[Authors Circle] Yamasaki on Watching a Biblical Narrative

Gary Yamasaki, Associate Professor of New Testament at Columbia Bible College, Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada, is the latest contributor to our Authors Circle. And we are very happy to have him as one of our authors! His book will be available for purchase at our conferences this weekend.

We encourage all our readers to comment and pose our Authors Circle writers questions regarding their work and posts!

Brain Surgery on a Biblical Narrator

You are proceeding through the Book of Acts, coming toward the end of chapter 15, and you see Paul approaching Barnabas with the idea of embarking on another journey. And you are settling in to watch this great team in action again, but suddenly, they are at each other’s throats. When the smoke clears, they’ve split as a team, and are going their separate ways.

What just happened? They disagreed on whether John Mark should be taken on this new journey, and neither was willing to budge. So, was Paul in the right in holding that John Mark’s earlier desertion rendered him unfit for this new journey, or was Barnabas in the right in his willingness to give John Mark a second chance? You glance over at the narrator, but he’s not telling.

This is a scenario faced countless times by biblical exegetes. A narrator relates a character engaged in some activity, but does not append a “He did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord” to make it clear to the audience that they are to disapprove of the character’s actions. Without the guidance of evaluative commentary such as this, how are exegetes to know what the narrator intends for the audience to take away from any given episode? How are exegetes to get into the mind of the narrator?

A new critical methodology equips the exegete to perform some brain surgery on a biblical narrator, opening up the narrator’s skull to get at his intentions in situations such as this. Watching a Biblical Narrative: Point of View in Biblical Exegesis sets the groundwork for Perspective Criticism, a methodology designed to discern a biblical narrator’s intentions through the analysis of linguistic constructions involved in the manipulation of point of view in a narrative.

What exactly is point of view? Think of a movie camera, starting with a high-angle shot. . . drawing in for a close up. . .establishing a position inside a character’s head shooting out through their eye sockets. These different camera angles produce different stances for the audience to view the events unfolding on the movie screen, that is, different points of view.

Something similar happens with readers. While proceeding through a narrative text, readers are actually watching the events unfold. . .in their mind’s eye. And a skillful storyteller can have the readers viewing one scene through a high-angle shot, and then the next through a close up, and the next from inside a character’s head, simply by using a variety of linguistic constructions.

So what’s the payoff? What difference does any of this make to the exegesis of a narrative text? Well, when a narrator establishes the readers in a stance inside a character’s head for anything more than just a fleeting moment, the readers will begin to feel a sense of identification with the character, and will start to empathize with the character in whatever he or she does. And this empathy will be felt whether the character is engaged in positive or negative activities.

If you are skeptical, consider movies in which the protaganists are engaged in antisocial behavior, and we, the audience, are cheering them on. Why do we pull for outlaws, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to escape a posse of law-enforcement officers? Why do we side with thieves such as Ocean’s “eleven” as they attempt to break into a casino’s vault? Our sentiments are dictated by a movie director’s decisions on the positioning of cameras. Likewise, if a biblical narrator manipulates linguistic constructions to have us experience events through the point of view of a given character, we will find ourselves siding with whatever he or she does.

So, in terms of exegesis, if a narrator establishes a given character as the point-of-view character, we can rest assured it is the narrator’s intention that we side with that character. Thus, for those acts about which our sensibilities tell us the narrator could not possibly approve—Abraham’s sacrificing Isaac, the Levite’s treatment of his concubine—perspective criticism provides an objective means for determining the narrator’s intent.

As you glance back over at the narrator, you realize that though he is not telling you whether you should be siding with Paul or Barnabas, you notice he is giving you a wink and a nod. He is providing you with guidance on this issue. It’s just going to take some digging to discern it. . .a bit of brain surgery.