Biblical Study (and any Textual Study!) as a Crime Scene Investigation

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.

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     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.