Jesus the Storyteller

Stephen I. Wright

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611646313
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

While it is widely acknowledged that Jesus told stories, there has not been much focus on why he did so and how these stories contributed to his ministry. Stephen Wright approaches this topic afresh to analyze how considering the parables as "stories" can help our understanding of Jesus and his mission. Wright begins by looking for insights in scholarship from recent decades on the parables and the historical Jesus. He goes on to imagine how these stories would have resonated with hearers in each of the Synoptic Gospels and considers the dynamics between Jesus and his hearers in different locations like Galilee and Jerusalem. Finally, Wright considers the purpose of these parables as an element of Jesus' ministry and looks at Jesus himself as a storyteller. This book will provide a solid basis for understanding why Jesus spoke in parables and how this distinctive style of speech functioned in his ministry.

Part 1

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS

1

Eclipsing the stories of Jesus: from Reimarus to Jülicher

The stories Jesus told, and Jesus’ activity as a storyteller, have been strange and usually unintended casualties of the modern quest for the historical Jesus. Repeatedly, this element of his life has been marginalized, and the stories themselves have been, in effect, transposed into other rhetorical forms, sometimes in the effort to establish criteria for distinguishing the Evangelists’ implied interpretation of the stories within the Gospels from the force they would have carried for Jesus and his hearers.

It had not always been so. A noteworthy feature of the ‘pre-critical’ phase of interpreting Jesus’ parables, which lasted from the first century well into the nineteenth, was that their narrative richness was often preserved. Although modern scholars have surely been right to regard the allegorical readings developed by the early and mediaeval Church as mostly implausible construals of the parables’ original force for their speaker or hearers, these readings did often have the merit of mirroring the pattern of the story. To take the most famous example, the interpretation of The Good Samaritan well known from Augustine (but present in earlier interpreters including Origen and Ambrose), which reads the story as an allegory of the events of salvation in which the Samaritan stands for Christ, may be fanciful in its details but reflects the sweep of narrative time and the plot-dynamics of disaster and rescue in the biblical text.¹

The early students of Jesus from a modern historical perspective, however, had concerns understandably different from Jesus’ storytelling. And the earliest major historical work on the parables, that of Jülicher, with which this chapter ends, determinedly reshaped his stories into similes. To understand something of the background of this move, we must go back to the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus.

Jesus as political messiah: Hermann Samuel Reimarus

Reimarus’s Fragments are generally considered the starting point of the modern quest of the historical Jesus. Published by his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing after his death in 1768, they contained an incisive attack upon traditional Christian doctrine and upon the veracity of the Gospels themselves. Indeed, the relief into which Reimarus threw the figure of Jesus by setting him within a framework of Jewish thought and language was not to be recapitulated until the late nineteenth century, in the work of Johannes Weiss and then Albert Schweitzer (Schweitzer, 2000 (1913), pp. 22–3). According to Schweitzer, Reimarus’s work ‘was the first time that a really historical mind, thoroughly conversant with the sources, had undertaken the criticism of the tradition’ (Schweitzer, 2000 (1913), p. 16).

Reimarus’s basic line of attack was to drive a wedge between the intention and proclamation of Jesus and that of the apostles and Evangelists. Jesus’ announcement of God’s kingdom, for Reimarus, was entirely conditioned by Jewish expectations of the establishment of an earthly theocracy through the agency of a Messiah, in which Israel would at last throw off the yoke of her enemies. This kingdom was proclaimed by John the Baptist and Jesus as imminent, but when it did not appear, and Jesus was put to death, his followers reconfigured his message radically, introducing the doctrines of a suffering and risen Saviour who would come again in glory, doctrines which shaped the New Testament (NT) writings and all subsequent Christian theology. In this, Reimarus believed, they were drawing on an alternative Jewish Messianic tradition which believed in a supernatural kingdom.²

Although Reimarus does not discuss any of Jesus’ stories in detail (indeed, much of his discussion treats Jesus’ words in quite a generalized fashion), it is important to start our survey with him because he ‘takes as his starting-point the question of the content of the preaching of Jesus’ (Schweitzer, 2000 (1913), p. 17). Reimarus believes that the Gospels give us access to the substance of what Jesus said, and that this shows Jesus to have been a preacher of repentance from abuses within Judaism (such as those ascribed to the Pharisees) in preparation for the arrival of God’s kingdom. Jesus regarded himself, in this view, as the one through whom the kingdom would be established, and thus gathered his followers in Jerusalem for a climactic showdown. This message, says Reimarus, has been overlaid by the retrospective interpretation of the Evangelists, who have depoliticized Jesus and ascribed to him a vocation to suffer and die which he had not in fact possessed (see especially Reimarus, 1970 (1768), pp. 135–50). They were able to carry out this radical reinterpretation because there was in Judaism an alternative conception in which the Messiah came twice, first in misery, then in glory (pp. 212–15).³

As a part of his argument, Reimarus refers to the so-called ‘parables of the kingdom’ found in Matthew 13 and Mark 4 (pp. 74–5, 123–5). He points out that these parables actually tell us very little about the kingdom. Even the story of The Sower, to which is appended an interpretation ascribed to Jesus, seems to tell us little more than that there is hope for the triumph of the kingdom, despite evident resistance to it. This is a key element in Reimarus’s argument that Jesus possessed, and assumed in his hearers, a thoroughly traditional Jewish conception of the kingdom. Jesus must have thought that they knew what he was talking about; thus his parables on the subject were not conveying new information so much as expressing encouragement in a vivid way that this kingdom was indeed just around the corner.⁴ Jesus’ more detailed teaching is read by Reimarus as a reminder of fundamental truths from which his people had strayed, and to which they must return in preparation for God’s kingdom. In this connection he refers briefly to The Rich Man and Lazarus as an example of Jesus preaching a ‘better righteousness’ than that of those who were overconcerned with outward ceremonies (pp. 62–3), by drawing attention to judgement and eternal life.

Despite his lack of discussion of Jesus’ stories, Reimarus’s understanding of the Gospels is significant for us here in two ways. First, his emphasis that Jesus was not intending to propound new (i.e. what became ‘Christian’) doctrine or found a new religion was a departure from the thrust of much Christian teaching, and the forerunner of contemporary scholarly emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus. The stories Jesus told have been, both before and since Reimarus, an important locus for the articulation of Jesus’ newness in respect to Judaism. Up to the mediaeval period, they were regularly read as encoding the division of Jew and Gentile in salvation history and pointing to the judgement on Judaism expressed in the rise of Christianity (for some examples see S. I. Wright, 2000b, pp. 76–97; Milavec, 1989, pp. 81–4). Since the attempted demolition of allegorical readings by Jülicher, such perceptions have become less tenable, and the emphasis has been on the immediate purpose of Jesus’ sayings for his own contemporary context (however that purpose is construed). Yet the attempt to understand Jesus in the light of his Jewish background also impels recognition of the repertoire of images and narratives on which Jesus’ stories draw, and this may come close to reintroducing a Jesus who does, indeed – at least indirectly – lay the groundwork for later Christian doctrine, though now in more continuity with Judaism (as in the work of Bailey, 1976, 1980, 2003, 2008; N. T. Wright, 1996).

Second, Reimarus’s emphasis on the essential simplicity of Jesus’ language also foreshadows Jülicher’s work. That which Christians had often seen as intriguingly obscure, admitting of deep and hidden meanings, is ‘unmasked’. Hence the stories Jesus told, insofar as Reimarus uses them at all, can be used as simple examples of his ‘teaching’. Reimarus, who became a professor of oriental languages (see Talbert’s Introduction to Reimarus, 1970 (1768), p. 3), had a clearly (though rudely) articulated perception of Hebraic expression:

For one can be certain of this much: the Hebraic expressions of the Jews sound swollen and bombastic in the Oriental manner, and one might marvel at what great things seem to be hidden beneath them, but they always mean less than the words seem to imply. So one must learn to divest and strip them of their magnificence; then he will at last understand their speech correctly, and the ideas that prevailed among the Jews will confirm that we have hit upon their meaning.

(Reimarus, 1970 (1768), p. 88)

Reimarus is here discussing Jewish Messianic terminology, but his comments fit the whole thrust of his argument about Jesus’ teaching. If only we do a bit of homework about contemporary Judaism, he seems to say, obscurity in Jesus’ words will melt away. In this respect, history seems to have proved Reimarus wrong. But the themes he raised of the distinction between Jesus and the Evangelists, the Jewishness of Jesus and the character of his language have become leitmotivs in the study of Jesus’ stories.

Parables as problems to be solved: David Friedrich Strauss

Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1840) took up the historical baton bequeathed by Reimarus. A forerunner of much later Gospel criticism, he subjected the texts to careful scrutiny, exposing (as he saw it) the ‘mythological’ language in which they are largely written, not least the accounts of miracles, and thus posing fundamental questions about what access we can really gain to the truth of what happened. Although he does not deny a historical basis to the Gospels, the effect of his work was decidedly negative, leaving the impression that very little could be known of the life of Jesus (Schweitzer, 2000 (1913), p. 85).

Strauss discusses the extent to which the Evangelists’ arrangement of the parables is true to the circumstances of their original utterance by Jesus (Strauss, 1994 (1840), pp. 345–55). An advance on Reimarus is his sensitivity to Matthew’s literary style, as well as to the oral dynamics of this kind of speech, when commenting that, contrary to the impression given by Matthew 13, Jesus would have been unlikely to utter the parables straight after each other:

The parable, it has been observed, is a kind of problem, to be solved by the reflection of the hearer; hence after every parable a pause is requisite, if it be the object of the teacher to convey real instruction, and not to distract by a multiplicity of ill-understood images.

(p. 345)

Here the assumption that the parables show Jesus as a plain and persuasive teacher rears its head. Strauss comments on the loose way in which parables sometimes seem connected to their contexts, especially in the case of the verses following The Shrewd Manager (Luke 16.9–13) which, Strauss says, will certainly skew our reading of the parable if taken as interpretative of it (pp. 349–50). He rightly shows the difficulty of taking The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16.19–31) as a portrayal of God’s moral judgement: ‘the guilt of the one appears to lie in his wealth, the merit of the other in his poverty’ (p. 351). Recent commentators have taken this insight in a radical direction, seeing the parable as an indictment of society’s inequality, rather than a depiction of individuals’ destiny (see e.g. Bauckham, 1991). Strauss, however, sees this as a sign of Ebionitism (valorization of poverty) in the Gospel account of Jesus’ teaching (and he does not approve).

Especially clear and interesting is Strauss’s discussion of the two parables of which Matthew and Luke have different versions: The Wedding Feast and The Talents in Matthew, The Great Banquet and The Pounds in Luke (Strauss, 1994 (1840), pp. 352–5). As noted by most modern commentators, one of each pair (The Wedding Feast in Matthew and The Pounds in Luke) seems to combine two stories. A sub-plot about rebellious subjects and a violent reaction from the overlord appears to have been mixed with another story, about invitations to a banquet, in one case, and the entrusting of money for trade, in the other. (Matthew’s conclusion to The Wedding Feast, in which a man is expelled for not having a wedding garment, might, says Strauss, be originally yet another story, ‘stitched on’ because of its reference to a feast (p. 355).)

Note the hidden literary evaluations at work. Strauss takes these ‘composite’ parables as necessarily combinations wrought by the tradition rather than the author, because the author as storyteller would surely have achieved a greater consistency (pp. 353–5). Here is an embryonic statement of the popular ideal of simplicity as a lens for reading Jesus’ stories, a lens which needs some critical examination,⁵ as well as a contrast, familiar in this period, between a Jesus who spoke in a well-honed way and Evangelists who tended to confuse matters by their loose method of associating material. This is a tendentious polarization. Moreover, as we shall see, a grasp of social setting that was not available to Strauss opens up the logic of a number of stories in a way that allows us to read them ‘whole’.

Strauss’s editor, Peter Hodgson, points out that Strauss says almost nothing about the nature of the parable genre (p. 790). We might add that Strauss says absolutely nothing about the narrative genre as such. In addition, Hodgson draws attention to the fact that Strauss sees The Talents / Pounds and The Great Banquet / Wedding Feast stories, along with The Rebellious Tenants, as referring to the Second Coming. This shows that Strauss is still under the influence of traditional Christological readings (p. 790).

Communicating God-consciousness, founding community: Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher

Strauss and Schleiermacher stand in a strange relationship. Strauss’s massive Life of Jesus was first published in 1835 and issued in a fourth edition in 1840. On a visit to Berlin, Strauss had obtained and read a copy of notes from Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus, which were delivered for the last time in 1832 before Schleiermacher’s death in 1834 (Schweitzer, 2000 (1913), p. 67). Schleiermacher’s own Life of Jesus, however, was not published till 1864, some 30 years after his death. Schweitzer comments:

For the questions raised by [Strauss’s] Life of Jesus, published in 1835, Schleiermacher had no answer, and for the wounds which it made, no healing. When, in 1864, Schleiermacher’s work was put on view like an embalmed corpse, Strauss accorded the dead work of the great theologian a dignified and striking funeral oration.

(Schweitzer, 2000 (1913), p. 60)

Schleiermacher had approached his task entirely from a theologian’s point of view, attempting to show how the Gospel records strike a balance between docetic and Ebionitic pictures of Jesus (i.e. the tendencies to underplay his humanity and divinity respectively) (Schweitzer, 2000 (1913), pp. 59–64). For him, Jesus’ vocation is the communication of his God-consciousness. This did, indeed, seem like a backward-gazing direction to take in the wake of the bold historical hypotheses advanced by Reimarus and Strauss, and their negative implications for traditional understandings of Jesus.

Schleiermacher’s posthumously published Life of Jesus (1997 (1864)) differentiates between Jesus’ regular teaching in the synagogues, based on a scriptural text, and the more ad hoc communication of ‘his own spiritual existence’ when crowds gathered round him (p. 230). Schleiermacher goes on to ask whether the disciples were entrusted by Jesus with an esoteric teaching different from his message to the crowds, and answers in the negative: apparent differences can be explained as ‘only a matter of the time at which the message was proclaimed’ (p. 231), that is, the disciples were ready for more advanced teaching more quickly because of their more intense relationship with Jesus. This is an implied explanation of the rationale for Jesus’ parables, as veiled speech for the ‘outsiders’, given in Mark 4.10–12. Schleiermacher identifies the ‘gnome’ or ‘aphorism’ as the common element between parable and ‘consecutive discourse’ (1997 (1864), p. 232): the parable is basically a ‘pictorial’ aphorism and the discourse a ‘didactic’ one. Note, again, the absence of the category of narrative.

The theological convictions driving Schleiermacher’s work are seen in statements such as this: ‘[W]e see that [Christ’s teaching] must have been at the same time a teaching concerning himself and not just concerning general human affairs’ (1997 (1864), p. 234). All Christ’s teaching is aimed at laying a basis ‘for a specific human community’: ‘The teaching of the kingdom of God could only have been an invitation to belong to it and an encouragement to do what it demands’ (p. 234). Schleiermacher explicitly brings the parables under this umbrella: ‘Most of them are concerned with the kingdom of God, and likewise refer to it by way of Christ’s founding of a community’ (p. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Laying The Foundations
• Part 2 Hearing the Stories through the Gospels
• Part 3 Hearing the Stories with the First Listeners
• Part 4 Gathering the Echoes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of stories and parables
• Index of ancient and biblical texts
• Index of modern authors
• Index of names and subjects