Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 26:3 (Fall 2022)
Article: Revealed Forward: Figural Revelation Of The Messiah’s Suffering And Glory In Israel’s Scripture According To Luke 24:13–35
Author: Ardel B. Caneday

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Revealed Forward: Figural Revelation Of The Messiah’s Suffering And Glory In Israel’s Scripture According To Luke 24:13–35

Ardel B. Caneday

Ardel B. Caneday is a Teaching Elder at Christ Bible Church, St. Paul, Minnesota, a Board Member and Writer for “Christ Over All” (www.christoverall.com), and an Adjunct Professor of New Testament and Greek at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul, Minnesota, where he taught for 31 years. He received his PhD in New Testament from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He has published numerous magazine articles and journal essays, co-authored The Race Set Before Us with Thomas Schreiner, and co-edited Four Views on the Historical Adam with Matthew Barrett. He is writing a commentary on the Gospel of John. He is married to Lois. They have two adult sons and six grandchildren. He maintains a blog, “All Things Christian” (www.abcaneday.com).

Widely reputed for his earlier focus on the use of Scripture in the Apostle Paul’s letters, within the past fifteen years, Richard Hays has turned his attention to the four Gospels resulting in his influential magisterial volume, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels.1 This volume was prefigured by the publication of his much smaller Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, wherein he demonstrably reasons that all four of the Gospels, not only John’s, present Christ as “fully divine,” the one who completes Israel’s story. Thus, it was fitting that the November 2018 Annual Lecture for the Institute for Biblical Research featured Richard Hays, who presented “Figural Exegesis and the Retrospective Re-cognition of Israel’s Story” as a rejoinder to evangelical scholars who have reviewed and engaged

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his two recent books on the Gospels which develops his continuing work on the use of the Old Testament (OT) in the New.2

With his IBR lecture, Hays responds to a persistent criticism raised by avowedly evangelical scholars both in reviews of Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels and in correspondence with him. He summarizes the gist of the complaint:

Are you saying that the OT prophets didn’t make predictions about the coming of Jesus as Messiah? If you deny that, aren’t you undermining the divine inspiration of Scripture? And aren’t you diminishing the importance of authorial intention? If the Gospel writers were just ‘reading backwards,’ are you ascribing the figural correspondences between OT and NT to the narrative genius of the Evangelists, rather than to the divine inspiration of the prop...