Josephus and Jewish Ethnonyms

I am pleased to report that a pre-print version of my long article, “Josephus and Jewish Ethnonyms: Restoration Eschatology or Jewish Antiquity?” has appeared online at the Journal for the Study of Judaism website.

The article is framed as a response to the use Jason Staples makes of the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, in his book, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2021). In a nutshell, I agree with Staples that Josephus links the term Ioudaios (usually translated ‘Jew’ or ‘Judean’) to the tribe of Judah, but disagree that Josephus’ adoption of Ioudaios as the standard term for his people at the midpoint of his massive Jewish Antiquities has anything to do with a sense of ongoing exile or a hope for the restoration of the northern tribes of Israel.

In addition to responding to parts of Staples’ important monograph, I’d like to think the article makes its own contribution to our understanding of Josephus, in the first place by defending one of Staples’ main points about Josephus, which might otherwise be neglected; second, by critiquing Staples’ case for restoration eschatology in Josephus; and, finally, by highlighting how Josephus’ introduction of Ioudaios as a new name contributes to his defense of the Ioudaioi by way of a polemical opposition to the Samaritans. (There is also a close reading of sections of Antiquities book 11 and an exploration of Josephus’ ‘geography of exile’—his understanding of the boundaries of Babylon, Media and Persia—and what it implies about where Josephus thought the inhabitants of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah were exiled.)

The article has had a long gestation period and has incurred debts along the way. I would like to acknowledge some of them here: I presented an early version of the essay at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies in May of 2023, and a revised version at a faculty colloquium at my home institution in January 2024. I thank Briercrest for a semester sabbatical in 2025 that gave me time to finish the essay, and the other Dr. Miller for reading and talking about it more than she wanted to. Incisive, detailed and critical feedback from two anonymous reviewers for JSJ resulted in a much better, clearer (and longer) final product. I am also grateful to Staples himself: I learned a great deal from interacting with his work.

For anyone interested in more detail, here are the thesis and outline paragraphs:

The re-examination of Josephus’ ethnic terminology in this article confirms and reinforces one of Staples’ major points. When in Antiquities 11 Ioudaios first begins to be used as a common label, the term is in fact closely associated with the southern kingdom of Judah. I am not persuaded, however, by Staples’ additional claims that Ioudaios consistently refers to a subset of “all Israel” or that the shift from “Hebrews” and “Israelites” to Ioudaioi in Antiquities 11 reflects Josephus’ restoration eschatology. The point of introducing the label, Ioudaios, at the return from exile in Babylon is not to contrast southern kingdom Ioudaioi, on the one hand, and northern kingdom “Israelites” still in exile beyond the Euphrates, on the other. Nor is it to express hope for a still future restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel. When Josephus adopts Ioudaios as his preferred ethnonym and explains its connection to the tribe of Judah, his goal is to establish continuity between contemporary Ioudaioi and the past history of his people in the context of a wider polemical contrast with the Samaritans, whose claim to Israelite ancestry he regards as illegitimate. Once the antiquity of the label and the people it designates is validated, its meaning expands to encompass the whole people regardless of current location or tribal ancestry.

I begin by tracing the use of ethnonyms in Josephus’ paraphrase of the preexilic period (Ant. 1-10), noting that his preferred term for the people as a whole before the exile is “Hebrews,” that Ioudaios seldom appears, and that “Israelites” can designate the people as a whole or the northern tribes, as “Israel” does in his biblical source texts. The two established meanings of “Israelite” complicate attempts to determine whether Josephus presents the Ioudaioi as opposed to the Israelites, a subset of the Israelites, or synonymous with the Israelites. This ambiguity is the subject of sections two and three. Section two examines Josephus’ own explanation of the postexilic origins of Ioudaios and its links to the “tribe of Judah” (Ant. 11.173), and then explores his understanding of the regions where the northern and southern tribes were relocated by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Section three employs what Josephus says about Babylonia, Media and Persia as a diagnostic tool to help determine the meaning of “Israelite” and its relationship to Ioudaios in the first half of Antiquities 11. Although it is not always possible to identify the referent of “Israelite” in book 11, Josephus’ use of “Israelite” and Ioudaios does not point to a separation between Ioudaioi and “all Israel” when the southern tribes return from exile. Instead, the continued use of “Israelite” during the return narrative connects the Ioudaioi to their preexilic past. The next two sections challenge Staples’ claim that Josephus’ adoption of Ioudaios implicitly draws attention to the absence of the northern tribes. Section four argues that Josephus identified the end of exile with possession of the land and temple, not the return of all twelve tribes. References to “Israelites” or members of the “ten tribes” beyond the Euphrates do not, therefore, reflect Josephus’ restoration hope; nor does a sense of ongoing exile explain the shift to Ioudaios. Section five shows that, despite its initial connections to the southern kingdom of Judah, the term Ioudaios expands in scope in Antiquities 12-20, becoming, in effect, a postexilic replacement for “Israelite” and “Hebrew.” A concluding section attributes Josephus’ decision to switch to Ioudaios to his own reading of his biblical source texts, and suggests that he attempted to introduce the name into his narrative in a way that confirmed his people’s antiquity.

You can view the abstract here.

Finally, I tried to present Staples’ position accurately. Staples evidently thinks I failed to do so. So … if you wish to pursue the topic further, I recommend reading Staples’ book as well as my own essay. Let the conversation continue. 

 

The Sisters of Sinai on Learning Ancient Greek as a Living Language

I recently finished reading Janet Soskice’s biography of the twin sister scholars, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, who in their 50’s joined the ranks of the world’s finest Western scholars of Syriac and Arabic, discovered one of the most important manuscripts of the Gospels, the Syriac Sinaiticus, and played an instrumental role in Solomon Schechter’s discovery of the Cairo Geniza.

All this was due, Soskice suggests, to the sisters’ decision to learn ancient Greek as a living language. As children, Agnes and Margaret’s father had made a deal: Learn a foreign language, and we’ll travel to that country. “On this happy plan, and with a twin as a constant practice partner, the sisters mastered French, German, Spanish and Italian while still quite young” (9).

When their father died suddenly in 1866—leaving “his twenty-three-year-old daughters entirely alone in the world, and very rich” (21)—Agnes and Margaret celebrated his memory by traveling up the Nile (in 1869) and determining to learn Arabic.

A decade later, in 1879, the still-single sisters, “threw themselves into the study of [ancient] Greek, … imposing on themselves the discipline of speaking only Greek to each other for days at a time” (56). Instead of the medieval pronunciation system reconstructed by Erasmus, the sisters adopted the current modern Greek pronunciation, following the advice of J. S. Blackie, Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. This enabled them to kill two birds with one stone: By 1883 the sisters, “now quite fluent in Greek,” had embarked on a tour of Greece, which resulted in Agnes’s second published travel memoir (56-57).

Marriage intervened for both sisters in the 1880’s. Margaret was married to James Gibson for three years before his untimely death in 1886. Agnes was married to Samuel Lewis for just over three years before his untimely death in 1891. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “to lose one spouse, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“[O]nly a couple months after Samuel’s death,” Agnes read that J. Rendel Harris had discovered a complete copy of the Apology of Aristides in Syriac at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai peninsula. “Agnes was so interested in this book that she began to study Syriac—not so difficult, she said, if one already had Hebrew and Arabic” (101).

“In January of 1892, less than nine months after Samuel’s death, Agnes and Margaret were in Cairo.” The sisters were able to secure permission from the Archbishop of Sinai to visit St. Catherine’s Monastery “not least because he had, early in their interview, formed the impression that the twins were on a mission to convert the whole of England to the correct pronunciation of Greek” (114). Once at the monastery, they befriended the Greek-speaking monks and were soon granted access to the monastery’s Syriac manuscripts, one of which turned out to be the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest extant Old Syriac manuscript of the Gospels.

Back in Cambridge in 1893—and simplifying a more dramatic story—the 50-year-old sisters “threw themselves into the study of Syriac” (191). By 1894, “[a]fter what must count as one of the most remarkable of middle-aged retraining exercises, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson stepped onto the world stage as oriental scholars of international repute” (200).

Quotations from Janet Soskice, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Vintage, 2010).

John Wesley on Clergy, Learning and the Biblical Languages

“Men in general are under a great mistake with regard to what is called ‘the learned world.’ They do not know, they cannot easily imagine, how little learning there is among them. I do not speak of abstruse learning, but of what all divines, at least of any note, are supposed to have, viz., the knowledge of the tongues, at least Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and of the common arts and sciences. How few men of learning, so called, understand Hebrew? Even so far as to read a plain chapter in Genesis? Nay, how few understand Greek? Make an easy experiment. Desire that grave man who is urging this objection only to tell you the English of the first paragraph that occurs in one of Plato’s Dialogues. I am afraid we may go farther still. How few understand Latin? Give one of them an Epistle of Tully [Cicero], and see how readily he will explain it, without his dictionary. … And with regard to the arts and sciences: how few understand so much as the general principles of logic? Can one in ten of the clergy (O grief of heart!) or of the Masters of Arts in either university, when an argument is brought, tell you even the mood and figure wherein it is proposed? Or complete an enthymeme? … Can one in ten of them demonstrate a problem or theorem in Euclid’s Elements? or define the common terms used in metaphysics?”

John Wesley, Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion (1743, 1745) as quoted in Stephen Westerholm and Martin Westerholm, Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2016), 290 note 39.

Looking up Hebrew Words in the Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) Lexicon Online

I regularly recommend StepBible.org as a resource for students who want to do original language Bible searches or who need to look up parsing and definitions for unfamiliar Hebrew and Greek words. Unfortunately, StepBible does not yet provide access to a full Hebrew-English lexicon. To look up the full discussion in the still-valuable 1906 Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) lexicon, you will need to go to another site, such as Sefaria.org. This little video demonstrates how it works: 

 

A 2025 Reading Retrospective

 

Thanks to a winter semester sabbatical, I was on pace to complete more than a book per week in 2025, but non-teaching-related reading took a nose dive when classes resumed, and I ended the year at 49 books—just shy of my goal of 52. Maybe next year?

Of the 49, I count 23 audiobooks and approximately 12 works of fiction, including such weighty tomes as E.B. White’s Stuart Little. As usual, my lightly annotated list is below.

Reading Highlights 

Perhaps because it is the last thing I listened to in 2025, Alan Noble’s excellent short theological reflection On Getting Out of Bed stands out as a general interest highlight. 

Another book I can’t commend highly enough is the Librivox recording of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius was one of those “I should really have read this by now” books. Completely fascinating, not least because it is a primary source compendium for many of the critical “introductory” questions that still occupy biblical scholars. Why did I wait so long?

My own reading highlight was (finally) finishing the Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek. I wrote about it here.

Current Events / History / Memoir

Ali, Ayaan Hirsi. Infidel. New York: Atria Books, 2008. (Audiobook)

Fascinating for many reasons, including the overlap with my own more limited memories of Kenya and Somalia in the 1980’s. 

Arnold, John. History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford : New York: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000.

Beinart, Peter. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. New York: Knopf, 2025. (Audiobook)

Recommended. See this post for more reflections.

Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020. (Audiobook)

A Palestinian perspective that pairs nicely with Beinart.

Kirsch, Adam. On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. Norton, 2024. (Audiobook)

Made some good points, but not against Khalidi.

Plokhy, Serhii. The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. Norton, 2024. (Audiobook)

Rosen, Jeffrey. The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024. (Audiobook)

Wacker, Grant. One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024. (Audiobook)

Reads like a history of 20th-century North American evangelicalism

Biblical Studies

Anderson, Gary A. Sin: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. (Audiobook)

Blogged here 

Barton, John. A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths. Penguin Books, 2020. (Audiobook)

Davis, Ellen F. Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. Cambridge, Mass: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001. (Audiobook)

Eusebius of Caesarea. History of the Christian Church. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert, 1890. Librivox recording, 2009. (Audiobook)

One of those “I should really have read this by now” books. Why did I wait so long? 

Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. 3d ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.

Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Recommended by the proprietor of Crux Books at Wycliffe College in 1999; I finally read it 26 years later. I wasn’t ready for it then; not sure I’m ready for it now. But now that I have read it, I notice its influence everywhere. Takes the prize for worst academic writing. 

Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. Romans: A Commentary. NTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2024.

Gaventa’s major commentary has a high new idea to page ratio. The comparison with Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans is apt; it suffers from the same weaknesses. Well worth reading, but I won’t be assigning it as an undergraduate textbook again.

Hays, Richard B. Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2014.

The man at the desk next to mine at Tyndale House kept telling me I should read it. “It will do your soul good,” he said. I did. It did.

Lentz, John Clayton. Luke’s Portrait of Paul. SNTSMS 77. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Moffitt, David. Rethinking the Atonement: New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022.

Nongbri, Brent. God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.

Takes the prize for the most exciting (modern) academic book this year ... in a bittersweet way: Nongbri fills in the picture of the manuscripts behind our critical Greek New Testaments and makes you wonder about what has been lost.

Novenson, Matthew V. Paul, Then and Now. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022.

Smith, David Andrew. Luke and the Jewish Other: Politics of Identity in the Third Gospel. New York: Routledge, 2023.

Stulac, Daniel J. D. Gift of the Grotesque: A Christological Companion to the Book of Judges. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024. (Audiobook)

So substantial the audiobook left me with impressions only. Purchased a paper copy.

Witherington, Ben. A Week in the Life of Corinth. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012.

Fiction, but not literature

Wright, N. T. Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul’s Greatest Letter. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2023. (Audiobook)

Helpful to think with, but not finally compelling

Fiction / English Literature

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: Egerton, 1817. (reread)

Caldwell, Bo. City of Tranquil Light. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010. (Audiobook)

Forster, E. M. A Room with a View. London: Penguin, 1908. (reread)

Heaney, Seumus. The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Hilton, James. Random Harvest. New York: Pocket Books, 1941.

Leacock, Stephen. Literary Lapses. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1957.

McCall Smith, Alexander. The Full Cupboard of Life: More from the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2005.

———. The Kalahari Typing School for Men. No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.

O’Dell, Scott. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Newbery Medal Winner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.  (reread)

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2021. (Audiobook)

Rattigan, Terence. The Winslow Boy. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1946.

White, E. B. Stuart Little. New York: HarperCollins, 1973. (reread)

 Other Languages

Martínez, Santiago Carbonell. ΛΟΓΟΣ : ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΓΛΩΣΣΑ ΑΥΤΟΕΙΚΟΝΟΓΡΑΦΗΜΕΝΗ (Logos. Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata). Cultura Clásica, 2023.

Meyer, Erika. Ein Briefwechsel. German Graded Readers Alternate Series Book 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954. (I wish I had more of these to keep my rusty German on life support.)

 Self-Help, etc.

Bain, Ken. What the Best College Students Do. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012.

Good ideas; condescending tone. The attempt to package research on learning as stories about exemplary learners seemed forced.

Brooks, David. How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. New York: Random House, 2023. (Audiobook)

Comer, John Mark. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2019. (Audiobook)

Hurried through at 1.5+ speed.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, 2024. (Audiobook)

Lang, James M. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. 1st edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2016. (Audiobook)

Miller, Neil. Agents of Healing: Learning To Do What Jesus Did. North York, Ontario: Swordfish Publishing, 2024.

Newport, Cal. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. New York, NY: Portfolio, 2024. (Audiobook)

            Hurried through at 2x speed.

Noble, Alan. On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living. Westmont: IVP, 2023. (Audiobook)

Volf, Miroslav. The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2025. (Audiobook)

Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2017. (Audiobook)

 For previous Reading Retrospectives, see this post and follow the links back.

An AI-Free Zone

 

When my students log-in to their course LMS this semester, they will encounter this warning:

This course is an AI-Free Zone: Because I am interested in what you think and in your own learning—including learning to communicate effectively in writing—the use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grammarly Pro, etc., is strictly forbidden in this class.

All written assignments for this course must be your own work presented in your own words.

Students must be able to talk cogently about their written assignments and their research process. At the professor’s discretion, an oral interview may be required before a grade is assigned for any assignment. Failure to participate in the interview process will result in a 0 on the assignment.

(For good measure, the same statement appears on my syllabi.)

I am not, I think, naïve. I don’t imagine perfect compliance or that I will even be able to tell each time AI is used. I am also aware that this is not a structural change to course assessment: Rather than materially altering my assignments, I am relying on students to choose to follow my class rules instead of turning to the low-hanging fruit that is ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and other Large Language Models that masquerade as “artificial intelligence.”

But here’s the thing: AI-bots are very good at producing the kind of introductory thinking-piece essay that teachers have used for generations. The point in these kinds of assignments is not for students to make a new contribution to knowledge, but to learn as they think through classic intellectual problems on their own. These assignments have been used for so long because they work—or they did work until AI-bots came along. All of a sudden we have to look for alternatives to traditional but effective ways of helping students learn (including summarizing, analyzing, synthesizing, etc.). We may eventually come up with workarounds as good or better than our current approaches to teaching, but we aren’t there yet.

So instead of totally changing the way I teach—and in the process abandoning effective ways of helping students learn—I will try once more to persuade my students that turning to AI to complete assignments in my courses will only hurt themselves.

Here is one more reason why:

With great texts, the reading is its own reward. No potted summary of Plato’s Republic or Homer’s Odyssey will substitute for the real thing. These rich texts can’t be absorbed on a single reading; give them years of attention and they will still have more to say. As a teacher in the Humanities, a major part of my job is helping students learn to read. This includes reading and thinking about difficult texts. Again, it is the struggle that matters for learning and thinking. And so a Cole's notes version or an AI summary will not help students learn how to summarize or synthesize, and it will not get the texts inside them in a way that shapes their lives.

What is true about Plato's Republic is even more true about the Bible, a collection of texts whose meaning and implications cannot be exhausted. As a Christian educator, one of my primary aims is to help people connect with the text of Scripture. The point is not so much the right answer or correct prose, but getting the text inside you deep enough that it can do its inspired work.

Thankfully, in my confessional setting students tend to be open to this kind of argument. Some will continue to cheat themselves (and their professor). My role is not primarily to police the boundaries, but to try and create conditions that will motivate and enhance learning. Wish me luck.

Earlier posts on Education and AI:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing
  

Baby Steps: On Reading through the Bible in Hebrew and Greek

I first read through the Torah in Hebrew in 2001 (or thereabouts) thanks to my affiliation with the Bat Qol Institute and its encouragement for Christians to follow the Jewish annual Torah reading cycle known as Parashat ha-shavua. I re-read the Torah in Hebrew around the time I started teaching Hebrew (2013). The Greek Isaiah in a Year Facebook group provided a schedule and the incentive to tackle Isaiah in both Hebrew and Greek (2014), followed by Psalms (2015) and Job (2016). 

From there I made my way through the major prophets Ezekiel (2017) and Jeremiah (2018). Reading Daniel (2018) required taking another swing at Aramaic, so I turned next to Ezra, with its Aramaic sections, and Nehemiah (2019). That left the Pentateuch (in Greek), the Former Prophets, the remainder of the Writings (including Proverbs), and the Minor Prophets. 

Progress was slow over the next several years. I found I could make some headway during summers, but not during the school year when my day-job as a NT professor became all-consuming. To make a long story short, I finally completed a reading of the entire Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek in June, almost 25 years after I began.

If there is a lesson here, it is the value of making a schedule and keeping to it. One of the great joys of last semester’s sabbatical was the chapter-a-day reading rhythm that, like a Duolingo streak, became a habit I didn’t want to break, and in due course brought me over the finish line.

I suspect reading the entire Bible in Hebrew or Greek is less common than it ought to be, even for those of us who teach the languages. But that doesn’t make it more than a baby step. I am well-aware that reading through texts just once is not the best way to build fluency or to retain new vocabulary. And I am nowhere near as literate or versed in Scripture (in any language) as I should be.

Consider John, a fourth-century Christian martyr, who, Eusebius says, 

“ ... had written whole books of the Divine Scriptures, ‘not in tables of stone’ as the divine apostle says, neither on skins of animals, nor on paper which moths and time destroy, but truly ‘in fleshy tables of the heart,’ in a transparent soul and most pure eye of the mind, so that whenever he wished he could repeat, as if from a treasury of words, any portion of the Scripture, whether in the law, or the prophets, or the historical books, or the gospels, or the writings of the apostles. I confess that I was astonished when I first saw the man as he was standing in the midst of a large congregation and repeating portions of the Divine Scripture. While I only heard his voice, I thought that, according to the custom in the meetings, he was reading. But when I came near and perceived what he was doing, and observed all the others standing around him with sound eyes while he was using only the eyes of his mind, and yet was speaking naturally like some prophet, and far excelling those who were sound in body, it was impossible for me not to glorify God and wonder. - Eusebius, “Martyrs of Palestine” ch. 13.6-8

In Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Richard Hays asked:

“What would it mean to undertake the task of reading Scripture along with the Evangelists? First of all, it would mean cultivating a deep knowledge of the Old Testament texts, getting these texts into our blood and bones. It would mean learning the texts by heart in the fullest sense. The pervasive, complex, and multivalent uses of Scripture that we find in the Gospels could arise only in and for a community immersed in scriptural language and imagery. ... But alas, many Christian communities have lost touch with the sort of deep primary knowledge of Scripture—especially Israel’s Scripture—that would enable them even to perceive the messages conveyed by the Evangelists’ biblical allusions and echoes, let alone to employ Scripture with comparable facility in their own preaching and renarration of the gospel story.” - Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 357

So I celebrate baby steps, knowing that “the days of the years of my life ... have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.” (Gen 47:9 KJV)