The Exegetical Thesis as (Digital) Storytelling

The "exegesis project" is a The Big Project for masters students in a biblical studies course. Usually, it's a paper, of course. This term, I hope to encourage students in my "Book of Daniel" to consider doing the project in the form of "Digital Storytelling." I realize that this calls for a two-part explanation:

1. What makes exegesis "storytelling"?


2. What makes exegesis "digital"?

I am going to take these one at a time. Today, we will stick with the first. In beginning to learn exegesis, one of the big hurdles for students is that they are asked to bracket their spiritual autobiography long enough to attend to the biblical text's own historical context. That being so, what can I mean when I ask them to accomplish their exegesis as "storytelling"? I'll break it down:

What makes it "exegetical"?

• The body of the work asks questions about the meaning of the biblical text for its author, and for the community to whom the author appears to have written, in that author's own social and historical context.


• The work's arguments rely on publicly available evidence and explicit lines of reasoning. They do not depend upon private revelation, confessional dogma, implicit lines of reasoning, or logical fallacies.

What makes it "a thesis"?

• The work is organized around the defense of a single claim, or thesis. A thesis is NOT, then, an opinion, a narrative, an “exploration,” or a review. A thesis should be defensible, relevant, and manageable. By “defensible,” I mean that it is a proposition that can be established by publicly-available evidence (not private revelation or confessional dogma) and an explicit line of reasoning. By “relevant,” I mean that the thesis forces your reader to re-evaluate the biblical text; the thesis "makes a difference" to how the biblical text is read. By “manageable,” I mean that the thesis can be argued comprehensively within the constraints of the assignment; it is not too big an idea for the word count, and also not so small that the paper falls significantly short or has to be “padded up.”

What makes it "storytelling"?

• Even when presenting data (as in a lecture, or a thesis paper), there is a "narrative" of sorts: you lead the reader from a starting place, through a terrain known only to you, to a destination. A good presenter "knows her narrative": you could take away her slides or her paper, and she can still guide you through the "narrative" of her subject matter or thesis (Ask a student about a recently-completed paper; if they can do this, it's probably a good paper.)


• We commonly ask our students to "book-end" their thesis with an introduction and a theological/hermeneutical conclusion. The project should begin with a statement of the student's interest in the biblical passage. It should end with her own assessment of the passage's theological claims as determined by exegesis. (Are those claims moral? coherent with other biblical passages? intelligible to today's reading communities?). This conclusion should also include claims about how the text might, or might not, lend itself to preaching and teaching in particular, well-defined communities of hearers. This is to say, the thesis project is a "round trip," beginning and ending with the student's own pressing theological and hermeneutical concerns.

So…What makes it "digital," if it is?

Stay tuned. In a follow-up post, I will look at the phenomenon of "Digital Storytelling" in the digital humanities, and how it might serve as a platform for "exegesis as storytelling." In the meantime, what do you think of this way of putting things? Does "storytelling" offer a useful lens, or muddy the waters?

[The Exegetical Thesis as (Digital) Storytelling was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/01/30. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]