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Supreme literature?
Solidly fixed in the minds of many is the opinion that the parables of Jesus in the New Testament are something special. Scott's book reinforces that opinion. It presents an analysis of some parables which opens up a relatively new and refreshing way of considering them. His thesis is that through the parables we can glimpse Jesus' vision of a new way of living.

Having said that, his opening comments are way over the top. The parables are, he writes, "... among the supreme literary creations of western literature." I suppose many would agree that the parables are unusual and that they have deeply impacted Western literature. But "supreme"?

Far from having been a window on either God or the person of Jesus, the parables have proved enigmatic from the first. Many generations of Christians have wondered what they mean. As many generations of preachers and writers have supplied ingenious answers.

It was not until the 20th century that study of the parables began to break away from traditional renderings of meaning, as Scott tells in a summary of "Early parable studies" towards the end of the book. It is to C H Dodd writing in 1935 that we owe what seems to have become an enduring definition of a parable:

At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought (The Parables of the Kingdom).

The author's focus is the historical Jesus. He's a charter member of the Jesus Seminar who has "... no illusions about being able to recover the very words of Jesus." But he's convinced "... that we have the feel of Jesus parables, their form and texture, if not their exact wording."

Scott makes an excellent point about the apparent complexity of the parables. People complain, he remarks, about scholars and others producing interpretations of the parables which are too subtle and complex. If they are that difficult, it is said, they could not have been understood by the ordinary folk who first heard them.

The reason why they appear complex now is because of our distance from their origins, both in time and culture. "Because we do not share the cultural world of Jesus and his audience ... the interpreter must make evident what would have been assumed, obvious, or intuitive to Jesus' audience," writes Scott.

Of the thirty-five parables ascribed to Jesus only twenty-three were selected by the Jesus Seminar as "what Jesus really said." This illustrates an additional problem when trying to work out their meaning. The Gospel authors had only slight concern with history. Their main thrust was theological - drawing out the meaning of Jesus in the "holy history" of the world. So if we want to work out how the Jesus of history re-imagined the world, we have also to see past and through the Gospel authors' interpretations. This can be a complicated business.

Profile of Jesus
All the effort of working out what the parables mean should, one supposes, have some worthwhile outcome. For those who think that the Jesus of faith is who matters, dissection of the parables is of interest but not definitively so. What matters to such are the formulations of the faithful of what Jesus means to them, not what he means in terms of "what really happened." 

For those who find, as I do, the traditional Jesus of faith increasingly nonsensical, what the flesh-and-blood Jesus really meant to say through his parables is of correspondingly intense interest.

Scott writes, "In his parables Jesus re-imagined a world in which to live. And through them his followers learned to live in a re-imagined world. Furthermore, they [the parables] are our only access to that world. He called it the kingdom of God."

His explanation of parables as a form of metaphor which supplants myth to make a point is clear and well-put. Elsewhere scholars often get into sometimes astounding contortions to reach their elusive conclusions. Scott's assertion is  that parables make comparisons, that they tend to shock, that they expose and attack convention, and that they get people to think about the world. His thinking is accessible to anyone, being far from the usual technical jargon to which we must so frequently submit.

As the author remarks, we don't have and never will have enough hard information about Jesus to compose even the slimmest of biographies. Even the fullest biography must guess at the complex motivations and emotions which underlie the behaviours of a subject.

Psychologists today don't much like it being pointed out that all their conclusions are inferential. They much prefer to intimate that somehow, when referring to mental and emotional processes, their diagnoses relate to something objective. At its worst, this sort of claim is sheer nonsense. They are able to observe only behaviours - even when you or I report to them our immediate thoughts.

While accepting that inference about Jesus' thoughts and meanings at our distance in time and culture from him is perilous, it is not in principle an invalid process. If we can somehow latch onto the parables in a way which accurately, even if only partially, relates to the situation in which they were delivered, then we should be able to tentatively conclude certain things about Jesus' intentions. 

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