Jesus and the Parables

When I went to seminary in the early 1980's, I was taught that if you wanted to know about the essence of Christianity, you studied Paul. Why? We knew for certain that we had Paul's letters and could say with the same certainty what this very early Christian witness had to say about Christianity, so if one understood Paul one understood the essence of Christianity. Paul, of course, said virtually nothing about the life or teachings of Jesus. He focused on the death and resurrection. This, we were taught by the great biblical scholar of the last century, Rudolph Bultmann, was the kerygma, the kernel, the key to it all.

What about Jesus? My 1980's seminary education was still under the influence of the humanitarian and biblical scholar Albert Schweitzer's early 20th century analysis of Jesus and Jesus scholarship. In a book entitled The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer criticized the late 19th century attempts to find the real historical Jesus, and demonstrated the way those quester's liberal picture of Jesus mirrored their liberal political and social agendas. Schweitzer said that the best we can say about Jesus was that he was an eschatalogical prophet who announced the end of the current age and the beginning of a new age, and for this Jesus was crucified.

It is difficult to imagine the profound impact this book had on biblical scholarship. But Schweitzer's work became well-known just as the world was about to be plunged into the darkness of World War I, and the prevailing liberal, optimistic view of human nature that dominated the religion and politics of the end of the 1800's was about to take a profound hit. The war and its aftermath gave rise to the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth and the neo-orthodox biblical scholarship of Rudolph Bultmann. Taking sin and the fallenness of human nature was now in, and so was the study of Paul's message of salvation from that sin and human nature. Jesus scholarship took a back seat.

That began to change in the 1960's as a few biblical scholars turned their attention to Jesus and the study of the parables. Twenty years later when I was in seminary, the 1960's works on parables by C.H. Dodd and John Dominic Crossan were required reading. They were important but not essential in my seminary education about Christian origins. Paul was still much more important and essential.

But as the tools of biblical scholarship grew, as more and more ancient scriptures were discovered, and as the findings of other scientific disciplines were brought to biblical scholarship, more and more scholars began to turn their attention to Jesus with a renewed confidence that it was in fact possible to discover the real historical Jesus. And in that renewed quest, attention to the parables of Jesus has been most important.

In Honest to Jesus, Robert Funk says:

The parables, and to a lesser extent the aphorisms, came to be understood as speech forms characteristic of Jesus. In the case of the parables, it was a form Jesus had not borrowed from his predecessors and a form not easily replicated. Very few sages have acheived the same level of creativity with the particular genre of discourse. Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges are among the few who have mastered the form.

The parables are ostensibly about the kingdom of God or God's domain, but in fact they are pictures and stories about baking, dinner parties, shrewd managers, vineyards, lost sheep and sons, and other everyday topics. (But none about carpentry, which makes one wonder about the historicial reliability of the legend that Joseph was a carpenter.) Jesus did not explain to his listeners how these stories were related to God's imperial rule; he left it to them to figure that out for themselves. As a consequence, the parables are enigmatic: it is difficult to specify what they mean, what they actually teach.

...

Of the twenty-odd parables that are probably authentically from Jesus, the strange thing is that not one says anything about the end of the world or the apocalyptic trauma that is supposed to accompany the event. And this body of Jesus lore is by volume the largest part of the surviving Jesus tradition....

The parables are authentic Jesus. They give a window into his vision. And contra Schweitzer, they do not give us a picture of an eschatological prophet announcing the immanent end of the world, but of a wisdom teacher proclaiming the presence of the realm of God already in our midst... for the one who has eyes to see and ears to hear.