Matt Swale (00:03)
I wrote this for lay people in particular and the undergraduates that I work with. in my sector of American Christianity, ⁓ in a very good flourishing of ⁓ evangelical, biblical theology, there’s such excitement about potential inter-biblical connections that I think
sometimes downstream of that, people in the pew or a young person starting to read biblical theology or listen to podcasts that are, you know, hear preaching from someone who’s kind of tapped into that ⁓ sub-discipline. Yeah, so they don’t know the
Dru Johnson (00:50)
Yes.
Matt Swale (00:58)
what evidence undergirds what they’re hearing. The example I always use, again, kind of in my circles is anytime somebody bumps their head in the Old Testament, it’s Genesis 315, right? So that’s alluding to Genesis 315. And not that there aren’t allusions to Genesis 315 throughout the Old Testament that personally, I would say have some bearing on my understanding of Genesis
Dru Johnson (01:01)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Matt Swale (01:27)
of that text, but I want to know that ⁓ it’s a demonstrable allusion. so trying to give people.
understandable hooks, you know, when you hear these kind of things, you read these kind of things. What are the words involved in the, you know, what are the words in the original language that are involved in this proposed allusion? And then the other instincts that I lay out in the book, I think, help then make sense of the strength or lack thereof of some of the claims that they hear about textual connections.
Dru Johnson (02:07)
Yeah, we don’t need to name any names in this interview. However, I didn’t even think about it in my question, but as soon you started saying it, it came to mind that TikTok might be the worst abuser of this, you know, citing allusions. Here’s how these are connected. And I only know that because I have a former student who’s now a professional fiction author herself who constantly sends me TikToks or Instagram videos.
Matt Swale (02:23)
Wow.
Dru Johnson (02:35)
of Christian influencers going, did you know that this passage is connected to that? You know, and she’s going, you need to start a YouTube channel where you just debunk all this stuff. was like, I don’t, I don’t have the energy or time for that, but
Matt Swale (02:38)
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. And
yet the reason that’s attractive, I think is a really good impulse. And that is that ⁓ we have this sense that there’s, and you you talk a lot in your podcast about the deep structures of scripture. And so there are very exciting things, probably more exciting than the fake ones, the fake allusions. And so
Dru Johnson (03:03)
Mm-hmm.
Great.
Matt Swale (03:13)
that impulse to want to see a conversation going on between biblical authors is a really good one. And so I would be delighted if one of those TikTokers would pick up the book and just, yeah, you know, just be able, because then you can make it more believable to your viewers who might be skeptical about the claims that you’re making. that, think that’s maybe even
intended in scripture that there would be something about ⁓
Dru Johnson (03:43)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Swale (03:47)
Feeling like an insider with this conversation that’s going on that endears you to the text. Because now you kind of feel like, wow, I’ve discovered something or I’ve become privy to something that’s textually actually going on and intended as far as we can tell. And so, yeah, and I’m not on TikTok, I ⁓ have, yeah, but.
Dru Johnson (03:50)
yeah.
Neither am I. I’ll, you know,
pull this code.
Matt Swale (04:15)
But I
think I’ve seen a few of the things that you’re talking about where ⁓ I was today years old when I found out that, fill in the blank, that can be really fun. You just want to make sure it’s real.
Dru Johnson (04:23)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I’m not telling you or the publisher what to do, but that would be a fantastic sales campaign to say, like, I will give you this book for $2 if you will read it and start using it. Yeah, yeah. And I’m sure there’s some, you know, like everything, it’s a mixed bag and I’m sure there’s some really good insights going on there too. And I think you’re right to identify it’s a good impulse that the text itself demands, right?
Matt Swale (04:36)
Yeah.
If you, yeah, yeah, for your zillion followers, yeah.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (05:12)
thinking about professionals now, including people on social media, ⁓ I have long complained, and I always exempt my own work from my complaint, because I might be just as guilty, but I can’t see it for myself. But I have long complained that one of the problems when people start making these allusions is they just don’t have any criteria by which to judge it. It’s just kind of like, it’s a feeling.
Which again, as you identify in the book, that’s how a lot of it starts for us as well, trained scholars, right? ⁓ But what are the criteria that you think make a minimal case to where people should go, ⁓ okay, say more. Like, ⁓ I want to hear more on this front.
Matt Swale (05:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. So I talk about, ⁓ and I wanted to alliterate to the best of my ability. So terms, themes, and thesis. And so ⁓ I like what I think maybe one of the best writers in this field is ⁓ Jeff Leonard at Sanford University. And he, he, he talks about how
Dru Johnson (06:02)
Yeah, that was nice.
Matt Swale (06:21)
original language terms that are either rare or kind of ⁓ a phrase would be like a jackpot if it’s not a stock phrase ⁓ or like a stock idiom or a cluster of terms. ⁓ I’m not aware of biblical authors being under any ⁓ constraint that, we can only use rare words.
Dru Johnson (06:25)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Matt Swale (06:51)
⁓ What we’re talking about is trying to not prove but trying to demonstrate the strength of evidence. And so it’s better and more convincing the more rare the terminology or the more rare the fancy word would be the collocation of, and that’s just a cluster of words that are in close proximity here, that are in close proximity in this text, maybe a couple other texts. And so… ⁓
I think it starts there, but it can’t terminate there because those can be coincidental or they can be stock phrases or things like that. And so that’s where you get into kind of, this is where I like the utility of a crime fiction analogy. Now let’s canvas the neighborhood and let’s see if there’s some other circumstantial elements in.
Dru Johnson (07:39)
Yes.
Matt Swale (07:47)
the text that I think is alluding to another text and the potential source text. And so the easiest, I think, place to look for that is gonna be thematic coherence is what one author calls it. ⁓ The more specialized the work gets, you start talking about ⁓ syntactical or ⁓ like…
grammatical similarities, especially when they’re out of place in the alluding text. Or even sometimes you might have a text that is matching the structure of a source text. And all of that is very helpful in confirming what those terms seems to suggest initially. So you’ve got terms, themes, and then thesis is the idea that in the
Dru Johnson (08:25)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Swale (08:41)
persuasive goal of the alluding text, what are they trying to do to their readers? And how does, if that allusion is genuine, how does it help accomplish that persuasive goal? that’s where scholars who read the book, if they do, would notice that that’s maybe what’s ⁓
One of the things that I’m trying to do that’s a little different and that is to bring in some more consistent steps in gauging or analyzing the ⁓ rhetorical force of an allusion because there’s this whole exciting field that I’m really a novice in, but rhetorical criticism and biblical studies that does a great job gauging the rhetorical intent and force of texts.
Dru Johnson (09:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Matt Swale (09:40)
And so if we can learn a little bit from that, then maybe that can be a third ⁓ area of confirmatory evidence to say ⁓ if that source text really does add a punch to that potential eluding text, then ⁓ that makes it even more likely.
And that’s what we’re dealing with is kind of a sliding scale of likelihood. So like Gary Schnittjer ⁓ in his, I can’t remember if he’s on your podcast or the other podcast that you work on. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah. And it must’ve been on script that he was, he was on, but he, yeah, he talks about, and this is, I think this is nice. It’s helpful.
Dru Johnson (10:11)
Mm-hmm.
He has not been on this one, but I just endorsed his most recent book. So I think we’re going to have him on here soon.
Yeah. yeah, it was.
Matt Swale (10:34)
to help students who are getting into this kind of exegetical work. If there’s one Hebrew root in common, he grades that a C. If there’s two, he grades that a B. If there’s three, he grades that an A. And I don’t hate that. I think that’s a nice way to kind of say, here’s how confident I am, or here’s how, maybe, maybe there’s something here.
Dru Johnson (10:52)
I don’t hate that. Right. Yeah.
Well, I think even stopping and asking people to rate their confidence is probably a good first step, right? Because you can rate it in some way. And, you know, I always point out, ⁓ for me, your book was very helpful in the first parts that I read, because I have a whole set of criteria I use as well, ⁓ including signal detection theory to kind of rate the levels of confidence of identifying text.
Matt Swale (11:08)
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (11:28)
and it landed very closely to where you are. So this was the kind of, okay, I’m not completely crazy. This ⁓ is a decent way to write these kinds of things. But also the biblical authors, just like modern philosophy, will use very common language in hyper-technical ways, right? So you not only have rare terms, but you have common terms that get used in these almost formulaic ways. I’m thinking of something like Natan and L’chaq, to give and to take gets used in this kind of formulaic way. ⁓
Matt Swale (11:33)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (11:57)
And it’s not always obvious until you kind of line things up. It does sound to me like some of what you’re suggesting does require some kind of, even if it’s a loosey goosey of a statistical analysis, right? You have to have kind of like, how rare is this word, right? This word is really rare. How rare is it? I was just talking to Ingrid Farrow this morning. did a podcast with her.
Matt Swale (12:13)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (12:24)
And she was talking about Tashukah and the desire in Genesis three. And she says it’s only used three times in the Hebrew Bible, which yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’s one of those times where we our ears prick up and we go, ⁓ wait, OK, this is not a it’s not a normal word placed right in the middle of this. ⁓
Matt Swale (12:31)
Song of songs, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Right. And
that’s a great example because that is the only term that song 7:10 has in common with ⁓ Genesis 3:16 and Genesis 4:8. But you fan the neighborhood and you’ve got garden imagery and you’ve got… But it’s a good example because if you pick up
Dru Johnson (12:50)
No.
Mm-hmm. yeah.
Matt Swale (13:07)
for commentaries on Song of Songs, some are gonna, most will note it and say it’s not an allusion. ⁓ you know, ⁓ I tend to humbly disagree. But again, to use that grading system from Schnittjer again, it’s not one that I can have extreme confidence in, but it’s one that ⁓ there might be something there and that might have a bearing on interpreting the song. So it’s.
Dru Johnson (13:27)
Mm-hmm.
You
Matt Swale (13:34)
Yeah, and to your point about humility and even being willing to state our level of confidence, I couldn’t agree more and I think ⁓ it would probably help laypeople if scholars practiced that kind of ⁓ humility more. And I haven’t always, but I’d like to, so think that’s a great point.
Dru Johnson (13:54)
Yeah, I was actually in a work group with Richard Schultz this summer. I’ve done a few things with him. I actually did not even know he wrote on this topic. So I was learning from you. Probably, ⁓ but in that workshop, ⁓ I saw in actions the things that you were ⁓ citing from him. And ⁓ I think there’s also the issue of false positives that doesn’t come up here as well.
Matt Swale (14:03)
Yeah, I think it was, was it his dissertation perhaps? Yeah.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (14:22)
So I in my own research, my doctoral research, I was looking at clusters of words, listening, seeing and knowing ⁓ as clusters for epistemology. ⁓ And it turned out that when I was doing my database searches, a passage on ⁓ the general Nahash in first Samuel. So you have Nahash, you actually have a cluster of all the terms from Genesis that kind of get worked formulaically.
Matt Swale (14:48)
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (14:51)
And I bent that three different ways sideways to try and make it fit my little thesis. ⁓ But what was absent there was I couldn’t conceptually justify, like the words were there. ⁓ And it was an interesting problematic passage for Israel, but the thesis, as you would call it, and the kind of the theme wasn’t really there. So I just kind of had to sit inside and it’s really interesting. They chose all this Edenic language, but I don’t know what to do with it. And I think if we identified those false positives,
Matt Swale (14:55)
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (15:20)
I know you can tell me whether you agree with this. ⁓ I also think we scholars need to be more honest about this. I think also pastors can sometimes feel a burden. You, you, who wants, well, I know from experience, nobody wants to hear a pastor that’s constantly going, maybe it’s this, maybe not. Who knows? Right? So there is kind of like this homiletical, this preaching pressure to say like, Ooh, do you see how these two things are connected? And,
Matt Swale (15:22)
That’s a great example.
Yeah. Yeah.
Right.
Dru Johnson (15:50)
is like they blow people’s minds. So how do you help people moderate that desire? Because I feel like that’s a deep one in this discussion, is we want to have our minds blown and then we want to blow other people’s minds.
Matt Swale (16:03)
Great question. And I think that, you know, because I’m a decent Protestant, if you end up bringing two texts in conversation, you know, and the analogy of faith,
at the end of the day, I’m unconvincing or if I’m unconvinced, ⁓ we’ve still done a good ⁓ correlative, we’ve done good correlative ⁓ interpretive work. But I think what you’re saying is really important because that kind of epistemic humility, ⁓ if it’s,
Dru Johnson (16:35)
Hmm.
Matt Swale (16:50)
pastors and theologians alike can model that, then we can help lay people to realize that, yeah, bringing two texts in conversation is useful hermeneutically as it is. ⁓ And so if we have the humility to say, you know what, I think I oversold that text, maybe it’s not alluding to this other text.
Dru Johnson (16:55)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Matt Swale (17:19)
but it still is a useful exercise to think about ⁓ canonical themes that might be at play in both texts. And so I brought this up recently, actually at ETS, I’d be curious your thoughts. ⁓ What’s more dangerous to over excavate or to under excavate the allusions that might be present in the Old Testament? Does that make sense?
Dru Johnson (17:28)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean, even while you were saying that, I was thinking, the rabbites are the rabbites, the rabbis are over excavators, right? They’re working every single possible angle, ⁓ which does lead to a little exegetical chaos. ⁓ And like a lot of relativity, nobody knows anything, right? It’s different ways to see the same text. But ⁓ man, they do come to some fascinating.
Matt Swale (17:57)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Dru Johnson (18:16)
fascinating insights. often I have some colleagues who I love dearly, but I think they over overconnect. And some of them are into like a little bit of numerology, a little bit, little bit of Kabbalah in there, which also has this over what I would say. And so I’m always, I’m always really hesitant on that. But then every once in while they whip out an insight. like, Ooh, that actually, I would not have seen that unless you did a little bit of that crazy stuff you’re into. Right. So
Matt Swale (18:28)
Yeah.
That’s right.
That’s
right. You’re painting for gold and everyone…yeah.
Dru Johnson (18:47)
Right.
And they’re good. They’re decent enough Protestants to have that epistemic humility too. So, ⁓ yeah, I think that’s where I’d fall. ⁓ we’ve talked all this time and we’ve never explained what we mean by an allusion. So maybe we should, you don’t have to define it, but just explain what, do you identify as where you can go? That’s an allusion. And we’re saying allusion, not illusion in case the listener is confused. Yeah.
Matt Swale (18:52)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Right, yeah.
Yeah. So we’re talking about ⁓ a menu of ways that
one text can evoke another text. so most ⁓ readers of the New Testament are quite aware of this. And I really like that ⁓ a lot of modern English translations are going to put quotations in bold or italics or indentations. And those are the ones that we’re getting that help from the translators to recognize them.
Dru Johnson (19:43)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Swale (19:52)
But they often have these ⁓ formal introductory phrases like it is written. And so they’re pretty easy to recognize. And then you have informal quotations. I think that is maybe Christopher Betham’s phrase or maybe, or probably, it’s probably shared by several. But where it’s a longer stretch of quoted text, but there’s not that ⁓ formal introductory marker.
Dru Johnson (19:59)
Hmm.
Matt Swale (20:22)
But what we’re talking about, which happens in the New Testament but is probably the primary mode of texts evoking other texts in the Old Testament is an allusion which is not going to have that signal phrase or that marker. And it’s probably not, it can be, but it’s probably not going to be an extended ⁓ string of text, but it’s going to be ⁓
more brief, a couple of words as you’ve probably picked up on in our conversation so far, but recognizable. brief, recognizable, but what I would say is rhetorically significant ⁓ reference to the wording of another text. would be, yeah.
Dru Johnson (21:03)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So, and
this can be just a handful of words. And in some cases, you pointed out just one word. you know, correct me if I’m wrong, but maybe a modern example of this for Americans might be, O say, can you see? Just a handful of common words, but put in that order, it evokes a very specific ⁓ memory and idea, conceptual baggage that comes with it, or all men are created equal, something like that.
Matt Swale (21:40)
Yep, absolutely.
Dru Johnson (21:43)
And I’m thinking of, ⁓ the New Testament, it’s a good example. know, citations or quotations are the most, you don’t have to do any work. Jesus says, is it not written? And then he just quotes. Although I will point out Jesus often never directly, like in the gospel, they’re always mixing the quotes a little bit or rearranging them. So there’s this idea that the exact wording is that there’s a little bit of play in that. But then you get something like, I think of Luke,
Matt Swale (21:52)
Right.
Yeah.
Mmm, yeah.
Dru Johnson (22:12)
24 and I can’t, I would not know what the verse is, but where the disciples on the road to Emmaus and ⁓ Jesus takes the bread, breaks it, gives it to them, gives thanks and their eyes were opened and they knew, which is a direct quote from the two agent, the Greek translation, which is one of the most puzzling direct.
you know, allusions that, you know, cause you’re like, wait, that’s in the Garden of Eden and their eyes were open. knew that only other place in the Bible where that phrase shows up. What is that doing here? Right. And it just, it’s so forceful that it requires you to sit in here and think about, okay, what is Jesus doing? How is this like that? And then how is it not like that? And would that be a full example of an allusion? Okay.
Matt Swale (22:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely. And I
would recommend an article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society by Ortland. I don’t remember which Ortland, but on that. Yeah, yeah, and…
Dru Johnson (23:12)
Dane or Gavin or yeah. yeah.
I think it is Gav. I don’t remember. Dane or Gavin one of those two?
Matt Swale (23:20)
Yeah, and it’s that very text and he shows that, and this is a great example of the subtlety of allusions. He surveys dozens and dozens of commentaries and monographs that don’t make note of this and that doesn’t mean that it’s like an Indiana Jones thing where, aha, I’m the first person in 2,000 years to find it. However, commentaries can’t do everything and so,
They’re focusing on particular things and so ⁓ that’s why this is kind of a, and you know this, there are endless doctoral dissertations that will continue to be written on Scripture’s use of Scripture, partly because of this, because the nature of biblical studies is that ⁓ every written work can’t do everything and so maybe that,
You know, you’ll run into this sometimes, a passing comment by a scholar then gets drilled down on by a doctoral student. But anyways, the reason I recommend that article is because particularly on, and I think I even quote it in my book, ⁓ because what he does with what I’m calling the themes instinct is masterful. He fans out and he looks at Genesis 3 and Luke 24.
Dru Johnson (24:27)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Swale (24:47)
and demonstrates really a startlingly impressive list of the thematic coherence between Genesis 3 and Luke 24. unlike a formal citation, Luke is not saying it is written. ⁓ But once there’s pretty, yeah, like you said, pretty exciting implications to that.
with the Eucharist and so forth. so he’s breaking the bread with them. yeah, so that’s a really good example.
Dru Johnson (25:24)
And the taking,
it’s taking and giving, they take and give the fruit, which I had worked that out on my own and I saw that article come out and it was again, one of those, okay, I’m not crazy. Other people, and then they, of course they had done more work. Whichever Ortland does it, I’m going to feel bad if Gavin emails me now. ⁓ Yeah. So we, I tend to think of these ⁓ evocative terms on a continuum of kind of citation being direct.
Matt Swale (25:28)
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah. Right? Hey, yeah. ⁓
Dru Johnson (25:53)
you know, allusion, echo, you know, allusion being criterion driven like what you’ve given us here. Echo kind of becomes a more of a, a little bit more in the subjective, depends on which texture looking through that you see that echo. Some of them are stronger than others. And then you have things like, which I don’t think you dealt with in the book and for good reasons, I would suspect, but metalepsis, this idea.
Matt Swale (26:06)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (26:21)
of not just evoking another text, employing that text in the logic, which I think actually Luke 24 is doing something more like that. John Hollander’s ⁓ idea of metalepsis there as well. But these are all, as you said, they’re on a continuum. then that content, know, which one you’re at, what level you’re evoking the text seems to create ⁓ that rhetorical effect of this is what I want you to pay attention to.
Matt Swale (26:26)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (26:47)
And you’re
Matt Swale (26:47)
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (26:47)
always pulling some of the text over, but never all of it as well, right? ⁓ Or not at least in whole cloth. That to me suggests that there is a very strong, there’s a phrase today that the kids say that I think is actually very helpful here is, if you know, you know. And it has all that insider in group kind of sarcasm does this as well. ⁓ And when Jesus spoke, there was a lot of, if you know, you know.
Matt Swale (26:51)
Right. Right.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (27:15)
And then a lot of him being disappointed because the things that he thought they would know they didn’t know and So When we’re thinking, you know for Christians reading this together by the way a lot of these elusive connections This is why if you’re a scholar or a pastor, you should be in a small group reading the Bible with people I’ve had lay people point out
Matt Swale (27:19)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dru Johnson (27:37)
Like, hey, that kind of sounds like this thing over there. And I’ll go, hmm. And I look it up and I’m like, hey, Mary, you actually just found something that I had never noticed before. ⁓ But what do we do with it? Say we find this allusion as a lay person in our small group reading through Luke and we find this allusion and we don’t have access to academic journals or whatever. What’s then the output of that discovery?
Matt Swale (27:39)
Yeah.
Yes. Great point.
Yeah, to a certain extent this book is maybe built for exegetical paper or something like that that a student might be doing. I hope that people are, this maybe helps them develop a new and vibrant relationship with the cross references in their English Bible and their reference Bible because
Dru Johnson (28:28)
Mm.
Matt Swale (28:30)
you know a lot of times these these these the system of cross references the different publishers develop ⁓ not all of those are not many of those would would be classifiable as allusions but ⁓ i’m finding that sometimes they are and so i think that as we and i i know we’re losing this in the digital age but i love the image of ⁓
the seasoned Christian with the tattered Bible. And so I think that what you gain by trying to develop some of the instincts that I talk about in the book and bringing them with you to your Bible reading is that, like you said, ⁓ in a small group setting or ⁓ in conversation or maybe even in talking about the faith with someone who doesn’t share your faith, ⁓
Dru Johnson (29:01)
Hmm.
Matt Swale (29:26)
You’ve got these meaningful to you, because it takes some work to notice these things, insights that other people will benefit from. especially, I know you have kids, and I’ve got three kids myself, trying to help my kids love the Bible.
Dru Johnson (29:51)
Mm.
Matt Swale (29:52)
and to show them that it’s… ⁓ I have a student who took a class with me on the Psalms and said, you know, when I came into this class I really thought that the Psalms were just full of hallmark poems. ⁓ So if you can help people see that there’s… this is why the Bible Project has been such a blessing to so many people, to see the literary sophistication, the theological… ⁓
Dru Johnson (30:07)
you
Mm-hmm.
Matt Swale (30:19)
brilliance that’s going on here that you know like when when Augustine before he converted when he thought that the Bible that the Old Testament in particular was this kind of gross barbaric book, but To help people see no there’s there’s something going on here that is intellectually stimulating ⁓ And and so you build that repertoire over time when you when you give attention to these kind of things
Dru Johnson (30:45)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Swale (30:48)
And to your point, if you don’t have access to ⁓ academic monographs or, you know, I’m as wary as I am ⁓ of AI, I think that ⁓ you could do worse than saying, see this connection between these two texts because of this, this, and this. Are there any scholars who say something like this? ⁓ Now I’m hoping none of my students listen to this. ⁓
Dru Johnson (31:13)
Right, right.
Right.
Well, that use of AI is profoundly different because it begins with work and insights and is just looking for some help, like a dictionary, right? Hey, can you help me figure out what this means? Yeah.
Matt Swale (31:17)
podcast interview.
Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Right, yeah, and if you don’t know where to look, yeah, if you don’t
know which theological journal or which commentary series, because not every, there are some commentary series that are really tapped into and tuned into allusions, but there are some that because of the aims of the series or because of the space that they can dedicate to each passage, they just can’t really get into all this. You might see it in a footnote or a parenthetical cross-reference, but.
they’re not going to have time to dig into it. yeah, and then that’s a good thing to do as well, is to broaden your, ⁓ as a Bible reader, broaden the community of ⁓ specialists that you allow to inform and confirm your own Bible reading.
Dru Johnson (32:15)
Yeah. Yeah, think the best thing, ⁓ my opinion, the best thing Christians can do in community is read the Bible aloud to each other and then discuss and maybe even argue about what you heard. And as long as you keep on going back to the text, I think that’s a pretty safe practice ⁓ over time. ⁓ You got me sidetracked. You said AI and my mind went all kinds of different places. ⁓
Matt Swale (32:24)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (32:44)
Well, the tattered Bible issue, as I was reading, I just read the first couple chapters, but as I was reading the first couple chapters, it became immediately apparent to me the problem that always is there, which is in order to notice allusions, you got to know the source material fairly well that’s being evoked. And if you don’t, then it’s kind of a hopeless enterprise. And I’m a little worried, I’m not worried, it’s just realistic. We work on…
Matt Swale (33:02)
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (33:09)
Bible literacy in some of the projects I work on and it’s pretty low. ⁓ I just gave a Bible literacy assessment to my class incoming just to see how they did and ⁓ five out of 22 was the average, right? ⁓ but that’s, not their fault. But is there a world in which we lose allusions because nobody knows the source material and it becomes like this priesthood of.
Matt Swale (33:23)
Yep. Yep.
Dru Johnson (33:35)
people who actually understand the allusions and everybody else just has to trust us kind of a thing? ⁓ how do we get people to that source material? I mean, besides the exposing them to the psalm so they can see that it’s not a bunch of hallmark cards, which is really funny because it’s about the exact opposite, right? Yeah.
Matt Swale (33:42)
Yeah.
That’s a really good.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you
really have to read selectively to just get the cute stuff. there’s a really exciting, ⁓ from the same publisher as my book, New Testament Study Bible that just came out ⁓ called Connecting Scripture. Have you heard of that one? Yeah.
Dru Johnson (34:12)
yeah, yeah, I saw
it. Yeah.
Matt Swale (34:15)
Yeah, and so what it’s doing is, only the New Testament is out, but the Old Testament is being worked on right now. So allusions are in green font. And then there’s ⁓ quite extensive index in the back of that study Bible ⁓ of what the contributors to that study Bible see as
Dru Johnson (34:32)
Hmm.
Matt Swale (34:45)
the allusions in each New Testament book. And so I’m really hopeful that this could become more a part of lay people’s vernacular surrounding the Bible because of ⁓ resources like that. And to me that scholarship at its best because
You’ve got folks who, like Ben Glad, who have written on this in scholarly works, who are then putting it into succinct study notes and coding it in the font there with the ⁓ different colored font. so, and I don’t think they’ll be the only ones to do something like that. that’s like, I guess, like I said, there are bajillion academic monographs and dissertations on this field.
But that’s a good kind of, now it’s gonna start to trickle down. And so I’m hopeful and optimistic that this could help with some of that Bible literacy because the example that I use later in the book is I’ve got a great, great preacher here in central Florida, Dr. Scott Markley, and he was preaching on Psalm 68.
and he made note that the first line of the Psalm is probably more like an informal quotation because of the length of Numbers 10:35 about the moving of the Ark. And so the listeners who might not have many reasons to read the Book of Numbers, it’s like there’s a pathway created now, okay? And Numbers 10 at that, so it’s not
Dru Johnson (36:22)
Mm.
Mm.
Matt Swale (36:41)
you know, like a really ⁓ well-worn text that a lot of people are going to be ⁓ aware of if they’re even higher on the biblical literacy ⁓ spectrum ⁓ or further along. And so I hope that if these kinds of things catch on that we could maybe see the tide turn a little bit regarding biblical literacy.
Dru Johnson (36:45)
Right.
Mm.
Yeah.
I hadn’t even thought about that, that implication, but it does create puzzles that beg to be solved, right? By going back to the source. Like, why would you quote numbers 10 in a Psalm right? ⁓ Okay. Finally, it only seems appropriate when I had ⁓ friends of mine, Josh Berman and John Walton on, we were talking about methodology and reading scripture. And so I put a couple of texts to them and said,
Matt Swale (37:18)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Dru Johnson (37:38)
How do you think these things are related? It got very interesting answers. ⁓ And so one of them was just, what do you make of, and it’s just your opinion, you don’t have to go on record, you can speak speculatively if you like, what do you make of the Joseph and Daniel stories? ⁓ Do you see them as connected or do you see them as two, you know, just completely independent traditions?
Matt Swale (37:42)
Hmm.
Great question. have not, yeah, like you said, I don’t want to go on record because I haven’t ⁓ combed through those texts, but it does seem like there’s something going on there. And I want to mention this as well, that allusions aren’t the, it’s not the only way that texts can be evoked or connected. And so,
There’s a whole other mountain of literature on ⁓ typology and I’m really eager to but have not yet dug into ⁓ Seth Postel’s book, The Art of Narrative Analogy.
Dru Johnson (38:47)
Yeah,
I’ve seen, I’ve read bits of it, yeah.
Matt Swale (38:50)
Yeah, I have not yet, but that kind of enterprise that’s trying to put methodology to something like narrative analogy, or I know he’s, it sounds like maybe he’s trying to distance that from typology ⁓ with his terminology, but it seems like the book of Daniel is doing something with the Joseph narrative.
Dru Johnson (39:17)
Yeah, even if the language is different, you still might have like thematic parallel, ⁓ strong thematic parallel.
Matt Swale (39:23)
Yeah, well said. That’s what I was getting
at with that remark is that ⁓ some of these thematic or structural or almost type scene with the dream interpretation and stuff, that those can be fertile ground for a textual relationship that’s different from allusion. ⁓ But sometimes they can overlap, like typology might involve allusions. ⁓
Dru Johnson (39:43)
Mm.
Mm.
Matt Swale (39:50)
And another one that I’m really ⁓ intrigued by and would like to do more work in is ⁓ Esther and Mordecai. are some ⁓ Mark Ginolet and Heath Thomas. And I think actually they were citing reading Esther intertextually. But there are some very interesting and potentially hermeneutically significant.
ways that that text might be evoking Joseph and might have an impact on what interpreters ought to say about the ⁓ ethics of the book of Esther.
Dru Johnson (40:34)
⁓ Yeah, it’s fascinating. That’s, know, I don’t know about Marc Genelette, that’s Heath Thomas’ jam, that area of the scripture. So ⁓ he’s good on allusions. I’ll give you one more. ⁓ This is, you actually addressed this a bit in your book, but just kind of your hot take on ⁓ the Genesis 19, Judges 19. We’ll forget for the fact that they both are chapter 19 somehow. You wonder if they like lined up the books there at that scene.
Matt Swale (40:44)
Yeah.
Isn’t it? Yeah.
Fun.
Dru Johnson (41:03)
⁓
But that happenstance, but what do you make rhetorically of that move where you do have linguistic and story parallel, narrative parallel, and some theme parallel as well?
Matt Swale (41:14)
Yeah.
Yeah, this seems to me to be one of the best examples of how our interpretation can be helped by keeping an eye out for potential allusions. Because ⁓ you know the… ⁓
Dru Johnson (41:36)
Hmm.
Matt Swale (41:40)
Brandon Hurlbert has a great article on this, maybe in biblical interpretation, where he talks about some of the ways that even popular fiction, I think it’s maybe The Handmaid’s Tale, makes reference to Judges 19 disparagingly.
it’s a sophisticated narrative where ⁓ you want more of an ethical judgment from the narrator than you get. Or if the narrator is patterning the text after ⁓ Genesis 19, then that could be the narrator’s evaluative judgment. And so ⁓ why not be more explicit with it? ⁓
Dru Johnson (42:23)
Right.
Matt Swale (42:32)
a good thing to kick around and to think about, but this helps answer the question that I know when I’ve read that text with students, it can be very troubling for them. ⁓ I think there’s, you know, we, to ⁓ frame the text as a recapitulation of ⁓ Sodom is not a compliment rhetorically. And so,
Dru Johnson (42:40)
Mm.
Matt Swale (43:00)
Yeah, it helps answer some questions that ⁓ can be tricky for students and for any Bible reader. And so, yeah, I think there’s something going on there.
Dru Johnson (43:11)
Yeah, you know, I always say it’s the kind of how bad was it? It was Genesis 19 bad, right? And then to have the first king in the next story, the first king of Israel come out of that village again is not a compliment. And then to have, which I don’t, I really don’t know what to make of this one. Paul say I’m a Hebrew of Hebrews tribe of Benjamin. I’m like, I don’t think that’s a flex.
Matt Swale (43:18)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Dru Johnson (43:39)
I’m not sure what he’s doing there, that
does not sound like a brag to me, right? ⁓
Matt Swale (43:42)
Yeah,
I’ve wondered that too and I just don’t know enough about Second Temple Judaism to know the, yeah, worst of sinners kind of thing. Yeah.
Dru Johnson (43:47)
Maybe he’s just humbly offering, you know, like, hey, I’m a Hebrew, tribe of Benjamin. Right, right, right,
exactly. Well, Matt, thank you for helping us to think through the complex topography of allusions in scripture. And I hope everybody goes hunting for some more. And then buy your book so they can figure out how to discipline themselves to see ones that are there and worthy of notice.
Matt Swale (44:06)
Me too.
I really appreciate your time. for having me on the show.
