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The Historical Jesus
Parables (Continued)

What then are we of the 21st century to make of Jesus' parables? Are they mere quaint examples of a wise man's teachings? If they are not allegory, how are we to use them? If they were told in an agricultural context, to illiterates two thousand years ago, how are we to get much sense from them? The global, industrialised, technological twenty-first century is utterly unlike the culture in which they were composed.

[1] It might be that we can understand from the parables how Jesus thought - what his values were, what he thought about his society, how his thought developed and so on.

It's important to note, however, that such conclusions can only be arrived at by inference. The best minds haven't been able to reconstruct Jesus - that is, we don't have enough information about him to write his biography. We might correctly infer from the Parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, that Jesus thought that care for those in distress is important. But there's no way of being certain about this.

[2] We can suppose that the parables are not that critical to understanding Jesus. Tales told to a bunch of primitive peasants in a small, unimportant corner of the world surely can't say much. 

If so, then the millions of words written about the parables are an example of scholarly and priestly mystification. The simple has been transformed into the complex. Something has been made of not very much. 

Perhaps their complexity and wisdom is only apparent, arising mainly because we're so far from Jesus in time and culture and find it hard to make sense of them. 

To take a parallel: we assume that Milton's Paradise Lost is a difficult piece of literature. The fact of the matter is, however, that the poem is considerably more difficult for us because we no longer inhabit the world Milton lived in. His contemporaries would not have had our level of difficulty. In the same way we must struggle to comprehend what to Jesus' listeners would have been relatively simple.

[3] Perhaps we are wrong to think that the authors of the gospels manipulated material for their own purposes. Many think that we have in the parables the authentic, verbatim words of Jesus, written down by men inspired by the Holy Spirit. 

This is, in the final resort, a judgement call. If anyone arrives at this conclusion after having considered all the evidence, especially that produced by scholars over the last 300 years about the nature of the Gospels, they are bound to stick with it.

In trying to understand the parables it may help to compare two approaches to a particular example. The first is that of C H Dodd, the second of Bernard Scott. The parable is that of the Leaven (Luke 13.20-21; Matthew 13.33; Thomas 96).

Dodd  The parables "... represent the interpretation which our Lord offered of his own ministry". Their implication is that an hour of decision has arrived, first for Judaism and second for everyone who hears Jesus speak.

This parable illustrates the mystery of the kingdom of God. That was Jesus' purpose in using it. In Matthew and Luke its companion parable is that of the Mustard Seed. "In that case," writes Dodd, "the emphasis must lie upon the completion of the process of fermentation."

But the parable could originally have stood alone. Leaven is a symbol in Judaism for evil influences. "By analogy, it should be used here as a symbol for a wholesome influence," says Dodd.

It is the ministry of Jesus which is working in this way. The process of fermentation is at first slow but soon speeds up. That is, "... the power of God's Kingdom worked from within, mightily permeating the dead lump of religious Judaism ..."

Scott  He points out that the Gospel of Thomas makes this parable primarily about a small beginning coming to a large completion - essentially Dodd's position.

But important small points indicate that the traditional view of this parable is suspect.

• "Three measures of flour" is a large amount - enough to feed a hundred people.
• It springs from Genesis 18.6 where Sarah feeds the angels who predict Isaac's birth with three measures of flour. These were truly big eaters.
• Unleavened bread in Judaism was a symbol for the holy. In contrast, the leaven in this context would have been "... a powerful metaphor for corruption".
• For a woman to be used as the agent of something sacred would have been notable to people listening to this parable. This was universally a man's role at the time.
• The word often translated as "mix" is in fact krypto in Greek. This means" concealed". The woman conceals the leaven in the dough.

Scott continues: 

If we listen to the parable it says something like this. "The empire of God is like moral corruption." ... that is a very bad start. Most folks in Jesus' audience would have blanched at the first term "leaven," for the empire of God cannot be like leaven, but should be unleavened.

His interpretation follows - which may or may not be the "right" one. But it illustrates a contemporary trend to stress the background of the Gospels in order to better understand them and the Jesus they portray.

Might it be that the parables have lost much of their original power because of the wide gap between ourselves in the 21st century and the people Jesus spoke to?

The point is that as soon as the experts start pronouncing on the parables (or anything else in the Bible for that matter) differences - sometimes impossibly large - open up. Not one seems to agree with another. There is a babel of voices, each stridently asserting his own her own viewpoint. 

Whatever one concludes about the nature of the parables, one line seems to run strongly through all approaches. It is that Jesus intended his hearers to respond to the parables by reflecting on their own lives. As Scott puts it:

The parables give us access to the way Jesus re-imagined the possibility of living, of being in the world. They are not just religious, not just about God, although they are that too ... They help us imagine how we might live life in this world.

But how can we reflect on our lives in response the the parables - which, remember, are just about as close as we'll ever get to "what Jesus really said" - if we can't easily understand them, if at all? Have the parables not lost their power over ordinary men and women today?

The only way the parables can regain power is for the ordinary person to know something about New Testament times. This may be less than satisfactory because an inevitable reliance upon "experts" follows. One's encounter with Jesus becomes a matter of study, of understanding an older culture, of getting into the shoes of people long gone from the face of the earth. But we have only argumentative scholars or fundamentalist certainties to help us.

Scott's suggestion is that Jesus used parables to undermine and destroy what he call the current "myths" of Jewish society. These myths tended to operate almost beyond awareness, as "givens" which were seldom if ever questioned - but which nevertheless ruled people's lives with an iron rod of unconscious compliance.

As a boy in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), I was a subject of the British Empire. School authorities went to great lengths to ensure that we absorbed a version of our country's origins which suited their purposes. As Scott points out, such myths operate beyond consciousness. When they are questioned, however, they fall apart easily. Their loss can be traumatic.

Jesus' parables almost certainly had just this function. They were meant precisely to prick the balloon of Hebrew awareness in relation to their national and religious myths. "A Samaritan is the hero? And he flouts our God-given rules about ritual cleanliness? Disgusting! Who does this Jesus fellow think he is?" might be the righteous response of a good Jew who heard Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan.

The problem today is that unless the ordinary man or woman in the pew is aware of the background, the parable of the Good Samaritan cannot convey what Jesus meant to convey. The fundamental power of the original is almost totally lost. As Scott writes,

Because parables expose myths as false answers to life's hard realities, they also expose their audiences to discomfort and pain. [But] We no longer take offense at the parables because myth has reclaimed the parables for us, and we no longer experience their assault on myth and their re-imagining of life apart from myth.

It might be possible to redeem the parables by rejecting the gospels as a pre-eminent source of knowledge about what Jesus really said and did in this world. The parables have been hyped-up so much over the centuries that we tend to invest them with meaning and power far greater than they actually possess. They are interesting to some, and helpful to a few. But they have little or no power over most and need not be paid much attention.

It seems to me that this solution would be justly criticised as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The gospels, with all their shortcomings, are our only authority (apart from Paul's letters and various non-canonical writings) about Jesus. Ditching them is a solution, but not a good one.

We do get some idea from the parables (if we study them) of what Jesus was saying to his contemporaries. But the question remains, "What does Jesus, a man who lived and died some two thousand years ago, say to us? If the parables - supposedly relevant and challenging to all - are opaque, no longer easily accessible to ordinary people, what next?"

I wish I knew the answer to this problem of "power-loss" in the parables. Attempts to build them up to incredible heights of relevance and importance to the 21st century have, it seems to me, largely failed. Making the parables out to be what they are not is as unsatisfactory a response as diminishing them to the status of interesting first-century stories told by an inspired Palestinian peasant.

In the final analysis, unless their context and background are understood, they mean either very little or nothing (as to most non-Christians), or what they shouldn't mean (as to those Christians who interpret them knowing neither context nor background).

That something should have been pointed out at the start of the Church's life is not necessarily an indication of its truth. But it's relevant, I think, that Paul should have suggested a number of functions for Christians, and that one of them should be teaching (Roman 12.4-8). 

It looks as though those who choose Christianity as a way of life [5] must perforce look back and understand as best they can. If the parables are perceived as aids to living God's way, rather than as prescriptions for right living, their power is restored.

But study of the parables to know, as far as we can know, what he meant by them doesn't alone restore their power. That requires what Scott calls a shift from trust in Jesus to a to trust in God with Jesus. We trust God in some measure because Jesus trusted before us.

The world that Jesus formulated to us through the parables is ultimately the same world in which we live. His formulation is a primary guide in living our lives. But it is we who live it, not he. To that extent we are as able and as free to create our own parables as he was to create his.

Scott gives an example, created by one of his students, as an equivalent for the parable of the Leaven:

God's overwhelming love is like cancer that invaded a woman's breast until it had consumed all of her, even in her Sunday finery.

If we are to call ourselves Christian, there is a sense in which Jesus went before us and we follow after him. What he pioneered we continue and develop - always re-engineering without destroying the original powerhouse. Thus only when we are bold and courageous enough to create our own parables can Jesus' parables in turn regain their full power.
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[4] The Acts of Jesus, R W Funk & The Jesus Seminar, 1998
[5] See Christianity as a Way of Living

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