Interpreting the Parables

Craig L. Blomberg

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780830866779
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In the last century, more studies of the parables were produced than for any other section of comparable length in the Bible. The problem is that most Bible readers are unlikely ever to know of most of them.In this substantially new and expanded edition, Craig Blomberg surveys and evaluates contemporary critical approaches to the parables, challenging the prevailing consensus and making his own important new contribution to parable studies. Within proper definitions and boundaries, the author defends a limited allegorical approach. In support of this view ofparable interpretation, Blomberg not only sets forth theoretical considerations but devotes attention to all the major parables, providing brief interpretations that highlight the insights to be gained from his distinctive method.Interpreting the Parables can be read with profit by scholars, students, pastors and educated laypeople.

1

Introduction

Books about the parables of Jesus come in many kinds. Some reflect popular exposition and preaching, others are used as textbooks in college or seminary courses, and still others represent scholarly studies written primarily for other scholars. In the last century, more studies of the parables were produced than for any other section of comparable length in the Bible.[1] So any new book like this one ought to justify its existence in some detail. There are at least two main reasons for this book. The first may be explained quite simply; the second will require elaboration.

The simpler reason is that whenever an area of research generates as many studies as the parables have, a majority of Bible readers is unlikely ever to know of most of them, much less understand their contributions and significance. Of the three categories of books on parables just itemized, the least well-stocked are works that can serve well as textbooks. Two outstanding volumes of the past decade are comprehensive enough to cover most everything that ought to be discussed, but one of these is probably too advanced for most undergraduates and the other is too compendious even for most seminary students.[2] Other works are well-pitched in level and length but study only representative parables rather than trying to say a little bit about all of them.[3] This volume, therefore, brings a state-of-the-art report on parable scholarship in a form intended to be useful as an update for pastors and scholars, a basic textbook for students in colleges and seminaries, and an introduc­tion to the field for the layperson willing to wrestle in some detail with scholarly concerns.

This book, however, also defends a thesis. This is the second reason for its publication: there are good reasons to believe that in important ways the dominant approaches of the twentieth century to the interpretation of the parables were misguided and require rethinking. This is a bold claim but one echoed in an ever-growing number of parable studies. Some similarities exist among the alternatives put forward in these studies, but there is scarcely any consensus. The academic guild of biblical scholars, moreover, has become so large and diverse that it is completely possible, and in some people’s minds acceptable, to write simply for one theological or ideological tradition and remain blithely unaware of other major swaths of academia. Or at least various works continue to appear that betray no such awareness, much less interaction with views that differ greatly from their own.[4] So this book hopes to make a fresh contribution to the interpretation of the parables as well as to survey the contemporary scholarly scene.

1.1 The Previous Scholarly Consensus

How did the majority of scholars approach the exegesis of Jesus’ parables during the first three-fourths of the twentieth-century?[5] The typical New Testament survey or hermeneutics textbook likely contained many or all of the following assertions that can still be found in their even more recent counterparts.[6]

1. Throughout the history of the church, most Christians interpreted the parables as allegories. That is, interpreters assumed that many of the individual characters or objects in the parables stood for something other than themselves—spiritual counterparts which enabled the story to be read at two levels. A parable was not just a story about human activity but also a narrative of “heavenly reality.”

To take perhaps the most famous parable of all as an example, the story of the prodigal son (Lk 15:11-32) was viewed not simply as a poignant drama of a Jewish father’s remarkable forgiveness for his wayward son. Rather it was assumed that a series of one-to-one correspondences could be set up so that the father stood for God, the prodigal for any sinner running away from God and the older brother for the hardhearted Pharisee. Usually the number of cor­respondences was extended. The ring the father gave the prodigal might represent Christian baptism, and the banquet could easily be associated with the Lord’s Supper.[7] The robe that the newly returned son put on could reflect immortality; and the shoes, God’s preparation for journeying to heaven.[8] One by one, most all of the details were explained, and the spiritual significance of the story was determined.

2. Modern scholarship has rightly rejected allegorical interpretation, instead favoring an approach that allows for each parable to make only one main point. Down through the centuries, the artificial and arbitrary nature of the elaborate type of allegorization illustrated above became progres­sively clearer. A careful comparison of older expositors shows that they often did not agree on what each of the details in a given parable represented. To return to the example of the prodigal’s robe, in addition to immortality it was interpreted as standing for sinlessness, the Holy Spirit, baptism, wisdom, love, spiritual gifts, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, or the sanctity of the soul.[9]

Supporters of these different interpretations all recognized that the father gave the robe to the prodigal to indicate his restoration to the family. But it was impossible to agree on how to match that robe with one particular aspect of a new Christian’s relationship with his or her heavenly Father. Presumably the lesson to be learned is that the robe is not meant to be allegorized. In fact even to view the father as directly standing for God is often held to be inappropriate. After all, God himself seems to be referred to in the parable as a separate char­acter, however indirectly, when the prodigal speaks of sinning against his father and against heaven (Lk 15:18, 21). So instead of alle­gorizing individual details, one must seek to encapsulate the story’s message under one overarching theme, for example, “the boundless joy of God’s forgiveness.”[10]

3. Nevertheless, the parables as they appear in the Gospels do have a few undeniably allegorical elements, but these are the exception and not the rule. One frequently cited example is the narrative of the wicked tenants (Mk 12:1-12 pars.[11]). The plot, in which the landlord’s tenants beat and kill his servants, and finally kill his son in hopes of obtaining full control of the vineyard, so closely matches the history of Israel’s leaders’ antagonism to God’s prophets, and finally to Christ, that most commentators admit that the parable as it stands is allegorical. But for this reason many scholars deny that Jesus ever spoke this particular parable, or at least not in the form in which it now ap­pears.[12] The presumption is still that parable and allegory are strik­ingly different forms of speech, and allegory is usually regarded as aesthetically inferior. Thus, as an expert in telling parables, Jesus had no need or use for allegory. Many scholars today are more willing to admit that the dichotomy is not so great, and that Jesus may have on occasion employed allegory. But the allegorical parable still remains the exception, not the norm, and whatever allegorical elements appear in other parables are peripheral and not central to their nature.[13]

The problem with all that has been summarized so far comes to a head most clearly when one examines the only two parables for which Jesus himself supplied a detailed interpretation—the sower (Mk 4:3-9, 13-20 pars.) and the wheat and tares (Mt 13:24-30, 36-­43). In each of these interpretations, almost all the major details of the parables are explained by means of a series of one-to-one cor­respondences. The seed is the Word of God, the four soils are four kinds of people, the birds represent Satan, the thorns stand for the cares of this life, and so on. Yet this looks precisely like the allegorical approach of the premodern era that was so roundly rejected!

4. Thus the occasional explicit interpretations of parables in the Gospels are additional exceptions to Jesus’ usual practice, and they too are not to be taken as normative. At this point all but the most conservative commentators agree that the interpretations for these two parables are simply not authentic. They were supplied by the early church or perhaps even the Gospel writers themselves. The true meaning of a parable like that of the sower is to be found in a general principle such as this: “In spite of every failure and opposition, from hopeless beginnings, God brings forth the triumphant end which he had promised.”[14] Those few scholars who do accept that the interpretations found in the Gospels reflect what Jesus actually said nevertheless insist that this type of interpretation is exceptional.[15] The very fact that Jesus left most of his parables without such interpretation proves that they are to be taken less elaborately.

5. Apart from this small amount of allegory, most of the parables and most parts of each parable are among the most indisputably authentic sayings of Jesus in the Gospels. Most Gospel critics regularly differentiate between sayings ascribed to Jesus that they can with a fair degree of probability accept as genuinely his and those they believe came from a later source. The most prominent criteria used to make such distinctions include “dissimilarity” (that which marks Jesus off as different from both the Judaism of his day and from the early church could have come from no one else), “multiple attestation” (that which occurs in several Gospels or in several different Gospel sources is more likely authentic than that which is singly attested) and “coherence” (that which fits in with material authen­ticated by other criteria may also be accepted).[16]

The authentic “core” of the Gospels lies in Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God entering history by means of his ministry, a theme that well satisfies all the criteria.[17] Because many of the parables form the heart of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom, they too (by coherence) are widely held to be authentic. Moreover, virtually no one in the early church taught by means of parables, and rabbinic parables served primarily to illustrate or expound the Law instead of teaching fresh insights about God’s ways with humanity. So the parables of Jesus satisfy the dissimilarity criterion. They are also multiply attested. Parables occur in all of the Synoptic Gospels and in all of the layers into which the Gospels are usually separated (the triple tradition of passages common to Matthew, Mark and Luke; the double tradition of material common to Matthew and Luke; and the peculiarly Lukan and peculiarly Matthean traditions).[18] The more recently developed “plausibility” criterion, which looks for material not only dissimilar from the Judaism of Jesus’ day and subsequent Christian tradition but that which is at least similar enough to both to be plausible in such contexts, also finds parables at the heart of what it authenticates.[19]

There are a few features of the parables that are usually attributed to later stages of tradition. But these can generally be identified by discerning the “laws of transformation” which the oral tradition of Jesus’ sayings underwent prior to the writing of the Gospels, or by observing patterns of “redaction”—the ways in which the Gospel writers themselves shaped the material they inherited. The disciplines of form criticism and redaction criticism have grown up among students of the Gospels primarily to detect these kinds of changes on a more widespread basis, so that it is not too difficult to apply their insights in the particular case of the parables.

1.2 The Sizable Minority Report

These five common hermeneutical rules that comprise the previous scholarly consensus are somewhat selective, but they suffice to illustrate the main issues. It is at least curious that the upshot of the majority of twentieth-century scholarship was to declare the vast majority of all previous nineteen centuries of Christian interpretation in error. Slightly more disconcerting is the belief that viewing the parables as allego­ries is the most illegitimate method for interpreting them. After all, this is the only method the Gospel writers themselves ever portray Jesus as using, even if he used it only occasionally.

More puzzling still is the inability of these rules to account readily for the enigmatic comments attributed to Jesus in Mark 4:11-12 and parallels, in which he explains to his disciples his purpose for teaching in parables: “the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’” Understandably, these words have also widely been held to be inauthentic.[20] Jesus’ parables, according to the generally held principles of interpretation, are intended to reveal and not to conceal. Moreover, the rules of parable interpretation discussed above fail to address a number of other questions that will arise in the course of this study. Not surprisingly, more and more scholars have come to question this older consensus.

Although they may differ widely on other aspects of parable in­terpretation, a sizable minority of interpreters from a broad spectrum of ideological traditions is increasingly willing to affirm a different set of statements from those listed above.[21]

1. The parables, as they stand in the Gospels, are much more allegorical[22] than is usually acknowledged. This does not mean that all the elaborate in­terpretations of previous eras of commentary are correct. Rather, the problem of many older interpretations is not their allegorical nature per se, but the extent to which they allegorized and the specific meanings they often gave to certain details in the narratives. We may argue, for instance, that the prodigal’s robe is not meant to stand for any specific part of one’s spiritual life, whereas the Father is meant to symbolize God. Allegorizing one detail does not commit an interpreter to allegorizing all of the details. One of the key problems with modern biblical criticism has been a wholesale misunderstanding and misrepresentation of standard literary theory, as if all or most of the details of a story had to disclose double meanings in order for it to be allegorical.[23]

2. If the parables are fairly uniformly allegorical in nature, then they are likely to be either even more entirely authentic than the consensus admits or much more inauthentic. By accepting the possibility that Jesus himself employed allegory, the critic discards a major criterion for dividing the parables into authentic and inauthentic bits and pieces. One tendency in certain circles has been to assume greater inauthenticity,[24] but this study will follow a more promising trend that argues for greater authenticity. Jesus’ teaching about the purpose for parables will then also fit in with his method of inter­pretation more easily; parts of them are not as ...