Richard Hays on the poetic sensibility of the Gospels

If we learn from them [the NT’s four evangelists] how to read, we will approach the reading of Scripture with a heightened awareness of story, metaphor, prefiguration, allusion, echo, reversal, and irony. To read Scripture well, we must bid farewell to plodding literalism and rationalism in order to embrace a complex poetic sensibility. The Gospel writers are trying to teach us to become more interesting people – by teaching us to be more interesting readers.

from Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, (Baylor UnivPr., 2014), 105.