Robo-exegete

I read Biblical Greek in college. Our department was small, so the senior seminar was offered every other year. However, I needed to take it in an off year, so I had a special session, me and one other guy, under Professor Hafemann. It was an 8:30 class, and Hafemann would call me at 8:45 to wake me up. Then I'd fall asleep in class. "My name is Chad and I have senioritis."

Being awake didn't actually help. For example, I would argue for an interpretation based upon its beauty, or I would insist on using page numbers rather than verse numbers in Biblical citations (because versification encourages an atomistic reading of the text). This all culminated in my senior thesis: a comparison of two commentators on a particular passage in Philippians, followed by my own exegesis of the passage. Here's the conclusion of my comparison (the full paper is undergoing bitrot, sorry):

So the difference between Doughty and deSilva [my two commentators] seems to be reducible to a discrete number of interpretive issues, with the relative importance of each issue being itself an interpretive matter. The arbitration of their differences, then, involves the examination of their interpretations, and their interpretations of the importance of their interpretations.

[...] We find ourselves caught, then, in an intricate web of authenticity [did Paul write the passage in question?], integrity [was the passage written all at once?], and exegesis [what did the author(s) intend by it?]. But this web is apparently only loosely correlated (if not flat out irrelevant) to the actual use of the text. That is, both Doughty and deSilva use the text in the same way – as community building rhetoric – even though they come from very different presuppositional backgrounds regarding historical issues, and differ exegetically from minor issues such as the instance of [a Greek phrase] to major issues such as Paul and the law.

This still rings true for me: Biblical exegesis is a seemingly intractable problem, with nodes upon nodes of decision at any number of levels (text-critical, morphological, grammatical, rhetorical, historical, philosophical, etc., etc.). Finding signal in such noise is decidedly stochastic.

And yet the problem is not infinite. Or at least, it could be modeled, no? What if you took theology (biblical? systematic?) on the one hand, and on the other you systematized all of the various low-level "interpretive issues." Then for every such issue in the Bible (Josephus? the Fathers?), you correlate its possible interpretations to the various themes of theology. Factor in the relative weight of each issue, and the probability of each interpretation, and voila! You've got an automated exegete.

Imagine the visualizations you could do with a dataset like this. How about a heat map of theology: tweaking the interpretive importance of this or that verse sets the whole thing rippling. Red-line James, and watch Romans go black. Or picture it as a mobile with millions of weights: touch one and watch your theology sway and shimmer. You could run a model for Jefferson's bible, or the Jesus Seminar's.

Much harder than writing the software would be standardizing and digitizing the myriad data that biblical exegesis and theology have generated over the past 2,000 years. You'd need to enlist the academy (and probably factor in a reputation system of some sort) or else wait for artificial intelligence to mature. I predict that in the future, every vacuum cleaner will be an exegete.

P.S. This hints at where I want to go with my previous post on the Bible, but it looks like I'm going to take my time getting there. I'm trying to say 20 things at once.