This beautiful rainbow image, which won an honourable mention in a National Geographic listing of Best Science Images of 2008, was created by Chris Harrison, a Ph. D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, and Christoph Römhild, a Lutheran pastor from Hamburg. It is a visualization of 63,779 cross-references between chapters of the Bible that Römhild had identified. The 1,189 chapters are plotted along the horizontal axis, the length of each bar corresponding to the length of the chapter - Psalm 119 can be seen hanging well below the others.
It doesn’t strictly prove my argument that we cannot read the New Testament properly without taking into account the highly allusive character of the texts, but it provides a nice opportunity to make the point again. It is not simply that the teaching of Jesus or of Paul is littered with countless quotations from, cross-references to, and echoes of the Old Testament. What we need always to consider in any instance is the likelihood that a larger narrative or argument is invoked than is immediately apparent from the surface of the New Testament text. These are not proof-texts; they are not designed merely to lend scriptural authority to the argument. Rather they repeatedly summon to mind a background story that must be reinterpreted and retold if the present circumstances of the people of God are to be understood.
To give a simple example, when Jesus protests that the temple, which should have been a place of prayer for all nations, has been turned into a ‘den of robbers’ (cf. Mk. 11:17), the force of the condemnation is only grasped when we bring into view the full argument of the passage in Jeremiah 7 from which the ‘den of robbers’ phrase has been taken. Jeremiah has been instructed to announce to the people of Israel as they come to worship that by stealing, murdering, commiting adultery, swearing falsely, and making offerings to Baal they have made the temple a ‘den of robbers’. The consequence will be that God will do to the temple in Jerusalem what he did to Shiloh, which had once been a place of Israelite worship (1 Sam. 1:3) but was now in ruins.
Jesus expects that background narrative to be heard. By his disruptive action he is not saying that the merchants and money-changers should be barred from the temple - after all, they were an integral part of the system. Nor should we probably read the story as primarily an attack on the temple hierarchy and its cosy relationship with the oppressor, as is often argued from the standpoint of an anti-imperialist hermeneutic. Just as Jeremiah’s condemnation was directed against the worshipping community of Israel, so Jesus by this prophetic action warns Israel as a nation that unless it repents, the temple will again suffer the fate of the shrine at Shiloh.
