04_Reasoner_388-404 28/10/14 10:43 Pagina 398 398 MARK REASONER text of Jeremiah and the text of Romans. Those in the field of liter- ature are sometimes more alert to this sort of dissonant intertextu- ality than we students of the New Testament are, who tend to look for quotations or positive allusions when we attempt to retrace Paul’s exegesis. Purists among my readers have my permission to cringe at the following examples. Though their contexts are far re- moved from the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament, I offer the following examples of the anxiety of influence, just so we can be more alert to it within the Christian canon of scripture. The “sa- cred parody” of the 17th century British poets, especially George Herbert, took secular conventions and inverted them or adapted them for sacred purposes. Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” par- odies Gothic romance by making fun of characters’ imaginations (such as they would be shown in Gothic romances) as she moves toward more realistic fiction. Similar phenomena occur in other genres: the impressionist Debussy quotes Wagner the romanticist and then introduces laughing sounds to show his rejection of such musical phrasing 30. Harold Bloom’s “The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry” suggests five ways in which authors display dissonant intertextu- ality in relation to antecedent texts. In his discussion of one of these ways, what Bloom calls “Daemonization or The Counter-Sublime”, he writes, “So many songs of triumph, read close, begin to appear rituals of separation, that a wary reader may wonder if the truly strong poet ever has any antagonist beyond the self and its strongest precursor” 31. Is there a sense in which Jeremiah is a strong, or the “strongest precursor” for Paul, against whom Paul is asserting his independence? I will not allow my argument to rest on the personae of Paul and Jeremiah to explain the anxiety of influence Paul perhaps experi- enced regarding Jeremiah. But the biographical contours of these two messengers to the nations are remarkably similar 32. Paul, a member of the tribe of Benjamin (Rom 11,1), designated apostle 30 DEBUSSY, “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk” (a movement from Children’s Cor- ner) quoting from WAGNER, Tristan und Isolde. 31 H. BLOOM, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (London 1973) 110. 32 With special attention to Galatians, EASTMAN (Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue, 67-68, 76-84) highlights similarities in prophetic call, self- presentation and suffering that Paul shares with Jeremiah.