Every week, I hope to share with you a short article from a scholar (that is an “I hope so” kind of hope, though, so relax if you don’t see nothing on here some weeks) on something I did not have time to flesh out on Sunday. Although I strive for an exposition that is God-honoring, Christ-exalting, and Holy Spirit-led, there may be difficult texts or pearls that I didn’t get to share. I only get 35 minutes to preach, y’all. In other words, you can take this short article as a supplement during the week to the sermon preached on Sunday.

This week, we tackle 1 Corinthians 2:9 in which leading New Testament scholar Richard B. Hays will give us insight on.

For context, Paul is writing to the Corinthian church and he quotes a citation in verse 9. We are used to Paul quoting writers of the Old Testament. But to attribute this citation to an Old Testament writer is difficult because, although it comes close to Isaiah 64:4, it is not an exact parallel to it. The question then is, “Who does Paul quote?” Dr. Hays gives us some insight. Emphasis is mine.

 ⁹ But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
    nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

1 Corinthians 2:9 (ESV)

The Scripture quotation in 2:9, however, creates a number of puzzling problems, because it does not conform exactly to any known Old Testament text. There are two possible explanations for the source of the quotation: either Paul was referring to Isaiah 64:4 (with perhaps an echo of Isaiah 65:16) and quoting it very loosely from memory, or the quotation comes from an apocryphal source no longer extant. Several factors speak in favor of the Isaiah reference.

Paul elsewhere employs the citation formula “as it is written” exclusively for quotations that come from texts belonging to the subsequently formalized canon of Hebrew Scripture; it is unlikely, though not impossible, that he would use this formula to cite a Christian apocalypse otherwise unknown to us.

Secondly, Paul’s letters contain numerous allusions to Isaiah, particularly its later chapters, which he read as a prefiguration of God’s eschatological salvation of Gentiles along with Israel. An allusion to this section of Isaiah would fit the general context in 1 Corinthians 2 very well indeed. (Note, for instance, the fervent appeal “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” in Isaiah 64:1 and the prophecy of “new heavens and a new earth” in 65:17.)

On the other hand, they are equally good reasons to think that the quotation comes from a lost source. The syntax of the quotation fits Paul’s sentence very awkwardly; if he were quoting Isaiah loosely from memory, he surely would have made the citation fit into his sentence better.

Secondly, Origen, writing in the third century C.E., identified this quotation as coming from the Apocalypse of Elijah, a text no longer extant.

Finally, a very similar quotation turns up in the Gospel of Thomas as a saying attributed to Jesus: “Jesus said: I shall give you what no eye has seen and no ear has head and no hand has touched and (what) has not entered the heart of man” (Gospel of Thomas 17). Thomas is a second-century text and therefore certainly not the source of Paul’s quotation, but it may bear witness independently to this tradition as coming from a source unrelated to Isaiah.

Whatever the source of the quotation, its sense is clear: