Parables after Jesus

Their Imaginative Receptions across Two Millennia

David B. Gowler

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493406661
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

Jesus's enigmatic and compelling parables have fascinated their hearers since he first uttered them, and during the intervening centuries these parables have produced a multitude of interpretations. This accessibly written book explores the varying interpretations of Jesus's parables across two millennia to demonstrate how powerfully they continue to challenge people's hearts, minds, and imaginations. It covers more than fifty imaginative receptions from different eras, perspectives, and media, showing how the use of Jesus's parables affects society and culture and offering a richer appreciation for Jesus's most striking teachings.

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The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in Antiquity (to ca. 550 CE)

Developments, elaborations, and reinterpretations of Jesus’s parables already are found in the New Testament Gospels, including various stages of allegorical interpretations, such as the explanation of the parable of the sower in Mark 4:13–20. Scholars still debate whether or how much the historical Jesus used allegory, but it will become clear in this chapter that, from the earliest period in the reception of his parables, allegorical interpretations dominated. Interpreters understand the Scriptures as including various symbols, parables, and riddles that require explanation for the “spiritual” sense, so allegorical readings were the most commonly held understandings of the parables and other biblical texts for hundreds of years (see Crouzel 1996, 153). As Frank Kermode puts it: “Allegory is the patristic way of dealing with inexhaustible hermeneutic potential” (1979, 44). Scripture, these early interpreters believe, is the Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and, when interpreted correctly, consistent in its message. It is also, however, filled with mysteries: “God is able to speak in riddles and metaphors and has an exceptional ability to stir the curiosity of true listeners” (Studer 1996, 357).

Interpretations during this period vary, but they have some common elements. Foundational to most interpretations is the belief that Scripture—whatever that encompassed—is divinely inspired and unified; thus one easily understood biblical text can be used to explain another hard-to-understand biblical text (e.g., some parables). In addition, God is more fully known through the revelation of Jesus and the New Testament, and, as the parable of the laborers in the vineyard demonstrates to many interpreters, God’s revelation is progressive in that mysteries are revealed over time. Another common element is that the Hebrew Bible is often interpreted typologically or allegorically: interpreters believe, for example, that events or concepts found in the Jewish scriptures foreshadow, symbolize, or prophesy the life, ministry, or teaching of Jesus (Papandrea 2012, 126–30).

Most of the interpreters in this chapter illustrate these trends, and they also reflect some of the diversity within the church of this period. These interpreters are primarily “ante-Nicene”—before the important Council of Nicaea in 325 CE—and some are Nicene or post-Nicene, working during or after the Council of Nicaea. They include the more well-known “church fathers,” such as some of the “Greek Fathers” (e.g., Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and John Chrysostom), the “Latin Fathers” (e.g., Tertullian and Augustine), and one “Syriac Father” (Ephrem the Syrian). Also included is the significant voice of Macrina the Younger, who is often overshadowed by her three brothers, Peter of Sebaste, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nyssa, the latter two being two of the three famous “Cappadocian Fathers.” In addition, the chapter includes a divergent voice, The Gospel of Philip, a representative of Christian gnosticism that was deemed heretical by the church. Finally, the chapter concludes with important examples of parable interpretation from both art (e.g., frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, and mosaics) and music (Romanos the Melodist).

Irenaeus (ca. 140–ca. 200)

Irenaeus writes that in his “early youth” he saw Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna (martyred ca. 156), who “always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true” (Against Heresies 3.3.4, in ANF 1:416). Since Polycarp might have listened to John the Apostle, as the early church historian Eusebius reports (Church History 5.20.4–8), Irenaeus possibly was one of the last witnesses to the generation who learned at the feet of the apostles of Jesus.

According to Eusebius, Irenaeus became bishop of Lyon after a local persecution killed numerous Christians, including Pothinus, Lyon’s first bishop (Church History 5.1.1–63). Irenaeus’s major surviving work, Against Heresies, is a sustained polemic against the teachings and practices of the gnostics, particularly Valentinian gnostics (Norris 1965, 45) and Marcion. Gnostics like Valentinus claimed to have a special saving revelation, as the Greek word gnōsis (knowledge) implies, a secret tradition of esoteric wisdom that Jesus privately transmitted to select disciples who, in turn, delivered those traditions to them. This esoteric wisdom allowed gnostics, they believed, to move from the corporeal realm to the pure spiritual realm. Marcion is best known for distinguishing the “lesser” God of the Hebrew Bible, which he called the demiurge, from the transcendent God of Jesus. Irenaeus envisions such gnostics as a central threat to the Christian church, but, in the process of refuting them, Against Heresies also makes significant contributions to the development of what will become Christian orthodoxy.

The gnostics were dangerous, in Irenaeus’s view, because they led Christians astray with their claims of esoteric wisdom transmitted by Jesus in secret. In contrast, Irenaeus points to the authentic tradition passed on by apostolic succession, that is, from the apostles down through the bishops to the church. A defense of Scripture as apostolic writings thus plays a key role in Irenaeus’s arguments, although Irenaeus’s authoritative writings include only the four Gospels, Acts, the Pauline Letters, Revelation, and possibly 1 John and 1 Peter—not all the other works that eventually made their way into the Christian canon.

Irenaeus’s interpretations of the parables influenced a number of later interpreters, and he succinctly states his interpretative approach in Against Heresies 2.27 (ANF 1:398–99). God has made it possible for anyone who is “devoted to piety and the love of truth” to study Scripture to understand the “things which God has placed” within our power to understand, because Scripture speaks “clearly and unambiguously in express terms” about those things:

And therefore the parables ought not to be adapted to ambiguous expressions. For, if this be not done, both he who explains them will do so without danger, and the parables will receive a like interpretation from all, and the body of truth remains entire, with a harmonious adaptation of its members, and without any collision. But to apply expressions which are not clear or evident to interpretations of the parables, such as every one discovers for himself as inclination leads him, [is absurd]. For in this way no one will possess the rule of truth; but in accordance with the number of persons who explain the parables will be found the various systems of truth, in mutual opposition to each other, and setting forth antagonistic doctrines, like the questions current among the Gentile philosophers. (Against Heresies 2.27.1, in ANF 1:398)

Interpreters such as the gnostics inquire but never find, according to Irenaeus, because they improperly reject the authoritative “method of discovery” (adherence to the apostolic tradition). Irenaeus points to the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids (Matt. 25:1–13) to explain. If a person’s lamp is untrimmed and burning with an unsteady light, that person obscures the “plain announcements” of the parables and will be excluded from the “marriage-chamber.” Not just the parables but also all of Scripture “can be clearly, unambiguously, and harmoniously understood by all, although all do not believe them” (Against Heresies 2.27.2, in ANF 1:398). Thus the secret knowledge allegedly passed by Jesus only to certain disciples and the resulting obscure interpretations of the parables by the gnostics actually are self-imposed chains that bind them in darkness.

Irenaeus acknowledges that “parables admit of many interpretations” (2.27.3, in ANF 1:399), but argues that the solution to this problem is explained by the parable of the wise and foolish builders (Matt. 7:24–27 // Luke 6:47–49): one should build one’s house on the rock that is “certain, indubitable, and true”; building “upon the shifting sand,” as the gnostics do, is to “act as if destitute of reason” (2.27.3, in ANF 1:399). The gnostics twist Scripture “from a natural to a non-natural sense” that supports “any kind of hypothesis they fancy” (1.9.4, in ANF 1:330). Irenaeus argues that imperfect human beings cannot have perfect knowledge in this life and that some things are beyond human understanding (2.28.2). The Scriptures, however, are perfect and “perfectly consistent.” Therefore, the sometimes-hard-to-understand parables must be harmonized with other, more easily understood passages, whose meanings are clear and which can “serve to explain the parables; and through the many diversified utterances [of Scripture] there shall be heard one harmonious melody in us, praising in hymns that God who created all things” (2.28.3, in ANF 1:400).

Most of Irenaeus’s discussions of the parables occur in book 4 of Against Heresies. This section seeks to demonstrate the unity of the Hebrew Bible and Christian scripture (4.36.1–41.3), and in it Irenaeus discusses nine parables (cf. Minns 2012, 56–58):

1. wicked husbandmen (Matt. 21:33–45; Against Heresies 4.36.1–4)
2. wedding feast (Matt. 22:1–14; Against Heresies 4.36.5–6)
3. prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32; Against Heresies 4.36.7)
4. laborers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1–16; Against Heresies 4.36.7)
5. Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14; Against Heresies 4.36.8)
6. two sons (Matt. 21:28–32; Against Heresies 4.36.8)
7. barren fig tree (Luke 13:6–9; Against Heresies 4.36.8)
8. sheep and goats (Matt. 25:31–46; Against Heresies 4.40.2)
9. wheat and weeds (Matt. 13:24–30, 36–43; Against Heresies 4.40.2)

The first three parables signify that “the prophets were sent from one and the same Father” as the God of Jesus (Against Heresies 4.36.5, in ANF 1:516), an argument that strikes directly at Marcion’s claim that the God of the Hebrew Bible is different from the Christian God. The parable of the wicked husbandmen, for example, demonstrates the unity of the God of the “Mosaic dispensation” and the God of Jesus, because it is the same “householder” (Jesus’s Father) who sends both his servants (i.e., the prophets) and his son (i.e., Jesus). God now rejects those who rejected the Son of God—those of the “former dispensation to whom the vineyard was formerly entrusted”—and has given the vineyard to the gentiles (the church), who were formerly outside the vineyard (cf. the denunciation of the “former dispensation” in Irenaeus’s interpretation of the wedding feast parable, Matt. 22:11–13; Against Heresies 4.26.6).

Irenaeus’s discussion of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard provides an excellent example of his parable interpretation: the householder is God, and the laborers called at different times of the day demonstrate the continuity between the God of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian God:

The same God is declared as having called some in the beginning, when the world was first created; but others afterwards, and others during the intermediate period [i.e., the time between Moses and Jesus; cf. Against Heresies 4.25.1], others after a long lapse of time, and others again in the end of time; so that there are many workmen in their generations, but only one householder who calls them together. For there is but one vineyard, since there is also but one righteousness, and one dispensator, for there is one Spirit of God who arranges all things; and in like manner is there one hire, for they all received a penny each man, having [stamped upon it] the royal image and superscription, the knowledge of the Son of God, which is immortality. And therefore He began by giving the hire to those [who were engaged] last, because in the last times, when the Lord was revealed He presented Himself to all [as their reward]. (Against Heresies 4.36.7, in ANF 1:518)

Irenaeus’s use of allegory is rather restrained in comparison to other early interpreters, such as the gnostics against whom he writes, and this example does not take interpreters much further down an allegorical path than does the author of Matthew’s Gospel. Irenaeus’s interpretation of the parable of the good Samaritan, however (Against Heresies 3.17.3), lays the foundation for later allegorical interpretations of the parable. Irenaeus implies that the Samaritan represents Jesus, who has compassion on and tends to the wounds of the injured man, who symbolizes the human race. Jesus also pays “two royal denaria” to the innkeeper, who represents the Holy Spirit and is our advocate against the “accuser” (i.e., the devil).

Irenaeus was a pioneer in many ways. He emphasized the harmony of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures, and he was one of the first writers who cited Christian writings as authoritative scripture on the same level as the Hebrew Bible. As Robert Grant notes, Irenaeus used the traditions of his predecessors to refute the gnostics and, in the process, “built up a body of Christian theology that resembled a French Gothic cathedral, strongly supported by columns of biblical faith and tradition, illuminated by vast expanses of exegetical and logical argument, and upheld by flying buttresses of rhetorical and philosophical considerations from the outside. In his own person he united the major traditions of Christendom from Asia Minor, Syria, Rome, and Gaul” (1997, 1). As we shall see, Irenaeus also influenced the biblical interpretation of many Christian authors who came after him, including their interpretations of the parables of Jesus.

The Gospel of Philip (Late Second–Early Third Century)

The Gospel of Philip, the only extant ancient copy of which was discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, appears to belong primarily (but not completely) to the most well-known stream of Christian gnosticism, the Valentinian tradition. Valentinus himself was active in Rome (ca. 140–160), and from the fragments of his writings that survive (mostly via Clement and Epiphanius), it seems that Valentinian Christianity blended Platonic, biblical, and gnostic elements into its version of Christianity.

The Gospel of Philip contains approximately seventeen sayings of Jesus, nine of which are found in some form in the New Testament Gospels, but it also includes additional stories, such as the account that Joseph the carpenter made the cross on which Jesus died (Gospel of Philip 73.8–15). A major theme of The Gospel of Philip is the reunification of soul and spirit in a heavenly union that culminates in the identification of the soul with the “true self.” This reflects the myth of Sophia (wisdom), who is eager to rejoin her spiritual companion, the Logos (the “Word”), and their reunification is often symbolized by the allegory/metaphor of mar...