Intertextuality Analysis

Intertextuality analysis studies how one text invokes another, and in biblical studies it focuses on the dense web of allusion and echo by which later scripture reuses earlier scripture. When Paul quotes, paraphrases, or faintly echoes Israel's scriptures, the borrowed words carry their old context into the new, enriching and sometimes reshaping the meaning. Richard B. Hays's 1989 Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul made this study rigorous by proposing a set of criteria for deciding when an apparent echo is real and what it does. Drawing the term intertextuality from literary theory but giving it a controlled, text-critical application, Hays distinguished quotation, allusion, and the faintest echo, and showed how an evoked source text can transform a passage through the figure of metalepsis. The method gives disciplined criteria for a notoriously slippery interpretive judgment.