Intertextuality Analysis

They mark points along a spectrum of explicitness. A quotation reproduces the source's words openly, often with an introductory formula, and is the easiest to verify. An allusion is a deliberate but unmarked reference, recognizable from shared distinctive wording or imagery without being a formal citation. An echo is fainter still, a subtle resonance that may be only partly conscious and is the hardest to establish. Hays's criteria are designed precisely to grade these cases, requiring stronger evidence as the proposed reference grows fainter, so that confidence is calibrated to how explicit and distinctive the link actually is.

Metalepsis, or transumption, is the figure by which an allusion evokes not just the words it borrows but the unstated wider context of the source text. When an author echoes a passage, the surrounding verses, themes, and situation of the original can be activated in the reader's mind, so the new text means in dialogue with the old. Hays makes this central because, for him, the point of detecting an echo is not to tally borrowings but to hear how the evoked context transforms the meaning of the new passage, letting the later author reuse scripture to make a richer theological argument than the surface words alone convey.

Through its battery of criteria, applied cumulatively. Availability rules out sources the author could not have known; volume and distinctiveness demand significant, characteristic shared wording rather than common phrases; recurrence checks whether the author echoes that source elsewhere; thematic coherence and satisfaction require the echo to fit and illuminate the argument; historical plausibility and the history of interpretation test it against what the audience could grasp and what other readers have heard. No single test is decisive, so a proposed echo must build a cumulative case, and faint echoes that fail several criteria are set aside, which disciplines the otherwise unbounded temptation to hear allusions everywhere.