04_Reasoner_388-404 28/10/14 10:43 Pagina 400 400 MARK REASONER that it inverts the language of judgment in Jeremiah 1–20 to com- municate the contours of this future redemption. Of course, Romans 9–11 has other relationships with Jeremiah beside redemptive inversions. Romans 9,21 echoes the potter story of Jeremiah 18. Indeed, Paul’s point in 9,21 that the potter is free to make different vessels from the same lump (fu,rama, the same word that is used to say how the first fruits sanctifies the whole lump in 11,16) is developed more in Jer 18,1-12 than it is in Isa 29,16, the text he ostensibly quotes. Isa 29,16a is linked in the tar- gums by verbal parallels with Jer 18,6b, as Ross Wagner has shown, to suggest that Isaiah 29,16 was read alongside Jer 18,6 37. Why does Paul not quote from Jeremiah if Jeremiah is expressing his point about God’s freedom to form Israel as God wishes? Perhaps it is be- cause the potter paragraph in Jeremiah 18 includes the calamity ora- cle against Judah and Jerusalem in verse 11. Paul could not risk anyone reading a quotation from Jeremiah on the potter and associ- ating it with the prediction of evil upon Judah and Jerusalem. Just as Paul does not quote from blocks of the book of Isaiah that contain judgment oracles against Jerusalem and the Jewish nation 38, so per- haps the potter analogy in Romans 9 avoids quoting Jeremiah, the prophet of judgment whose book is framed by the fall of Jerusalem, when he is writing a letter to show that he is not against the Torah or its people, shortly before traveling to Jerusalem 39. The advance that I seek to make in our understanding of the use of the scriptures in Romans is therefore to prompt consideration that even in places where the letter to the Romans does not quote scripture, it is wrestling intensely with scripture. Koch missed this by explaining away places like 1 Cor 1,31; 2 Cor 3,6 and 10,17, and claiming that Paul nowhere clearly quotes from Jeremiah 40. 37 WAGNER, Heralds of the Good News, 70-71 n. 88. 38 WAGNER, Heralds of the Good News, 344 n. 5: “The only major blocks of material in Isaiah from which Paul does not draw quotations or allusions in Ro- mans are the pronouncements against the nations in Isaiah 13–23, the various or- acles in chapters 30–35, and the historical narrative in chapters 36–39”. It should also be noted that the first two “blocks of material” listed include prophecies against Jerusalem (22,1-14) and against the Jewish nation (30,8-17). Paul may not explicitly quote from Jeremiah for the same reason that he does not quote from these sections of Isaiah that include warnings of judgment against God’s people. 39 Jer 1,3; 46,3; Rom 3,1-2.21.31; 4,1-25; 7,12.14; 9,1-5; 15,30-32. 40 KOCH, Die Schrift als Zeuge, 45.