use of the Old. NT Use of OT credits his work on echoes with extending the study from citations to allusions; Typological Fulfillment names him a leading recent voice on typology; Corporate Christology cites him on the representative logic behind the New Testament's use of the Old.
Defeaters. Failed Messianic Prophecy Objections lists his Echoes books as the main modern theory of typological-fulfillment hermeneutics. David Bathsheba Objection Defeater cites Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels on Matthew's genealogy, and Unitarian Oneness Binitarian Objection Defeater and Conditional Immortality from Text-First Method name him in their scholarly lineage.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays, The Widening of God's Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story (Yale University Press, 2024). doi:10.2307/jj.17102061