Parables as Subversive Speech

Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed

William R. Herzog II

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9781611642339
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

William Herzog shows that the focus of the parables was not on a vision of the glory of the reign of God but on the gory details of the way oppression served the interests of the ruling class. The parables were a form of social analysis, as well as a form of theological reflection. Herzog scrutinizes their canonical form to show the distinction between its purpose for Jesus and for evangelists. To do this, he uses the tools of historical criticism, including form criticism and redaction criticism.

PART 1

The Parables of Jesus,
the World of the Parables,
and the Pedagogy
of the Oppressed

This study of the parables poses a problem that can be expressed in a series of questions: What if the parables of Jesus were neither theological nor moral stories but political and economic ones? What if the concern of the parables was not the reign of God but the reigning systems of oppression that dominated Palestine in the time of Jesus? What if the scenes they presented were not stories about how God works in the world but codifications about how exploitation worked in Palestine? What if Jesus’ parables were more like Paulo Freire’s “codifications” than like sermon illustrations? What if the parables are exposing exploitation rather than revealing justification? What would all this mean for a reading of the parables?

Chapter 1 sets out the framework for this experiment in reading the parables by making the case for using the pedagogy of a modern educator, Paulo Freire, for understanding the parables of an ancient rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. This comparison raises other fundamental questions, which are pursued in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 discusses the hermeneutical nature of historical inquiry, since the quest for the historical Jesus is a problem intricately related to the meaning of the parables spoken by Jesus. Any interpreter of the parables must have some understanding of the purpose of Jesus’ ministry, of which they were an important part. But as Albert Schweitzer (1956) knew, the quest for the historical Jesus merely poses the larger problem of how modern researchers can investigate the past without falling prey to anachronistic readings of eras distant from their own.

Chapter 3 shifts the hermeneutical issue from the relationship of the parables to the historical Jesus to a review of the various historical tools developed to study the parables themselves. This review surveys the principal approaches that grow out of the historical-critical method. The chapter also explores the peculiar form of the hermeneutical circle known as the relationship between the part and the whole, as a prelude to suggesting a way of proceeding with this study. In light of the current dominance of literary-critical and narrative approaches to the parables, it is important to explain why this study continues to use earlier critical approaches to the parables that are now in some disrepute.

Chapter 4 delineates the world of agrarian societies and aristocratic empires, in order to define the “social construction of reality” (Berger and Luckmann 1967) in which the parables were told. If the parables present narrative snapshots from everyday life, then it is important to know the big picture in which they fit. How do the social scenes and social scripts of the parables disclose and explore the larger social, political, economic, and ideological systems of Palestine during the time of Jesus? How do the particulars in the parables fit into the infrastructure and superstructure of Palestine under Roman rule? How does the information learned about agrarian societies and aristocratic empires enable modern readers to decode the riddles called parables? The materials found in this chapter are later used to contextualize the scenes presented in the specific parables that are interpreted in parts 2 and 3.

1

The Parables of Jesus, the Reign of God,
and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The parables of Jesus have long been revered as earthly stories with heavenly meanings. They have been viewed in this way because Jesus was thought to be a teacher of spiritual truth and divine wisdom. However, this view of Jesus stands in some tension with the account of his final trial and execution. If Jesus was a teacher of heavenly truths dispensed through literary gems called parables, it is difficult to understand how he could have been executed as a political subversive and crucified between two social bandits. It appears that Jerusalem elites collaborating with their Roman overlords executed Jesus because he was a threat to their economic and political interests. Unless they perceived him to be a threat, they would not have publicly degraded and humiliated him before executing him in as ignominious a way as possible. How is it possible to bring together the teacher who spoke in parables and the subversive who threatened the ruling powers of his day? This chapter attempts to answer that question in two ways: first, by interpreting the parables of Jesus as a form of subversive speech; and second, by connecting that view of the parables with an interpretation of Jesus’ public activity large enough to encompass his roles as pedagogue of the oppressed and political threat.

The Parables and the
Reign of God

A long and hallowed tradition has held that many of Jesus’ parables proclaim the coming of the reign of God.¹ The Gospel of Mark summarizes Jesus’ public message with these familiar words: “The critical time is fulfilled, the reign of God is at hand, repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15; author’s translation). Many parables are introduced by phrases that explicitly identify their focus as the reign of God (for example, Matt. 13:24; Mark 4:26; Luke 14:15–24; and their parallels). Other parables are clearly devoted to closely related themes, such as the great judgment (Matt. 25:14, 31), or warn of the coming apocalypse (Matt. 22:11–14; Mark 13:34–37; Luke 13:24–30). Even when the parables turn their attention to theological (Matt. 20:1–16; Mark 4:26–29; Luke 15:3–7), spiritual (Matt. 11:16–19; Luke 13:6–9), or moral matters (Matt. 5:25–26; Mark 12:1–11; Luke 10:25–37), their intent seems as clear as their semantic field. Through the parables, Jesus proclaims the nearness of the reign of God and communicates the spiritual truths and moral insights related to its advent.

In the early part of the twentieth century, C. H. Dodd (1935) established this way of viewing the parables by his persuasive and influential reading of the parables as “the parables of the kingdom.” In reading the parables in this way, Dodd was building on the earlier hermeneutical insight of Adolf Julicher (1910), who had argued that parables were not allegories but stories meant to communicate only a single point. Julicher believed that the single point of each parable could be found by formulating the broadest possible ethical generalization implied by the story, but Dodd, armed with the form-critical method and a different theology, disagreed. The key to the parables, he insisted, was to be found in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God. This announcement accounts for the “parables of crisis,” which exhort their hearers to watchfulness, and the “parables of growth,” which declare the arrival of the kingdom as a small and seemingly insignificant presence in the world that will, in time, grow to full stature (Dodd 1935, 154–94). In addition to these two clear clusters of parables, Dodd was able to weave a great variety of other parables into the “setting in life” of Jesus’ ministry, always managing to discover their relationship to his proclamation of the coming reign of God by skillfully removing ecclesial accretions and reconstructing the earliest form of the parable.

Joachim Jeremias ([1947] 1963) built on the work of both Julicher and Dodd. With Julicher, Jeremias was convinced that each parable communicated only one point, so that the goal of interpretation was to find the tertium comparationis, the central comparison, the fulcrum on which the parable’s meaning turned. But Jeremias had learned from Dodd that the meaning need not be confined to the moral readings suggested by Julicher but could grow out of the theological themes associated with Jesus’ ministry. Dodd had limited himself to one theme, the proclamation of the kingdom of God, but Jeremias saw no reason to squeeze all of the parables into a single mold. So he expanded Dodd’s schema by identifying more than one “setting in life” for Jesus’ ministry and then organizing the parables into nine distinct theological themes related to those contexts (Jeremias 1963, 115–229). Yet for all his careful work, Jeremias’s departure from Dodd was more apparent than real and revealed his indebtedness to him, for all nine of his theological themes were basically elaborations of the meaning of the arrival of the reign of God in the person and work of Jesus.

The Parables as Primers
of Ethics and Theology

The work of Julicher, Dodd, and Jeremias represents a tradition of scholarship that has taken the parables to be expressions of theology and ethics in story form. In this context, the primary task of interpretation was to bridge the apparent gap that separated the story of the parable from the discourse it was clearly intended to generate. The details of the parable were investigated only to the degree necessary to establish the theological or ethical correlations that needed to be made. The scene presented in the parable was understood not as a social scene important in and of itself but as a set of ciphers, whose secret message had to be decoded so that its true meaning could be explicated. This procedure was in keeping with the basic meaning of the word that was translated as “parable.” Parabolē translates mashal, whose basic meaning is “riddle” (see Scott 1989, 3–62). Of course, the same scene could be decoded in numerous ways. Consequently, interpreters who were persuaded that each parable communicated only one point nevertheless managed to produce a bewildering variety of interpretations. Yet even this diversity remained within a recognizable set of parameters. The reason for this seemingly contradictory result lies in the fact that later interpreters took their cues from the Gospel writers, whose interpretations of the parables continued to exercise a strong influence on them.

Even after form critics had carefully removed the parables from their narrative contexts to reconstruct their meaning in another “setting in life,” they often continued to read the parables in ways related to their setting in the gospel text. The reason for this is not hard to find. Before integrating the parables into their narratives, the Gospel writers had selectively invested them with theological and ethical meanings consistent with their larger themes and concerns. They were not interested in allegorizing the parables and were therefore inconsistent. One detail or character might be invested heavily with theological meaning (the man who went out to hire laborers becomes a God figure) while other details were ignored (the bargaining with the laborers). This selective investment of the details of these parables may be called “theologory,” a kind of allegory in the making but incomplete, inconsistent, and highly selective. Klyne Snodgrass (1983, 12) would refer to this phenomenon as a “partial allegory or mixed form.” The investment strategies differed from one gospel writer to another, one preferring to append explanatory codicils to defend his accounts (Mark 4:14–20 and parallels; Matt. 13:36–43) while another tended to wrap his investments in carefully crafted portfolios (Luke 10:25–28, 36–37; 18:1–14).

The form critics were keenly aware of the Gospel writers’ work. Jeremias (1963, 23–114) devoted the first substantial portion of his study to the problem of returning “to Jesus from the primitive church.” In this section, he identified a number of factors that had to be taken into consideration in any form-critical reconstruction of the original parable spoken by Jesus. The major ones were as follows: “representational changes” in the details of the story as it moved from a rural Palestinian to an urban Hellenistic setting; the tendency toward “embellishment” found in folk stories and the influence of parallel materials from the Old Testament and folk literature; “the change of audience” from the opponents of Jesus to his disciples and the early church; “the hortatory use of the parables by the church,” which removed them from their polemical context in Jesus’ ministry and reset them in the Gospels as words to the wise; and the struggle to understand the delay of the Parousia and the unfolding Gentile mission of the church. However, like all of those who preceded him and many of those who followed, Jeremias was convinced that the semantic field of the parables remained in the realm of theology and ethics. It was precisely this unchanged semantic field that allowed the Gospel writers to adapt the parables for their communities when they committed them to writing. A parable spoken by Jesus to rebut his Pharisaic opponents and defend his gospel might indeed have been turned to hortatory uses by the church (for example, Luke 15:4–7), but it remained a parable about “God’s mercy for sinners.” Jesus told the parable to defend the sinners toward whom God’s love was being shown, and the church retold it to celebrate “God’s love” by the community of sinners who claimed that love through Jesus. The transformations were variations on the insider-outsider theme.

In time, form-critical readings of the parables would give way to redaction-critical readings, which would focus almost exclusively on the parable as a vehicle for the evangelist’s theology and ethics. After a reign of two decades, redaction criticism would be dethroned by a variety of literary-critical approaches, but the focus would remain essentially the same. Theology and ethics by any other name, whether “advent,” “reversal and action,” or “literary-existential,” remained the same (Crossan 1973; Via 1967).

One apparent exception to this rule emerged with the development of literary-critical readings of the parables that attacked the theologizing of the parables as energetically as Julicher had railed against their allegorization. By shifting attention to the narrativity and metaphoricity of the parables, interpreters sought to discern how they worked to change human perception and traditions of language. Seen in this light, the parables generated interiorized apocalypses in which one’s individual perception of reality was subverted, shattered, and reconstituted. Because the parable’s structure held the vital clues to its function, a great deal of attention was devoted to its literary form, and because parabolic language was paradoxical, the more minimalist the parable, the more original its form (see the work of Crossan, Funk, Scott, Via, and the early issues of Semeia, especially vols. 1, 2, and 4, for examples of this approach). The language of the parables was explored more for the purpose of disclosing how its metaphors operated than for any clues it held regarding the social world in which it was spoken or the social scripts it presented. Parable became metaparable, which forced its readers to reinterpret the meaning of interpretation itself (see Crossan 1980, 25–64, on the parable of the sower).

The differences between the Dodd–Jeremias tradition and the literary-critical tradition are minimal. Both produced “idealist” readings of the parables, without much regard for the importance of their “materialist” scenes.² The scenes presented in the parables were valued for their theological, ethical, or metaphoric value, and once this was established, the details of the parable were left behind. Given this basic orientation, it mattered little whether one operated with a moral generalization (Julicher), a single theological theme (Dodd), a variety of theological themes (Jeremias), existential themes (Via), or a philosophy of language and perception (Crossan, Funk). The fate of the social world or social scripts glimpsed in the parable was the same: they were ignored or, after cursory examination, neglected. The parable thus generated a discourse that was finally unrelated to the material details of its story world or narrative. The notion that language, even the language of Jesus, once lived as part of a social, political, economic system, which gave it birth and provided its resonance, was foreign to the enterprise of interpreting the parables.

At the same time, as the parable was being removed from its world, it was being situated most comfortably in the world of the interpreter. What could be more natural than for teachers of theology and ethics to assume that Jesus was engaged in the same activity or for professors of religion with a passion for poetics to assume that Jesus’ parables were poetic creations? In short, in their quest for the parables of Jesus, these interpreters treated the parables very much as their earlier counterparts, in their quest for the historical Jesus, had treated the rabbi from Nazareth. The parablers are merely a subset of the historians. With a few substitutions, what Albert Schweitzer said about the quest for the historical Jesus could be said about the interpreters of the parables: “It was not only each [intellectual movement] that found its reflection in [the parables]; each individual [interpreter] created [them] in accordance with his [or her] own [ideological passion]” (Schweitzer 1956, 4).

The Parables of Jesus and
the Historical Jesus

The comparison of the quest for the parables of Jesus with the quest for the historical Jesus raises a fundamental question. Any study of Jesus’ parables will be predicated on some larger understanding of what Jesus’ public work was all about.³ It is not possible to analyze the pieces without some view of the whole. Yet this determining gestalt is rarely, if ever, discussed. How can one judge what the parables are about unless one locates them as part of some larger strategy that led eventually to Jesus’ execution as a subversive to the Roman order and a false claimant to political power in Judaea? Rarely is the need for this criterion brought to the level of conscious reflection. Even when criteria for adjudicating the “authenticity” of Jesus’ sayings are identified, the larger issue remains submerged beneath the details of the arguments about specific utterances. The issue here is not the possibility of reconstructing such a complete framework but the necessity of entertaining one in order to evaluate even the most fragmentary piece of the tradition, whether a saying or a parable. All perception requires a paradigm, without which individual events seem random and collections of data seem unrelated (Kuhn 1970, 43–51). In the absence of a consciously articulated paradigm, interpreters will substitute their own plausibility structures and smuggle them into the discussion of the particular parts. Even when it is seemingly absent, the underlying vision of Jesus’ public work informs the discussion of particular parables or specific sayings.

Interpreters vary in the degree to which their paradigms are visible. Jeremias envisions Jesus as a cross between a rabbi and a Christian theologian; Kenneth Bailey believes him to have been a poet and a peasant; John Dominic Crossan, a master of metaphor and poet of the interior apoca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Parables of Jesus, the World of the Parables, and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Part 2 Unmasking the World of Oppression: Posing the Problems
• Part 3 Opening Up New Possibilities: Challenging the Limits
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Ancient Texts