Proof

Proof September 19, 2006

I read John 1:1, and I hear echoes of Genesis 1:1, and I begin to suspect that John wants to teach that the gospel story is a story of new creation. That conclusion does not rest simply on the phrase “in the beginning,” but that phrase is certainly a pointer in that direction. I read the early chapters of Matthew, and I think Matthew is telling the story of Jesus to bring out analogies with the history of Israel; I conclude that Matthew thinks Jesus is the new, the true, Israel. But how do I know that? What do I say to someone who reads the same passage and doesn’t hear Genesis 1, or who hears Genesis 1 but draws a different conclusion? What constitutes “proof” in textual interpretation?

Questions like these often make it appear that literary interpretation is arbitrary, subjective, unprovable, in contrast, of course, to scientific or historical interpretations which are taken to rest on “solid evidence.” But how does explanation take place? How do historians and scientists come to their conclusions?


It’s sometimes assumed popularly that explanation in these “harder” disciplines rests either on the sheer accumulation of facts or on logical deduction from first principles or axioms. Accumulation of facts and deductive reasoning are part of any discipline. I wish to argue, however, that scientific and historical explanation is essentially the same process as literary interpretation; or, to put it the other way round, that literary interpretation is a kind of “theory-formation” or “hypothesizing.”

To make a case for this, we need to ask what happens in historical or scientific explanation. Is historical explanation merely an accumulation of facts? NT Wright argues that it is not. While every explanation attempts to encompass all the known facts in as elegant a manner as possible, there is always an imaginative leap involved in forming a hypothesis that puts the facts into a coherent narrative.

Wright offers this example: “I have frequently asked my students why Rome was especially interested in the Middle East. Few of them comes up with (what seems to me) the right answer: that the capital needed a constant supply of corn; that one of the prime sources of corn was Egypt; and that anything which threatened that supply, such as disturbances in neighbouring countries, might result in serious difficulties at home. (It is the more surprising that this story does not come readily to mind, considering the obvious analogies with late-twentieth-century politics: substitute oil for corn, certain other countries for Rome on the one hand and Egypt on the other, and the equation still works.) But this account of how things were – of why, for instance, someone like Pontius Pilate was in Palestine in the first place – is not read off the surface of any one particular text. It is a story told by historians to explain the smaller stories they do find on the surface of their texts. Reaching even so simply a story requires controlled and disciplined imagination, but imagination none the less.”

Theodore Rabb has recently suggested that the Renaissance was the age that “came to terms with the invention of gunpowder.” Gunpowder obviously changed the face of war, but this shift set of a chain reaction that had far-reaching social, political, economic, and architectural consequences. Gunpowder equalized warfare, so that a barely trained commoner could fight as effectively as a highly trained, and richly equipped, knight. That, in turn, pulled out one of the central props holding up the aristocracy’s social position – if they weren’t specialists in war, what exactly was the basis for all the social privileges they enjoyed? An aristocracy of refinement replaced the medieval aristocracy of military prowess. Castles built in the old style could not withstand cannonballs, and one result was that brickmaking became big business. Rabb makes a very compelling case for this scenario, but nowhere does he cite a piece of conclusive documentation supporting his hypothesis. The hypothesis is compelling because of the overall coherence of the story, which encompasses many established facts but which goes beyond that mere collection of facts.

More generally, Wright points out that on a positivist model of explanation, “hypotheses are constructed out of the sense-data received, and then go in search of more sense-evidence which will either confirm, modify or destroy the hypothesis thus created.” He finds this misleading, and “no reflective thinker in any field imagines that this is the case.” Rather, “One needs a larger framework on which to draw, a larger set of stories about things that are likely to happen in the world. There must always be a leap, made by the imagination that has been attuned sympathetically to the subject-matter, from the (in principle) random observation of phenomena to the hypothesis of a pattern.”

I don’t have the time or competence to go into scientific theorizing much, but I am arguing it’s the same kind of procedure. You have an accumulation of data, and the theory that you form, the scientific hypothesis, is an attempt to account for all the data, but theorizing involves not only amassing data but telling a story that gives the data coherence. There is an imaginative leap from the data in Newton’s gravitational theory, Einstein’s relativity, quantum physics, chaos theory, and Darwinian evolution.

Literary explanation functions the same way, and the “proof” of a literary hypothesis is similar to that in history and science. Interpretation is analogous to hypothesizing or theory-building in science.

The “data” in a literary interpretation is the text itself, these particular words on the page in this particular arrangement. It is assumed that these words did not appear randomly on the page, but were placed there by some intelligent being. The goal of interpretation is to account for this data. In certain kinds of texts, the author makes his intention or the logic of his arrangement explicit. But in poetry, fiction, and more literarily minded non-fiction, this is not the case. So, the interpreter attempts to discern the logic of the pattern of words on the page from the words on the page, bringing into play his knowledge of the author, of the historical period of the writing, of other literature, and so on. Coming to an interpretation of the text is not, however, simply an accumulation of the data, but involves the same kind of imaginative leap that historical explanation requires. From the data of Matthew 1-4, the Christian interpreter (with a knowledge of the Old Testament and a knowledge of the New) concludes that Matthew organized his account of the life of Jesus to match the early history of Israel. There are “proof texts” here, but they are not absolutely conclusive. The interpretation involves a move beyond the gathering of data that explains the pattern of the data.

Think of the alternative. Would we be satisfied with an historical explanation that, taking note of Rome’s interest in the Middle East or the coincidence of gunpowder warfare with the transformation, simply said “that’s just the way it is”? Would we be satisfied with a scientist who just presented a bunch of data without any attempt to demonstrate a pattern in the carpet? We expect more from historical and scientific explanation, and when we’d think an historian who said nothing more than “that’s what happened” was not earning his keep. But when it comes to literary explanation, many abandon this expectation and are satisfied with a “that’s the way it is” explanation. This is not interpretation, and it is not good reading.

An interpretation says, “This is how I account for the dat

a, the words on the page and their arrangement. John wrote this way because he was writing a new Genesis, and Matthew because he believed Jesus was Israel. This hypothesis accounts for the data (or, much of it) elegantly.”


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