Textual
Study is Like a Crime Scene Investigation (CSI)
For years now, I’ve encouraged my students to
embark on the enterprise of biblical studies by suggesting that the study of
the Bible can be made more interesting and even fun if we imagine it as a “crime scene investigation” (CSI). In this metaphor, the biblical text is tantamount
to the “crime scene” (CS); the one who studies, analyzes, and interprets the
text is the “crime scene investigator” (CSIr); and the events that led to the
creation of the text as we know it now is the “crime.” Let me walk you through
the finer points of this image, helpful—I think—for textual study in general
and biblical study in particular.
First of all, when we seek to read and
understand the New Testament better (or any piece of literature for that
matter), it helps to remember that we are dealing with “texts.” A “text” is usually
associated with something written, but that is just one of its possible meanings.
We can expand the meaning of “text” to its greatest possible extent. For our
purposes here I will define “text” very broadly as “anything that has meaning
and that can be interpreted.” When we look at “text” in this way, it will be
clear that a text can be practically anything: a written text of course, but
also a piece of music, a poem, an historical event, a friend’s facial
expression or body language at a given moment, a movie, a work of art, a scene
in nature—all of these things can be texts because each of them has a
potential meaning and can be interpreted.
What makes texts (in the wider sense
described above) so interesting is that we, who seek to read and understand
them, can propose what we think they mean. In short, we can interpret them. Interpretation then is a key notion in biblical
studies or any textual study for that matter. Besides, haven’t you noticed that
we usually make an effort to interpret the “texts” that are truly important to
us? To make a sweeping yet true statement: In order for anyone to understand practically
anything at all, we actually have to interpret that very thing. We can
therefore say that the activity of interpretation (“hermeneutics” is the fancier
word) is a crucially important and essential process not only in textual study
but for life itself.
It is absolutely vital then to learn how to
interpret “texts” well so that our understanding of the things that really matter
to us in life would be more precise. When it’s a matter of really important
things, we do not want to proceed with misunderstandings or illusions. Needless
to say, good interpretation is a skill that has to be honed with the right
knowledge and the right tools. And that is why I propose the following image
for biblical study and interpretation.
When we've understood the importance of
having good interpretation skills and have decided to grapple more seriously with
some important “texts” in our life (hopefully, that would include the biblical
texts), the image of (biblical) textual study as a CSI, I’ve found, comes in
handy for us to better understand what it is exactly we're doing when we study
"texts," because it describes as it were “the nuts and bolts” of
dissecting a literary text in order to grasp the different nuances of meaning
that this text contains.
The Crime Scene (the Text) and the Investigator (the
Student)
In a CSI, the only thing that is
accessible to a CSIr is the crime scene itself. The event of the crime—that is,
the past happening that produced the crime scene—is (with utter finality!) no
longer directly accessible to the CSIr or to anyone else. It has already happened;
it is in the past; no one can go back to it barring time travel. When we apply
this image to textual study, we see clearly that the event behind a
given text is inaccessible to us except through something that we can
access now. That often takes the form of a written text or other “mediating” materials
such as archaeological remains. What that past event produced is something like
a crime scene that is present to us now. This CS is so crucially important for getting
a glimpse of what happened in the past and understanding this past event’s
different dimensions, that the authorities will try to preserve the CS as it
is to the best of their abilities (often by cordoning off and protecting the
crime scene) so that the CSIrs could come in and do their job properly and well.
(Additional
yet optional nerdiness: that could be an apologia for the importance of the
area in biblical studies called textual criticism.)
Expanding the metaphor and summarizing the
discussion thus far, in our case, the biblical reader-interpreter is, as it
were, the CSIr who comes to the CS (which is equivalent to the biblical text) and
works at the scene by carefully investigating it (an image of textual study).
The purpose of this careful study is to thoroughly analyze what is presently
available in order to determine as best as possible what might have
transpired at the scene in the past which, as we saw, created such a CS in
the first place. In other words, the CSIr seeks to get as clear a glimpse as
possible of events in the past by analyzing the material remains that they can
access now, with all the knowledge, training, and tools at their disposal. Why such
a focus on the past? It’s because we hope that understanding the nature of that
past event can teach us valuable lessons in the present which will in turn help
us forge a better future.
Of course, the success or failure of the
CSI depends on a lot of factors but, one can say, that it relies in a major way
on the competence or lack thereof of the CSIr. If s/he does her work well and thoroughly,
that is, observes the CS very carefully, sees the matter from every possible
angle, does the requisite background historical research and applies a sharp
wit to the analysis of all the available data, then what transpired in the past
as the crime will probably successfully come to light. If the CSIr instead does
a sloppy job, a less than optimal result might turn out. Of course, it is also
quite possible that there are other reasons over which the CSIr has no control,
such as, if the crime scene itself has been compromised or if it does not of
itself give sufficient evidence of the crime because of a very careful criminal. All
these extenuating circumstances could prevent a CSIr from getting to the bottom
of the CSI.
Are There Any Witnesses? Internal and External Evidence
In a conventional crime scene
investigation, potential “witnesses” play a crucial, even indispensable role.
Many of the crime scenes in the real world and those we see in movies are
solved because of key witnesses of the crime who often need protection because
they are targets of those who don’t want the truth behind the crime scene to
come out.
Here we have a key difference between a
conventional CSI and biblical study. In New Testament studies, we can speak of
“internal” and “external” kinds of evidence. Internal evidence refers to the various
elements found within the literary work itself: hence, the text
itself with its different components such as structure, themes, vocabulary, rhetoric,
characters, plot, etc. Working on internal evidence means doing a historical
reconstruction of the historical events behind the text based on those “internal”
factors.
“External” evidence instead refers to
sources of information outside of the text itself (hence “external”) such as
writings of prominent Church Fathers, archaeological discoveries, manuscript evidence
that could give us clues about the historical circumstances behind the New
Testament book we're trying to understand better. In the history of biblical interpretation,
the various statements of prominent early Church Fathers (such as Eusebius of Caesarea,
Papias, Irenaeus of Lyon, etc.) about the different writings of the New
Testament have traditionally been given much importance.
However, in contemporary biblical
scholarship, the rule of thumb seems to have become: “internal” evidence is
weightier than any “external” evidence. Why? It would seem that much of the
external evidence concerning the New Testament books is not as reliable as
formerly thought because of several reasons such as the historical distance
between, say, a Church Father who said this about Mark (for example) and the
writing of the gospel itself, or the fact that we can no longer verify the
reliability of much of external evidence concerning the New Testament.
Taking that into consideration, in the
present work (the book I'm now writing), we will not rely then on traditional “external” witnesses in
order to understand the historical circumstances concerning this or that
spiritual ancestor-writer (author) of a particular New Testament book. We will rely primarily
on “internal” evidence, that is, what we can say about a New Testament book,
its writer and his community, as well as the circumstances that surrounded him - based
on an examination of the literary work itself that he left us.
Parallels between Biblical Study and a CSI
As hinted at earlier, in the crime scene,
there is an encounter of past, present, and future. The crime belongs to the
past; the crime scene, however, is in the present and acts as a window to the past
for the CSIr; the results of the investigation spell out the consequences of
the crime for both the present and the future as people draw lessons from the
crime.
At
this point, I hope that the parallels between the textual study of the Bible
and a CSI are clear. With such a perspective, we can take up the study of
biblical literature with more gusto, imagining ourselves as being on a quest to
understand more deeply a past event with such a significance that it changed
the lives of our spiritual ancestors by “investigating” a text available to us
now.
Moreover,
with such an image of biblical textual study, the many methodologies that students
of biblical literature have to learn (such as the historical-critical method,
narrative and rhetorical criticism, contextual interpretation, and many other seemingly mind-boggling methods) can
be seen in a new, more interesting light. These different methods can be more
deeply appreciated as the necessary rigorous training for them to better deal
with the “crime scene” that will stare them in the face every time they
investigate a biblical text. This crime scene is waiting to be unlocked in
order to yield the riches of a deeper understanding and appreciation of the
past and enable them in turn to reap fruits for the present and the future. But
that all depends on whether they are competent and good CSIrs.
***
Making
biblical studies interesting is a crucial factor because when that is
accomplished, we can argue that at least half of the necessary work will have been done
as the students themselves self-motivate to become better investigators of the
biblical “crime scene” (the text).
For
more on this kind of approach to biblical studies, I recommend the work Sleuthing
the Bible: Clues that Unlock the Mysteries of the Text (2019) by John
Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie.
