This article brings together Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" with Lives of Jesus authored by David Strauss and Simon Greenleaf and reads them through Alain Badiou's philosophy of the Event. If we bear in mind the raging debates of the time about how to write an historical account of Jesus, represented here by Strauss and Greenleaf, Melville's story about a reclusive law-copyist and his frustrated biographer becomes a set of questions about the nature and purpose of biography. When Badiou's ideas about the Event are taken into account, "Bartleby" intensifies into an anguished consideration of what to do, or what to write, after a life-altering encounter with an elusive subject who leaves no evidentiary trace.