The phenomenon of intertextuality continues to elicit interest among biblical scholars, and rightfully so. The resources now available to both students and seasoned scholars (inter alios, Beale 2012, Huffman 2024, Schnittjer 2024), backed also by the unprecedented power of digital textual investigation, will most likely maintain the research on intertextuality for years to come. The use of the OT in the NT, the starting point in this endeavor, has generated an immense array of spin-offs, legitimate areas of investigation still waiting to be explored.
My interest in intertextuality focused initially on the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament. I was primarily interested in the role that the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible played in the (Gheorghita 2003, McLay 2003). Indeed, the pioneering approach of R. Hays (1989 for Pauline corpus, 2016 for the Gospels) has now developed into possibly the most dynamic area of biblical studies. As main editors, D. A. Carson & G. K. Beale gave the field two superlative resources in the Commentary (2005) and the Dictionary (2023) devoted to the NT use of the OT.
The aforementioned area led me to probing Septuagintal intertextuality, namely, to investigate whether or not an intertextual relationship in the Hebrew Vorlage had been depicted as such by the LXX translators and the ways in which they purposed / attempted to preserve the intertextual ties in their translation (Theocarous 2012). This pathway had been prepared by the study of intertextuality within the Hebrew Bible (Fishbane 1985, Dell et al., five volumes on Reading Intertextually). It soon became evident to me that these two stages of intertextuality – at the level of the Hebrew text and the Septuagint text – need to be supplemented by considering the intertextuality emerging in the work of the scribes, the copyists of the biblical manuscripts, that is, intertextuality at the level of biblical manuscripts.
Could this indeed form an intertextuality trifecta? What sort of role did the copyists and the manuscripts, used and produced by them, played in confirming or establishing intertextual links between texts. How did the copyists of the NT handled, for example, the Scriptural quotations in their Vorlage? Have they maintained a unequivocal dependence on their source text or did they verify the Scriptural passage in their source text before reproducing the text of the quotation? This trifecta of intertextuality, observable at the level of the authors of the biblical text, at the level of the translators of the biblical text, and at the level of the copyists of the text, needs to be developed further with nuances pertaining to the history of textual transmission for each of the layers aforementioned (Lange, Textual History of the Bible).