Are there Narrative Gaps in the Parables of Jesus?

Parables are not straight forward. They only tell you imprecise stories. At times, a parable is simply ambiguous, always polyvalent, or appears to leave gaps in the flow of the narrative. Such gaps influence capturing an elusive meaning for the story. Readers must find a way, or ways, to bridge the gap before they can struggle with a parable’s meaning.¹ Here are three parables that have or appear to have narrative gaps influencing how they are understood. At times the gaps undermine how one has always understood the story.

            Luke 13:9, the conclusion to the story of two bumbling farmers (Luke 13:6-9), breaks-off in mid-sentence leaving the reader with a physical gap in the narrative. Literally, 13:9 concludes: “And if it [the tree] bears fruit in the future, […]; and if not you will cut it down.” In this case, the latter half of the sentence is missing. Most translators, aware of the missing text, accommodate the ellipsis (i.e., gap in the text) in some way. For example, the NRSV and REB² fill it in the following way: “And if it bears fruit in the future, <well and good>” (pointed brackets indicate the translator’s conjecture; except translators don’t generally use pointed brackets). One can easily imagine the vintner’s shoulder shrug and open palms as he unexpectedly drops the last phrase. What should one make of the gap and how should one take the vintner’s subtle refusal to cut-down the tree?³

            There appears to be a crucial gap in Jesus’ well-known parable about a father and his two sons (Luke 15:11-32).⁴ The gap in the flow of the narrative occurs between Luke 15:24 and 25. Why did the father not notify his older son about the celebration? The celebration was in full swing when the older brother happened to come-in from the fields. He had to ask a hired hand what was going-on. He was clearly ignorant of the younger son’s return. The older son felt slighted, for his father had never given him so much as a young goat for a celebration. (15:29). Was the father’s slight of the older son deliberate or simply the oversight of a father who doted on the younger son and had taken the older son for granted? If this be the case, how does the gap influence how one reads the parable?

            Jesus’ story about a shepherd and a lost sheep (Luke 15:4-6) also may have a gap in Luke’s version of the parable. It occurs between 15:5 and 6. In verse 4, the shepherd discovers one sheep is missing and he leaves the flock of 99 sheep alone in the wilderness to search for the lost sheep. When he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders rejoicing (verse 5). When he comes home, he celebrates his finding the lost sheep with friends and neighbors (verse 6). Did the shepherd go directly home with the sheep on his shoulders after finding it, abandoning the 99 in the wilderness? If there is a gap between verses 5 and 6, the shepherd might be construed as returning to the flock and bringing all 100 of the flock to a place of safety before he returns home. Alas, that is not how the story appears in Luke. In Luke, it is a story about an irresponsible shepherd who abandons his flock in the wilderness and returns home to celebrate the one lost sheep that was found.⁵

The danger of filling gaps in an explanation of the story, however, leaves one open to the charge that he (or she) is writing another story, rather than reading and explaining the story as it is written. The more responsible approach would be to explain the story as written and raise the issue of the gap. In either case, once you recognize a gap, it is impossible not to let it affect how you read the story. For gaps also are part of the parable.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See Hedrick, Many Things in Parables. Jesus and his Modern Critics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 47-50.

²New Revised Standard Version and the Revised English Bible.

³See Hedrick, “An Unfinished Story about a Fig Tree in a Vineyard (Luke 13:6-9)” pages 142-69 in Parabolic Fictions or Narrative Fictions. Seminal Essays on the Stories of Jesus (Cascade, 2016).

⁴Hedrick, Many Things in Parables, 48.

⁵Hedrick, Many Things in Parables, 49-50.

Are the Parables of Jesus deliberate Enigmas?

I ask the question because they have been exhaustively studied by parable ponderers since the first century and explanations even today are still getting more diverse and contradictory. Scholars today cannot even agree on what a parable is, and how it is supposed to function, much less what a given parable means. Historical Jesus Scholar, John Dominic Crossan, in a dictionary article suggests that this is the very result intended by the historical Jesus himself. He says that parables in the Jesus tradition are problematic.

This is probably because the parables were often told concerning the Kingdom of God and that explained a symbol by a metaphor…The presumption is that Jesus intended this effect, namely, that the parables would be both provocative and unforgettable so that the recipient would be forced inevitably to interpret.¹

He concludes the essay this way:

All these differing interpretations…should not be considered the interpreter’s failure but rather the parable’s success. It is a parable’s destiny to be interpreted and those interpretations will necessarily be diverse. When the diversity ceases, the parable is dead, and the parabler is silent.²

An enigma is defined in Webster’s New World College Dictionary as “a perplexing, usually ambiguous statement, a riddle.”³ So far as I am aware no one has argued that parables are deliberate enigmas, but Crossan’s statement seems to lead us in that direction.

In the marketplace of the critical study of religion today there are at least six contemporary strategies for reading New Testament “parables.”⁴ One of these strategies treats parables as allegories. An allegory is a coded story that describes something totally different from what it says on its surface. On its surface the story of the Sower (Mark 4:3-8) describes the successes and failures of farming in first-century Palestine (Mark 4:13-20), but as its Markan interpretation (Mark 4:13-20) shows, it is really about success and failure of early Christian preaching. Most ecclesiastical interpretation of parables today are still treating them as allegories, particularly in church circles.

In the late 19^th century against the excesses of allegory, Adolf Jϋlicher, a German scholar, argued that parables were comparisons comprised of two parts, a picture part (the parabolic story) and a “matter” or substance part. The “matter” part was the unspoken “issue” of the comparison; the “matter” was the real subject of the picture part. Something learned in the picture part evoked the substance part in terms of a single point expressed in a universal moral of the widest and broadest generality. For example, Jϋlicher’s moral for the parable of the Two Farmer’s and a Fig Tree (Luke 13:6-9) was “all who do not repent will perish.”

In 1935 C. H. Dodd, a British scholar, argued that parables are metaphors. A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes one known thing in language appropriate to another known thing. Dodd argued that parables, introduced by the frame “the Kingdom of God is like…” were intended to cast light on God’s reign. In other words, God’s reign is described in language appropriate to Palestinian village life. As things go in the story, so go things under the reign of God. The specifics of the comparison, however, are never quantified, but left for auditors/readers to fill in. For Dodd, the Parable of the Sower illustrates the arrival of God’s reign in Jesus’ ministry by means of a harvest image.

In 1967, Dan Via, an American scholar, argued that narrative parables are neither allegory nor metaphor (a strategy that treats them as figures). Parables are narrative, freely invented fictions that work like any narrative does. They are a form of literary art that can be appreciated for themselves. They are literary objects that do not reference but instead call attention to themselves. What Jesus intended with the parables is lost to us in the twentieth century. All we have are the parables and they should be studied for what they are. These brief stories dramatize how Jesus understood human existence. In the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1-15). The complaining workers understood life in terms of merit and were unwilling to accept the risk of relying on God’s grace.

In 1994, W. R. Herzog, Jr., an American scholar, argued that the parables were stories typifying the oppressed situation of Palestinian peasants at the hands of a wealthy elite. In his stories Jesus mirrored the oppressed conditions under which the peasants lived; they were intended to teach the peasants about their oppressed situation. This explains why Jesus was crucified. He was a threat to the state precisely because he sought to inform the peasants about their oppression. The Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1-15) reflects Herzog’s understanding of the clash between wealthy elite and disfranchised peasants. The amount paid the workers was not a living wage because day laborers do not work every day. The banishment of the worker who confronts the owner is intended to intimidate the other workers.

In 1994, C. W. Hedrick, an American scholar, argued that the parables are open-ended narrative fictions that Jesus invented by observing the world around him. They realistically portray aspects of Palestinian village life and aspects of the world around him. Complications raised in the narratives are left unresolved leaving resolutions for auditors/readers to solve. Because their polysemy (meaning they are capable of multiple meanings) and what different readers bring to them, they are capable of a wide range of plausible readings, as the history of parables interpretation demonstrates. Narrative fictions work by pulling the auditor/reader into their fictional worlds where discoveries about self and one’s own world may be made. Discoveries are evoked for auditors/readers in the nexus between the narrative and what they bring to it. In the story a Pharisee and Toll Collector (Luke18:10-13) the auditor/reader is presented with two flawed characters praying in the temple. The complication facing the auditor/reader is this: which flawed character will be acceptable to God?

Jesus did not explain his stories to his auditors. Hence, no one has access to that information. We do, however, know how some were explained (or not) in manuscripts through the third/fourth century: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocryphon of James, Pistis Sophia, and The Apocalypse of Peter. Interpretations in the modern period add more diverse explanations. Explanations do not generally agree, but each interpreter claims to know how Jesus understood them. My own theory is that we do not interpret parables, but they interpret us (their readers), by evoking from us personal responses. How do you see it?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹“Parable,” vol. 5.146-52 in The Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday, 1992), 150.

²Ibid., 5.152.

³4^th edition, 2002.

⁴For the description of these six strategies, I have abbreviated and edited my dictionary entry on “Parable” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Abingdon, 2000), 374-76.

Flawed Characters in the stories Jesus told

There is a subtle grittiness reflected in many of the stories Jesus told, that many readers of the parables seem to miss. Likely because most readers are searching for religious morals among the parables Jesus invented. For example, the story of the Samaritan (Luke 10:30b-35) occurs in the aftermath of a vicious assault and robbery on the Jericho Road that left the victim almost dead (10:30b). The first travelers on the scene after the mugging ignore the man lying in the ditch. The Violent Tenants (Mark 12:1b-8) is a story about some ruthless tenants who, in the course of the story, committed several murders, beatings, and multiple stonings of rent collectors; the story concludes with them murdering the son of the property owner. One story, The Killer (Gos. Thom 98), narrates the calculated planning and the cold-blooded murder of an important man.

            Other stories, while not as violent, feature characters seriously flawed by their less than ethical practices. For example, the story of The Manager Fired for Cause (Luke 16:1b-7) features a manager accused of wasting the owner’s goods. The owner summoned him and fired him on the spot. Before his firing became common knowledge, the ex-manager conspired with those in debt to the owner to pay less than they owed in hopes they would reward him in the future. The story is followed by three awkward attempts to find some religious value in the story (Luke 16:8-9). Another story features the blatantly unethical practice of paying day laborers the same amount of money for unequal amounts of work performed, and then taunting those who worked the longest number of hours by paying them last (Matt 20:1-15). Those paid first no doubt were delighted with their pay. Those paid last who worked the longest felt unfairly treated and their efforts unappreciated.

            In other stories the flaws of the protagonist are not immediately obvious. Consider the story Jesus told about a dysfunctional family (Luke 11b-32). The characters include a pampered younger son who wastes his inheritance in a distant land, an indulgent father who dotes on the younger son, and an elder brother, who is thoroughly piqued at being slighted by his father, after his years of faithful service to the family business. Another example is the striking lack of compassion by the protagonist over a small debt owed to him by another, when his own much larger debt, had just been forgiven (Matt 18:23-34). Luke 13:6-9 features a story about two bumbling and incompetent farmers, neither of whom knows nearly enough about the care of a fig tree planted in a vineyard. On the other hand, The Pharisee and Toll Collector (Luke 18:10-13) features two men praying in the temple. Both are counting on God’s forgiveness for different reasons. Both seem to know how God will respond to them: the Pharisee stands before God on his own merits, having fulfilled the law perfectly (he claims). The toll collector, with eyes cast downward, cries for God’s mercy for his sins, apparently with no intention of mending his ways.

            Sometimes the evangelist misreads certain characters in the stories and either commends or criticizes them. For example, Luke denigrates the personal character of the judge in Luke 18:1-5 by calling him “unjust” (Luke 18:6), when he appears to be a thoroughly honest judge who calls his cases based on how he sees the evidence (18:2, 4). The judge, however, considers compromising his integrity because of a perceived physical threat from a widow. The story ends before he renders his judgment, and the reader is left pondering how the story might have ended.¹

            Why would a teacher of wisdom and religious values, who is touted as working miracles through the power of God, pepper his stories with such violent, unethical, and otherwise flawed behavior? The answer is: such appears to be the nature of the society in which Jesus lived. The stories of Jesus were realistic fictions and he invented his characters from the world around him. As John Kloppenborg aptly puts it:

The parable, in order to challenge or problematize prevailing values or beliefs, must be told in a realistic vein and evoke a world in which the audience is at home if it is to succeed in its rhetorical purpose of deconstructing or challenging that world.²

Ancient Palestine was a world in which banditry was commonplace suggesting that those on the bottom of the social scale, rural peasants and urban poor, were always at risk. Their world was not a safe place. There are few ancient sources describing their plight (the works of Josephus being the principal nonreligious source).³ The parables themselves are part of the evidence for the dangerous conditions of that world. The elements of these stories invented by Jesus are problematic: his characters are flawed, his settings are realistic, his plots are gritty, and there is no resolution to his complications. All of which leads a reader to ponder, and that is how the parables of Jesus work.

In that nexus (that is in the reader’s mind reflecting on the story within the parable’s world) readers find affirmation, challenge, or subversion to the constructs under which they live their own lives.⁴

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See C. W. Hedrick, Parabolic Figures or Narrative Fictions? Seminal Essays on the Stories of Jesus (Cascade: 2016), 171.

²J. Kloppenborg, The Tenants in the Vineyard (WUNT 195; Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 107. For a discussion of parables as realistic fiction see pp. 106-109 and Hedrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions. The Creative Voice of Jesus (Hendrickson, 1994), 39-56, and idem, Many Things in Parables. Jesus and his Modern Critics (Westminster John Knox, 2004), 53-54.

³L. R. Lincoln, A Socio-Historical Analysis of Jewish Banditry in First Century Palestine: 6-70 CE. Masters Thesis, University of Stellenbosch, Nov. 2005: https://scholar.sun.ac.za/server/api/core/bitstreams/f1d8d7ae-222a-4b10-b5c3-258c5504d31d/content

⁴Hedrick, Many Things in Parables, 85.

The Parables of Jesus are Realistic Stories about Human Life

Most of the “parables” of Jesus portray common peasant folk engaged in average, down to earth activities. Even those parables featuring characters not of the peasant class portray them in actions true to their status in society.¹ On the whole parables attributed to Jesus are not about kings and the trappings of royalty, but describe common folk caught in the act of being themselves. They are people in the local village, next door neighbors to Jesus’s first-century auditors. For example, the parables describe a peasant farmer sowing a field and the kinds of hazards any small farmer faces at every sowing season (Mark 4:3-8 and parallels); a woman sweeping her house searching for a lost coin (Luke 15:8-9); the behavior of a particular man (not everyman) who unexpectedly finds a lost treasure (two versions Matt 13:44 and Thomas 109); a shepherd searching for a lost sheep (three different versions: Matt 18:12; Luke 15:4-6; Thomas 107); a man hiring and paying day laborers (Matt 20:1-15); the haphazard planning and murder of a powerful man (Thomas 96); the murder of the son of an absentee landlord (Mark 12:1-11; Matt 21:33-43; Luke 20:9-18; Thomas 65); the questionable actions of a man fired from his job (Luke 16:1-7); two bumbling farmers worrying with a fig tree in a vineyard (Luke 13:6-9). To appreciate the commonness of the stories attributed to Jesus see the categories under which Brandon Scott discusses the parables (in the table of contents): family, village, city and beyond; masters and servants; home and farm.² See also my own classification of the parables in terms of social, cultural, and economic facets of Palestinian society.³ In the stories that Jesus told, realism trumps theology. In the interpretations of the evangelists and the contemporary church, theology trumps realism, and has the final word.

            In the main the parables are thoroughly secular and realistic slices of life in Palestinian antiquity. When read for themselves, they give the impression that they are completely transparent. They are “about” what they present to the reader. Their qualities of secularism, realism, and transparency work against the idea that they are opaque, encoded, arcane, and allegorical. They make good sense when read as fictional stories, but poor sense if the object is to find theological or allegorical messages in them.⁴

            On their surface the parables of Jesus are secular. They do not moralize, and neither does the narrative voice of the parables either condemn or commend the behavior of the characters in the stories. When read for themselves, the stories reflect neither apocalyptic despair nor imminent cosmic destruction. They are patently a-religious—neither affirming nor criticizing the behavior of characters in the stories. The narrator of the parables expresses no opinions, is completely self-effacing, and is silent on matters of faith, morals, and religion. For example, The Pharisee and the Toll Collector (Luke 18:9-13) present two clearly contradictory courses of life in Palestinian Judaism, but the narrator neither takes sides nor criticizes either man. Such moral ambiguity, a distinguishing feature of Jesus’s stories, associates the parables in some respects with what the literary critic Northrup Fry calls the ironic mode, a style characterized by “complete objectivity and suppression of all explicit moral judgments.”⁵ It may seem odd to think of Jesus telling stories lacking moral sensibility, but when read without the interpretive comparative frames and concluding moral judgments supplied by the evangelists that is exactly what one finds.⁶ How do you find the stories of Jesus?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹There are exceptions where narratives shade over into unrealism, however. Especially where allegorical features have been introduced into the narrative during its transmission; for an example, see the parable of the Mustard Seed (Mark 4:31-32; Matt 13:31-32; Luke 13:19; Thomas 20).

²Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable. A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Fortress, 1989), viii-ix.

³Charles Hedrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions. The Creative Voice of Jesus (Wipf and Stock, reprint, 2005), 259-61.

⁴This part of the essay is excerpted and revised from Hedrick, Many Things in Parables. Jesus and his Modern Critics (Westminster John Knox, 2004), 39.

⁵Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), 40.

⁶An excerpt revised from Hedrick, Many things in Parables, ix.

The Parables and their Study: An Embarrassing State of Affairs

In 2004 I called attention to what I described as an embarrassing situation in New Testament Scholarship.¹ Whereas in the natural sciences “the confirmation or not of a limited hypothesis is regarded as an experimental fact if repetition yields the same result,”² the modern study of the parables of Jesus yields remarkably different results. Each critic claims to have the key to explicate the parables of Jesus. Of course, literary and historical criticism are not the natural sciences, and in the study of parables the researcher’s personal proclivities frequently end up shaping the product of the study of the parables of Jesus.

Shortly before the death (4 B.C.E.) of Herod the Great, King of Judea, Jesus was born. According to early Christian tradition, his birth took place at Bethlehem (Matt 2; Luke 2), a few miles south of Jerusalem. He was reared, however, in the Galilee region at Nazareth, a tiny village in the hills a short distance from Sepphoris, where for most of Jesus’ life Herod Antipas directed the affairs of his tetrarchy (Galilee and Perea). Virtually everything known about Jesus’ public life comes from the early Christian gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, written decades after his death.³ Nothing is known of his private life. The gospels describe a number of Jesus’ public acts and preserve sayings and stories attributed to him in the course of his public career in the first third of the first century. Detailed reports exist of his death at the hands of the Romans during the Prefecture of Pontius Pilate (26-36 C.E.).

            The most prominent feature of Jesus’ public discourse, to judge from the gospels, is the brief story form he popularized in his short career. These stories, dubbed “parables” since the latter part of the first century, on their surface were simply secular stories about aspects of village life in what the Romans knew as Syria-Palestine, and later simply as Judea. Through the years it has been easier to reconcile the gospel accounts of Jesus’ activities with who Jesus has become in the faith of the church, than it has to reconcile his stories (which on their surface are not religious at all) with who Jesus has become in the faith of the church. Since the first century, his stories have remained a conundrum for the New Testament critic. How is it possible, for example, to find something religiously significant about God—or human life, for that matter—from a brief narrative about a woman putting yeast into a rather large measure of flour (Matt 13:33b; Luke 13:20b-21; Gospel of Thomas 96:1)? That issue—how to go from a first-century secular story to an “appropriate” religious explanation—has continued to be the fuse driving the fascination of the critic with Jesus’ stories. In the hands of his critics, those who ponder and analyze his stories for their “true” meanings, Jesus is seen to be many different people and his stories have been found to be about many different things. Each critic claims their own analysis unlocks the true meaning of the stories, giving expression to their true voice. That claim creates the embarrassing situation in which the study of Jesus’ parables finds itself today. The entire enterprise of parables study is threatened by each critic claiming to have the “true” interpretation of the parable. Their contradictory claims undermine confidence in any of the results. Yet no one seems to be bothered by this embarrassing state of affairs.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Charles W. Hedrick, Many Things in Parables. Jesus and his Modern Critics (Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004). This brief essay is adapted from the introduction.

²James B. Conant, “Concerning the Alleged Scientific Method,” in Louise B. Young, ed., Exploring the Universe (New York: Oxford, 1971), 31.

³The Gospel of John has no parables. See Hedrick, Many Things in Parables, 4-5.

Meier's Third Crucial Blunder*

Meier rejects the critical history of the parables tradition written by J. Jeremias in 1947.¹ Jeremias demonstrated that “the primitive church related the parables to its own concrete situation and by doing so produced a shift of emphasis” in the parables.² Thus the church reshaped the character of the parables by allegorizing them³ even to the extent of introducing allegorical features into the narratives to insure ecclesial interpretations.⁴ The critical distinction between parable and allegory was established in 1888 by A. Jülicher in his two volume work Die Gleichnisreden Jesu.⁵ N. Perrin summarized the distinction that Jülicher established between parable and allegory in this way: “parable means what it says, using pictures to express its meaning. Allegory, on the other hand…does not mean what it says, but hides its meaning in symbol.”⁶ Since these two pivotal studies on the parables (Jülicher and Jeremias) critical scholarship has regarded the allegorical flourishes in the parables like barnacles on a clam—the clam is not defined by the barnacle, rather the barnacle by the clam. In short Jeremias found that “most of the allegorical traits in the present form of the parables are not original.”⁷

Meier defines parables as “comparisons…that have been ‘stretched out’ into short stories with at least an implicit beginning, middle, and end—in other words, a mini-narrative with at least an implicit plot line.”⁸ But since allegorical narrative is used in ancient Israelite texts and in the synoptic parables “one must come to each Synoptic parable with an open mind rather than a rigid grid” (p. 87) as to the presence of allegory in the parables.⁹

            Nevertheless Meier regards the narrative parables as “riddle speech” when compared to Jesus’ “legal teachings” (p.4, 34). The parables require a context. Without a context the parables are open to multiple meanings (p. 32-33). He works out his understanding of the historical context of the parables in the career of Jesus in his first three volumes, summarized for the reader in the volume on parables (p. 3). This “historical context” is heavily indebted to the synoptic reconstructions of the career of Jesus. Hence a reliable interpretation of a parable of Jesus requires that it be analyzed in “its redactional context in a Gospel and its historical context in the ministry of Jesus” (p. 5) in order for an exegete to have any hope of recovering the “intention” of Jesus.¹⁰ Both requirements, therefore, ensure the continuing influence of allegorical analysis in the interpretation of the parables of Jesus.

At the end of his chapter on allegory (pp. 85-87) it becomes clear that allegorical motifs in the parables will be regarded as legitimate parts of the parables’ tradition, and such is the case with his discussion of the four parables he finds to be authentic (pp. 230-362). Interpreting the parables allegorically, however, is a denial of the inherent nature of the parables as realistic fictitious narratives about everyday life in Palestinian peasant villages.¹¹ Meier’s view is that while some of the parables might be realistic, not all are (pp. 42-43). The basic realism of the parables, however, challenges Meier’s allegorical method of parables’ interpretation. On the other hand, acknowledging their realism disfranchises allegory thus freeing the parables to come into their own as ancient texts un-encumbered by early Christian theology and rhetoric.¹²

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

*Meier uses the word “blunder” to describe a position with which he disagrees (40).

¹This is the date of the first German edition of Jeremias, Parables of Jesus (first English translation, 1954); see N. Perrin, Rediscovering the Teachings of Jesus, (1967), 258. Perrin was a student of Jeremias.

²Parables of Jesus (revised edition, 1963), 48.

³Ibid., 66.

⁴Ibid., 68-69.

⁵Jülicher’s two volume work has never been translated.

⁶Perrin, Rediscovering, 257.

⁷Jeremias, Parables, 89.

⁸Meier, Probing the Authenticity of the Parables, 37.

⁹Ibid., 87. See his brief discussion of allegory pages 82-88.

¹⁰Meier’s goal in interpreting the parables is the following: “our quest concerns what the historical Jesus intended when he decided to use parables in general and to speak this or that parable in particular,” p. 33. From my perspective, however, one never really knows what people intend; one only knows what they tell us they intended.

¹¹Meier specifically rejects the idea that parables are inherently realistic fictions that draw upon everyday life in Palestinian villages (42-43).

¹²Hedrick, Many Things in Parables, 36-44.

The Making of Poems and Parables

The Poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) concludes his comments on analogy in poetry with this statement: "Thus poetry becomes and is a transcendent analogue composed of the particulars of reality, created by the poet's sense of the world, that is to say his attitude, as he intervenes and interposes the appearances of that sense."¹ Thus poetic truth (which the poem is) as seen by the poet is an agreement with a particular aspect of reality viewed through the poet's imagination.² In short the poem is a description of some aspect of reality as the poet himself/herself imagines it.

 

            Stevens draws on (but misquotes) an example from the Gospel of Matthew describing Matthew's imagination at work.³ Jesus went about cities and villages teaching and preaching, and "when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they…were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd" (Matt 9:36; Mark 6:34; and compare Matt 26:31 and Mark 14:26; Zech 13:7). Here is how Stevens describes Matthew's imagination working on particular aspects of reality:

 

There came into Matthew's mind in respect to Jesus going about, teaching and preaching, the thought that Jesus was a shepherd and immediately the multitudes scattered abroad and sheep having that particular in common became interchangeable. The image is an elaboration of the particular of the shepherd.⁴

 

Actually, in this case Matthew took the image from Mark 6:34 and Zech 13:7 (compare Matt 26:31) and applied it to Jesus. Still Stevens' description of the way image making is done is accurate, as his other examples in the chapter show.

 

            Jesus made his parables in much the same way as Stevens describes a poet making poems. The parables in the gospels, if they originated with Jesus, "are the creative inventions of the mind of Jesus…" and fragments of his fictional view of reality.⁵ His reality was first-century life in Judean villages, and he invented the plots for these brief narratives by applying his imagination to particular aspects of that reality.

 

As a whole, the stories suggest that Jesus was a shrewd observer of life about him, but the information for inventing realistic characters in his stories would not have come only from his imagination. His stories arose from a blending of creative imagination with shrewd observation of everyday [village] life in Roman Palestine.⁶

 

His stories are notable for their secularity and realism. In short Jesus saw and described things as they are. Few of the stories have what may be described as religious motifs,⁷ and they also sport a goodly number of flawed characters. Nevertheless, the narrative voice of the stories neither commends nor condemns the actions of Jesus' invented characters. The stories conclude but the complications that are raised for readers are not resolved, and that feature appears to be deliberately designed into Jesus' narratives.

 

            The stories reflect a kind of moral ambiguity. When read closely as creative fictions against their background in Palestinian village life, they raise perplexing moral/ethical questions but offer no solutions. They do not even hint at a preferred solution, but interpreters, beginning with the gospel writers themselves, have regularly turned them "into stories about Christian theology, social justice, religious morals, and metaphors for the reign of God."⁸

 

            One can never be certain about such things, but judging from the nature of his oral compositions, as they have come down to us, it appears that Jesus did not turn to God to inspire his imagination, but rather he turned to the reality of the Palestinian world.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

¹"The Effects of Analogy" in The Necessary Angel. Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, 1951), 130.

²Necessary Angel, 54.

³Necessary Angel, 113

⁴Necessary Angel, 128-29.

⁵Parabolic Figures or Narrative Fictions, xv.

⁶Hedrick, "Survivors of the Crucifixion" in Zimmermann, Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu, 176.

⁷Hedrick, Wisdom of Jesus, 128-29.

⁸"Survivors of the Crucifixion," 172-73.

Why does Jesus not use Parables in John?

The word parable (παραβολή, parabole) does not even appear in the Gospel of John, and neither does the brief story form, which is what scholars usually describe as the classic form of the parable. Instead John uses the word paroimia (παροιμία) to describe an aspect of the discourse of Jesus. The figurative image of the sheepfold in John 10:1-5 is not a story and is not described as "parable," but rather as paroimia (10:6). Scholars provide several translations for this word: pithy saying, proverb, maxim, or hidden, obscure speech.  Its only other occurrences in the New Testament are translated as "figure" (John 16:25, 29) or "proverb" (2 Pet 2:22). The kind of language to which it refers is indirect language (i.e., not directly related to the issue at hand) or language that paints a picture.

 

            John 16:16-29 deliberately contrasts paroimia (16:25, 29) with clarity of speech (16:29)—paroimia being conceived as obscure, unclear, inscrutable and mysterious language, suggesting that it is not plain speech, but rather that it is obscure and that its significance is open to question. In this section (John 16:16-29) there really is no "figurative" language for the disciples to be perplexed over. They quite plainly state that what confused them was Jesus' statement "a little while, and you will see me no more; again a little while, and you will see me" (16:16-19). Jesus refers to his explanation to the disciples over their perplexity (16:20-28) as "paroimian language" (i.e., unclear, 16:25).  And they accept this explanation of what they regard as an obscure saying, as plain or clear language (16:29-30). In short, the narrator in John 16:16-29 seems to misunderstand paroimia—at least, one may say that what the disciples are confused about does not have the character of figure, pithy saying, proverb, or maxim.

 

            The image in John 10:1-5 (and presumably also John 10:7-18) is described as paroimia (John 10:6). And it certainly is, without doubt, a "figure," that paints an image of the situation with a sheepfold, the door to the sheepfold, and identifies the one who legitimately has access to the sheep and to the fold. This image (unlike the saying in John 16:16-29), however, does not confuse, it only succeeds in angering the audience of Judeans/Judaites/Jews (10:19), who apparently are not confused about the image, but rather are confused over the person of Jesus.

 

            The reason for the correct usage in one instance and the incorrect usage in the other is the fact that John 10:6 is a "narrative aside," written from a perspective different than that held by the principal narrative voice of the Gospel of John, which in this case is represented by John 16:16-29.*

 

            The Jesus of the Gospel of John does not use parables simply because the flesh and blood author does not know the tradition that Jesus told brief stories that the synoptic evangelists dubbed "parables." Nevertheless, both the authors of the synoptic gospels and the author of John agree that the language of Jesus was cryptic and in need of explanation, which is very interesting in the light of their almost complete disagreement on everything else. Their lack of understanding of the nature of parable arises from their erroneous idea that Jesus the early first-century Israelite believed the same things they did. But he was a Judean Israelite and they, coming along later, were Greek Christians.  Little wonder that they found his language strange, arcane, and in need of explanation.

 

Scholium (a marginal comment):

 

Brown is clearly wrong that "paroimia and parabole are used synonymously in Sirach 47:17." R. E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (i-xii). AB 29. New York: Doubleday, 1966, 385-86.

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

*See Hedrick, "Authorial Presence and Narrator in John. Commentary and Story," in Gospel Origins and Christian Beginnings, pages 74-93. Edited by Goehring, Hedrick, Sanders, and Betz; Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1990).

Why did Jesus tell Parables?

Well actually he told stories, or if I must use the technical literary term for stories, his characteristic way of speaking was in narrative. Narratives (stories) have as a minimum a beginning, middle, and end, and consist of a series of related events that develop and continue through the narrative to the end. In other words it is a story, and not just a statement. Calling a story a "parable" is a reading strategy describing how one intends to read the story. In other words a parable is not a distinct literary form; it is simply a brief narrative read in a particular way.

 

            In the early Christian gospels parables are generally viewed as brief stories intended to make a comparison, draw an analogy, or illustrate a moral or religious principle. Some of the parables are regarded as example stories that provide an example of proper human conduct. Some scholars theorize that parables are stories making a single comparison between an unstated reality and the situation in the story. The single point where the unstated reality and the situation in the story come together is best rendered as a broad single moral point. The stories of Jesus have also been described as metaphors: a narrative description of one thing under the guise of another unlike thing. On this reading strategy parables are described as stories intended to bring the kingdom of God into expression in vivid memorable language—all the above theories take their place among other reading strategies for the parables of the early Christian gospels.

 

            Basic to all these strategies, however, is the story, i.e., the narrative. In my view the stories Jesus told are freely invented secular fictions, which are subjected to various reading strategies by the writers of the gospels and subsequently by modern critics. A parable works when readers put themselves into the story and identify with one of the characters; they are then positioned to make discoveries about themselves.

 

            Why would Jesus tell what are principally secular stories that have been so confusing to understand? The earliest recorded answer to that question is found in the Gospel of Mark around 70 CE—we have no idea what Jesus thought of his stories; all we have to go on are the stories themselves to investigate the earliest period of Christian origins. Some forty to fifty years after the death of Jesus Mark thought the stories were allegories, which is another reading strategy for the stories. A narrative read as an allegory assumes that it is comprised of a series of figures, or metaphors: See Mark 4:3-8, a story about farming in the first century and Mark's reading of it (Mark 4:14-20) as a series of individual figures, which understands it as an allegory about the results of early Christian preaching.*

 

            Why did Mark think Jesus told figurative stories? Mark said that parables are for those outside the circle of the inner group of associates of Jesus. Parables were designed to keep "those outside" in the dark so that they would not learn the "secret" of the kingdom of God and turn and be forgiven (Mark 4:11-12). Matthew, on the other hand, blames the crowds to whom Jesus addressed his parables for deliberately hardening their hearts (Matt 13:10-15)—but omits Mark's strange phrase "lest they turn again and be forgiven" (Mark 4:12). Luke says that the parables concealed the secrets of the kingdom, which were only meant for disciples. Luke left it open that the crowds might still understand other things Jesus spoke about in parables (Luke 8:9-10), and like Matthew he also omits Mark's offensive phrase "lest they (the crowds) turn again and be forgiven" (Mark 4:12).

 

            When I was teaching classes in the parables of Jesus at Missouri State, students delighted in telling me that Jesus used parables because it was a good teaching technique, and made things clearer to the audience—like good examples do. The difficulty is that not even the evangelists agree among themselves on what a parable is and what it was about.  For example, Matthew and Luke come to opposite interpretations of the Parable of the Lost Sheep, and even disagree on what the parable says (Matt 18:10-14/Luke 15:3-7).

 

            I have never found anyone to agree with Mark that Jesus used parables in order to keep people from understanding "lest they turn again and be forgiven."

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

*See the discussion of Mark's theory of parables in Hedrick, Many Things in Parables. Jesus and his Modern Critics (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2004), 27-35.

Parables are not Parabolic Figures; they are Narrative Fictions

I am delighted to announce that Wipf and Stock, publishers in Eugene, Oregon, has recently published in their selective Cascade Series a new book of mine entitled Parabolic Figures or Narrative Fictions? Seminal Essays on the Stories of Jesus (Eugene OR: Cascade, 2016); the cost is $38.00 from the press. It is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. and even in electronic form.

 

            In the book I contend that parables do not teach moral and religious lessons; they are not, in whole or part, theological figures for the church. Rather parables are realistic narrative fictions told to Judean peasants, and like all effective fiction literature the stories are designed to draw auditors (and now readers) into their story worlds where auditors and readers make discoveries about themselves by finding their ideas challenged and subverted—or affirmed, by the stories.

 

            The parables have endings but not final resolutions, because the endings raise new complications for careful readers, which require further resolution.  The narrative contexts and interpretations supplied by the evangelists constitute an attempt by the early church to bring the secular narratives of Jesus under the control of the church's later religious perspectives.  Each narrative represents a fragment of Jesus' secular vision of reality.

 

            As I began this approach to parables over twenty years ago, I found myself moving further outside the mainstream of parables scholarship, both ecclesiastical and critical. I explored a literary approach to the parables in a series of early essays that, among other things, set out what I considered the basic rationale for a literary approach to the parables of Jesus.  These early essays form the central section of the book, published in recently edited form along with previously unpublished critiques of a strictly literary approach to the parables and my response to my critics.*

 

            I have been invited by Barnes and Noble in Springfield, Missouri for a meet-the-public and book signing on October 22, 2016.  If you are in town, drop by and let's chat a bit about parables, my blog, or you could just share a bit of your own thinking with me.  I am always happy to entertain new ideas.

 

What do you think of the parables as stories for a Judean peasant audience?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

*adapted from the back cover of the book; used by permission of Wipf and Stock.

Mystery, Reason, and Faith #2

Early Christians struggled to understand their faith rationally.  This essay continues the essay of July 27, 2013.

The mystery of all things united in Christ.  Some Pauline disciples believed that "in the fullness of time" God intended to gather into Christ the sum total of everything in heaven and on earth (Eph 1:9-10)—i.e., all things and all beings.  Christ becomes a receptacle for everything in the universe in the fullness of time so as to establish a kind of cosmic harmony and unity—just as it all had begun in Christ (Col 1:16-17; cf. Rom 11:36; 1 Cor 8:6).

 

The very concept is breathtaking, albeit a bit strange—all things are united in Christ and nothing exists outside him.  Christ in a sense becomes "the all in all" of the universe, i.e., its plenitude.  With the universe gathered "in Christ," it would be sanctified—ie. e., made holy.  The distance between the sacred and profane would be overcome, and the profane transformed into the sacred.  At the same time, it was clearly an odd idea for those who lived in the first century—hence their description of it as mystery.  But it is even odder for those of us who live in the 21^st century.  How exactly can such a concept be understood in the modern scientific age?  The universe is clearly expanding rather than contracting—and what exactly do you suppose "sanctified matter" might be anyway?

 

The mystery of lawlessness already at work.  In 2 Thess 2:1-12 the author corrects a misapprehension that the day of the Lord had already come.  The assertion is that it cannot have come, since it must first be preceded by "the rebellion" and by the appearance of the "man of lawlessness."  The mystery lies in the fact that already "lawlessness" is at work—although the lawless one has not yet been revealed.  In other words, there is an established timetable for the coming of the day of the Lord, and the mystery is that the scheme has been partially breached or compromised.  How can that be?  How explain that lawlessness is already at work even though "what restrains" (2 Thess 2:7) is still in place and the man of lawlessness has not yet appeared?  This kind of thinking is called apocalyptic eschatology, a kind of thinking in which imagined schemes are devised to account for what will transpire at the end time (cf. 2 Esdras 6:1-34).  Such thinking imposes a fictive plot on history that never happens.  On the other hand, Christianity was clearly more successful with its fictive plot on time separating a pagan time-frame from a Christian time-frame by Before the Common Era and Anno Domine.

 

The mystery of Christ.  The "Christ event" is by far the most perplexing of these mysteries.  This mystery, more than anything, revealed the difficulty that later followers of Jesus had with the most basic concept of their faith (1 Timothy 3:16).  They preached the mystery of Christ (Col 4:2-4)—that is, how could it be that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19)?  How could it be that all the treasures of wisdom had come to be in Christ (Col 2:1-3)?  How could the gospel of a crucified Jewish teacher be the wisdom of God destined from the ages to bring about human glorification (1 Cor 2:7)?

 

The early followers of Jesus did not settle the questions evoked by these mysteries—in fact, they never even really grappled with them.  They contented themselves with the idea that the solutions to these mysteries reside in the mind of God, and naturally remain incomprehensible to the human mind (Rom 11:33).  There was a surprising lack of curiosity or inquisitiveness on their part that apparently resulted in a reluctance to pursue them.  Certainly part of this mind-set was due to the idea that they regarded their teaching as absolutely true, but principally it was because they considered inquisitiveness (ἐκζητήση) a negative attribute.  The word appears in the New Testament where it is translated as "speculations" (ἐκζητήσεις).  Inquisitiveness also carries with it the idea of getting to the bottom of things—or making an investigation.  Hence there existed a kind of early anti-intellectualism on the part of the early Christians.  They simply ignored these issues, until much later when the diversity in the church forced later leaders to address them.  The mystery of Christ was eventually directly addressed in the councils of the fourth century, but never really resolved.  It was simply glossed over by adoption of an arbitrary scheme (the doctrine of the Trinity) at the Council of Nicaea in 325.

 

Mystery is a puzzle to be deciphered.  The word "mystery" is used only three times in the canonical gospels, and all in the same parallel context (Mark 4:11-12 = Matt 13:11, 13 = Luke 8:10).  The word does not indicate a divine mystery, as it appears elsewhere.  In the gospels a mystery is a deliberate strategy used by Jesus to present information about the kingdom of God in oblique language in order to obfuscate the understanding of the masses.  In the Apocalypse, on the other hand, it is generally used almost as the equivalent of a "puzzle" (Rev 1:20; 17:5, 7) to be solved.  In Rev 10:7, on the other hand, it is a divine mystery that would be accomplished at the trumpet call of the seventh angel.  This obscure reference to the "mystery of God" is not really made clear to the reader, but it is clearly a divine secret about to be unveiled.

 

Should Christianity be understood as one of the mystery religions that emerged about the same time it did?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University