In interpretive practice, meaning rarely moves in a single temporal direction. Readers do not approach texts empty-handed; they come equipped with conceptual frameworks, stabilized readings, and inherited interpretive traditions. Inevitably, later meanings are projected backward onto earlier textual layers. In Evidence-Based Biblical Studies (EBBS), this phenomenon is not treated as an error per se, but as a methodological operation that requires explicit recognition and control. What EBBS calls retroactive interpretive operations designate precisely this movement: the transfer of meanings, categories, or settled readings originating in later interpretive traditions onto an earlier textual stratum. Such operations are unavoidable in many forms of reading, yet they are epistemically non-neutral. Their legitimacy does not rest on their traditional authority or theological usefulness, but on whether they genuinely increase the explanatory power of the available linguistic, textual, and historical data. Where retroactive interpretation merely suppresses ambiguity by imposing a later coherence, its epistemic value becomes questionable.

A basic distinction is therefore required. Retroactive interpretation may function as a heuristic hypothesis, openly proposed and critically assessed at a late stage of analysis. In this form, it can help organize data and explore possible trajectories of meaning. The problem arises when retrojection operates implicitly—when a later sense is silently treated as if it were native to the source text. At that point, interpretation ceases to be an evidential process and becomes a form of confirmation. A particularly sensitive case is doctrinal retroprojection. Here, the interpretive filter is not merely chronological but normative. Meanings are introduced not because they explain the data, but because they regulate it—eliminating variants, tensions, and gaps in order to preserve doctrinal or catechetical coherence. From the perspective of EBBS, this operation carries a high methodological risk. It transforms interpretation from the weighing of evidence into an act of harmonization, shifting the burden of coherence from the data to the system imposed upon it. EBBS does not prohibit doctrinal retroprojection, but it requires that its presence be explicitly declared and its epistemic cost acknowledged. 

Closely related, yet distinct, is the notion of prefiguration. In many interpretive traditions, earlier textual elements are read as anticipations of later theological or narrative resolutions. EBBS draws a sharp line between prefiguration as a fact of reception and prefiguration as a claim about original meaning or authorial intent. The former can be described and analyzed as part of interpretive history; the latter cannot function as evidence for the semantic content of the source text itself. Prefiguration, in this sense, belongs to reception history, not to primary data analysis. What unites these retroactive operations is not their illegitimacy, but their timing and transparency. In EBBS, they may only be introduced after the autonomous analysis of primary data, the documentation of tensions, and the controlled confrontation of evidence. They must remain explicit, reversible, and proportionate to the quality of the available data. 

Retroactive operations do not conclude the interpretive process; they extend it, provided that their methodological cost is neither hidden nor denied. The guiding question, therefore, is not whether retroactive interpretation occurs—it always does—but whether it is acknowledged as interpretation, or smuggled in as data. EBBS insists that coherence is not a starting point but a possible outcome, and that every gain in interpretive unity carries a price that must be paid consciously, not silently.

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