'We fail to catch scriptural allusions not because most of the Bible is Heraclitus, who wrote obscurely so that only the highbrows would read him. The problem is, rather, us. Let me draw an analogy. Much of the power of Martin Luther King Jr.'s widely appreciated rhetoric came from his expectation that his hearer's would perceive the implicit. When he gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech, he expected his audience to hear his first words, "Five score years ago," an echo of the first words of the Gettysburg Address. It was a way of saying, "My cause is the completion of what Lincoln began." When King spoke of "this sweltering summer of the Negro's discontent," he was alluding to the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III - "now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York" - and thereby telling the whites in his audience, "You cannot ignore me. I know your European tradition as well as you do." When he said "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," surely he believed that his hearers would know this was from the Bible (Amos 5:24). King was asserting, "God is on my side."'
Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.107.
