04_Reasoner_388-404 28/10/14 10:43 Pagina 390 390 MARK REASONER in the Pauline corpus and only recognizes citations from Isaiah, the twelve prophets, and Psalms in Romans 9–11, grants that Jeremiah would thoroughly fit Paul’s concerns 7. Now that we are about to examine evidence for inversions of Jeremiah in Romans 9–11, I must answer a possible objection. Someone may well ask me: “How can you, whoever you are who reads Romans, claim to know what Paul was thinking? How can you know what was in Paul’s mind; how can you judge Paul to be intentionally avoiding quotations of Jeremiah while inverting Jer- emiah’s categories?” My response is first to concede that I cannot prove Paul’s intentions 8. For example, it is impossible to decide if Augustine’s complete omission of any reference to Donatism, the hottest controversy in which he was embroiled while writing the Confessions, is intentional or not. Here as well, I am carefully avoiding any claim regarding Paul’s intentions. But when the first scroll of Jeremiah is aligned with Romans 9–11, there are concep- tual and literary clues that point to a relationship of dissonant in- tertextuality, though no quotations are made. Paul may not be consciously inverting Jeremiah, but when his chapters on the sal- vation of Israel here in the middle of Romans are read alongside Jeremiah’s early, negative oracles regarding Israel’s redemption, there is significant evidence for intertextual inversion. The thesis of this article is that Romans 9–11 inverts Jeremiah 1–20 while singing “in concert” with Isaiah 40–55, resulting in an inversion similar to what happens in Jeremiah’s own book of comfort 9. in which Abraham moves from uncircumcised to circumcised by actually un- dergoing the prescribed rite (ibid. 147). Cf. also Jer 4,4. 7 D.-A. KOCH, Die Schrift als Zeuge des Evangeliums. Untersuchungen zur Verwendung und zum Verständnis der Schrift bei Paulus (BHT 69; Tübin- gen 1986) 45-46 and 46 n. 9. 8 See H. G. M. WILLIAMSON’s (“Isaiah 62:4 and the Problem of Inner-Bib- lical Allusions”, JBL 119 [2000] 739) concluding comment in an article in which he questions B. Halpern’s claim that Isaiah 62,4 is alluding to Jeremiah: “In the case of inner-biblical allusions, as opposed to full citations, it will never be possible finally to prove that a writer was consciously dependent on one source rather than another, especially when much of the vocabulary to which appeal is made is relatively common”. 9 Cf. WAGNER, Heralds of the Good News, and see W. L. HOLLADAY, Jer- emiah 2. A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah Chapters 26– 52 (Minneapolis, MN 1989) 148-201 on “this fresh scroll of hope” (201).