Joel, having seen the title of your book I am surprised we managed to keep the conversation going this long! Let’s take that as a very positive thing.

What you characterize as allegorical decoding, I regard as uncovering the realistic prophetic narrative out of which the NT has constructed its view of the future. To my mind these are two very different things. I agree with N.T. Wright that ‘understanding how stories worked in the ancient world, and how a small allusion could and did summon up an entire implicit narrative, including narratives within which speaker and hearer believed themselves to be living’ is vital for NT interpretation (Paul: Fresh Perspectives, 8).

It is the need to bring this allusiveness to the surface that creates the impression of decoding. But where we really differ is over the nature of controlling narrative, which is a much broader hermeneutical question than can be properly addressed in a piecemeal exegetical approach.