I was listening to an episode of the podcast It Means What it Means, titled “Scripting the Son with Kyle Hughes,” episode 86. Here Hughes discusses what is called “prosopological exegesis,” which reflects an interpretive approach which seeks to bring together appropriate criticisms and the role of Tradition. Put simply, “prosopon” means faces or persons, and exegesis means “interpretation of a text.” Thus it is a method that emphasises the persons evident within a text as the means to accessing what that text is saying. By persons this means taking all of the intersecting voices together when making sense of any given passage. This includes the audience, the compositers, the references to characters contained within, the writers, preexisting traditions that the compositers are working with, ect..
This might sound intuitive, but its often far less intuitive than we might think, largely due to the ways we bring in different competing allegiances and motivations to our readings of the scriptures. If this approach, which its worth mentioning is the subject of Hughe’s new book Scripting the Son: Scriptural Exegesis and the Making of Early Christology, can be summed up in one phrase, it could be “employing a necessary humility.” And it is this humility, Hughes argues, that we find in the practice of early interpretation, both within the Jewish framework that precedes Jesus (and that allows us to locate and make sense of Jesus) and in the early Church that follows Jesus.
It’s an observation that undestands and recognizes that what we find in the NT’s use of the OT is in fact a holistic and consistent practice that emerges from the OT itself (a recent episode of the Onscript podcast also delves into this with an interview with Gary Schittjer regarding how to study the Bible’s use of the Bible (the author of How to Sudy the Bible’s use of the Bible: Seven Hermeneutical Choices for the Old and New Testaments).
What brought this observation to light even further for me this morning was digging into a commentary on the book of Numbers by Peter Altmann and Caio Peres. Here Altmann and Peres argue in the opening pages that Numbers, more accurately or naturally translated from the Hebrews as “In the Desert,” is a vital portion of the OT narrative precisely because of the ways in which it parallels and connects the journey’s of distinct generations. On a macro level, we can connect the story of Israel “in the desert” on their way to the Promised Land with the story of the Church “in the desert” on its way to the fullness of time, or the new creation reality.
A journey that reflects our occupying that inbetween space.
And yet, this doesn’t mean being stagnant or stuck. The authors note how Numbers reflects a people who are on the move both geographically and spiritually. They are invested in this space and they see it as integral to the larger narrative of expectation. The fact that it depicts this as a “transition between generations” is what it makes it particularly powerful. Much in the same way that reading Deuteronomy from the perspective of a people in exile (understanding Deuteronomy as a temple text) looking back on a generation standing on one side of the Jordan reflecting on the previous generation that had come to the other side of the Jordan. Three generation in conversation, all bound by the same narrative.
Here Altmann and Peres note, “Because God’s people are always in the process of being formed afresh, Numbers contains many texts that update commands given by God in the previous biblical textst.” This might sound like heresy to some. but that would be unforunate. As the authors suggest, “(this) sets a model of how to interpret, adapt and apply God’s word to a braoder variety of communities throughout time and variable geographies.”
Sounds a lot like prosopological exegesis.
Hughes said something too that has really been sticking with me. He takes some misapplications of the word “fulfillment” to task, cautioning against writing a narrative that sees a beginning and an end. The minute we write the story as one in which they went through the desert so that we don’t, we’ve lost that central componant that binds one generation to another- the invitation to enter into and participate in the patterns of history. Part of the pattern, as the commentary on Numbers points out, is this constant act of centralization leading to decentralization. This is why we see embedded even in the liteary patterns of Leviticus, a literary design within the encampments that signifies this portrait of this ever expanding and distributing nature of the priesthood. Always reaching outwards with the tabernacle/temple (the presence of God) at its center.
And yet, as Numbers also expressly outlines, this patterned history is one in which we find both Life and Death at play. Thus what accompanies this distribution is a needed transformation. The continued act of recentralization if you will. This is what the promise hinges on. This transformation is found in the expectation of the fullness of time, not as an end but as a new beginning. it is one thing for transformation to occur from Death to Life, it is another for this transformation to continue and persist in a reality where Death has been defeated. Both of these things are held together within the narrative. This is where the generations intersect.
I’ve been pondering, or perhaps praying over what this means for my own desert space. The commentary offers a helpful inroad to this end. Noting the confusing and often frustrating lack of a clear beginning and end in Numbers, they suggest that often readers are “less clear on how to read it because we do not know what to expect.” They go on to suggest thinking about Numbers as one might a “human life.” We build the narrative of our lives by “omitting many parts.” Arguably we need to do this in order for our lives to make coherent sense. A book like Numbers however disorients us precisely because it tries to life to the cover of that narrative up momentarily in order to explore some of the less than linear parts. It’s a reminder that life is less orderly, less structured, less coherent in the space we occupy in the moment. And yet that’s precisely where things are moving and being shaped and being transformed. This is the shape of our experience. Yes, there is need for that narrative appraoch. This is just as important for our understanding of a life. For our understanding of the Christian story. And yet sometimes that need can get in the way of the living. It can lead to us stopping moving. To a failure to participate. To take off the narrative cover means encountering something that feels chaotic and incoherent and confusing and hard, perhaps even to the point of feeling like perhaps we had the wrong narrative. Maybe God isn’t in this.
That is however, to borrow from a formative voice in my life, Micheal Gorman, why participation matters. This is why participation matters to the narrative. We can describe the narrative of our lives in certain terms. Without that participation, which describes faith in the truer sense of the word as “lived conviction,” we can never truly know that narrative. This is the necessary act of trust that the promise requires. This is the invitation placed before the generations of Israel. It is the invatiion placed before the life of the priesthood that makes up the Church. This is where we find the pattern. In the faces and persons occupying our lives.
The Stories of my Life 