An index of the citations from the Old Testament in the standard edition of the New Testament (Nestle-Aland, ed. The title means “seventy” and comes from a legend that seventy rabbis translated the Old Testament without consulting each other only to discover that all of them produced exactly the same text. The Judaean mountains, near Jerusalem, Israel.Īn obvious source of intertextual references for the New Testament is the Old Testament and in the overwhelming majority of cases the references are to the Septuagint, that is, to an Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament that was produced in the community of Hellenized Jews living in Alexandria, Egypt. Elisabeth greets Mary with the words with which I began this piece: “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” Εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν τοῖς γυναιξίν, καὶ εὐλογημένος ὁ καρπὸς τῆς κοιλίας σου ( Eulogēmenē su en tois gunaixin, kai eulogēmenos ho karpos tēs koiliās sou in Jerome’s Latin translation, the Vulgate: benedicta tu inter mulieres et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Luke 1:42). She does this in part because she wants to check whether the words spoken to her earlier by an angel (namely, that she has conceived “the Son of God” in her womb) are true. Mary, who is pregnant, travels in a hurry through the mountains to her relative Elisabeth, who is the mother of John the Baptist. Let us take a look at how it works in the ‘Visitation’ scene of the Gospel of Luke (1:39–56), a text written in the 1 st century AD. The identification of these often substantially modifies an interpretation which would otherwise be limited to the surface text.Īn earlier text to which the author refers is called a “hypotext” or, less precisely, an “intertext”, while the entirety of relationships between a surface text and the earlier texts which the author intentionally invokes from the memory of the readers together form what we call “hypotextuality” or “intertextuality”.

The meaning hidden below the visible, surface text is defined primarily by references and allusions to earlier literature that is known to the readers. But they make the text no less, and contribute further to its meaning. The text is thus not only just the ‘threads’ which you can see at the surface (the so-called “surface text”), but also those threads underneath that are invisible at first glance.

This ‘cloth’ consists of various threads of different colours and texture. ‘Intertextuality’ comes ultimately from the Latin word textus (whence English “text”, which means “something weaved”, or “fabric”). In this piece I want to talk about the second of those phrases in the context of intertextuality in the New Testament. The Visitation, Giotto di Bondone, 1310s (North transept, Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi, Italy).

Ark antetype mary