Parable

11 Key excerpts on "Parable"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible

  • Leland Ryken(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Crossway

    (Publisher)

  P

  Parable

  A simple and brief story, usually allegorical, that primarily serves to teach and only secondarily to entertain. Parable is a major—and often misunderstood—biblical genre.

  Although there was an era in which biblical scholars claimed that the Parables are not allegorical, that viewpoint has been discredited. The Parables are obviously allegorical texts. We should immediately make the contrast between interpreting an allegorical text and allegorizing a text. The latter procedure involves foisting allegorical meanings on a text that was not intended to be interpreted allegorically. This is an unnatural thing to do with language and discourse. The Parables of Jesus are allegorical in the sense that numerous details in most of his Parables stand for something else. There is, to be sure, an allegorical continuum on which we can place individual Parables: in some Parables, nearly all of the details have an allegorical or “other” meaning; in others, fewer details are allegorical; and at the far end of the continuum, only a few details have a second level of meaning. Even in the latter case, though, as in the Parable of the good Samaritan, the story embodies an obvious, simple meaning, and by a slight extension of the term allegory, such a Parable falls under the rubric of allegorical story. C. S. Lewis defined allegory as “giving an imagined body to the immaterial,” and the Parable of the good Samaritan gives shape to the abstraction “neighbor.”

  There are seven good reasons to believe that the Parables of Jesus are allegorical stories:

  • Jesus himself interpreted two of his Parables for his disciples, and in both instances he gave an allegorical or “other” meaning to nearly all of the details in the stories. These are the Parable of the sower and the Parable of the wheat and the weeds; the interpretations are found, respectively, in Mark 4:13–20 (parallels in Matt. 13:18–23; Luke 8:11–15) and Matthew 13:36–43. That Jesus intended allegorical meaning as the hermeneutical principle for the Parables generally is made clear by his lead-in to his answer to the disciples’ question about the Parable of the sower, as recorded in Mark 4:13: “Do you not understand this Parable? How then will you understand all the Parables?”

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Basic Bible Interpretation

  • Roy B. Zuck(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • David C Cook

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER NINE

  Probing the Parables and Analyzing the Allegories

  Parables, allegories, and fables require special attention in Bible study. A Parable is a form of figurative language involving comparisons. But rather than using a single word or phrase to make the comparison or analogy, as in a simile, metaphor, or hypocatastasis, a Parable is an extended analogy in story form. A Parable is a true-tolife story to illustrate or illuminate a truth. It is true to life though it may not have actually occurred in all details as the story is presented. Historic events may serve as illustrations; but Parables are special stories, not necessarily historic events, that are told to teach a particular truth. Since Parables are true to life, they differ from allegories and fables, which will be discussed later in this chapter.

  The word Parable comes from the Greek para (“beside or alongside”) and ballein (“to throw”). Thus the story is thrown alongside the truth to illustrate the truth. Hearers and readers, by sensing the comparison or analogy between the story and their own situation, are prodded to think. In interpreting Parables we need to ask, What is the point of the story? What spiritual truth is being illustrated? What analogy is being made? Parables are sometimes unusual and startling, but never unlifelike or fictitious.

  Besides referring to stories the Greek word parabole also refers to short statements (sometimes called similitudes) and to proverbs. Similitudes normally refer to customary habits, stated in the present tense, whereas the story Parable records a specific instance, using the past tense (e.g., “A farmer went out to sow his seed,” Matt. 13:3).

  Five of the following six similitudes are referred to as Parables, in which the writer used the Greek word parabole.

  Jesus' Similitudes

  A paradoxical statement

  “It is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’ ... His disciples asked Him about this Parable” (Mark 7:16-17). Meaning: Evil deeds come from the heart (vv. 21-23).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Discovering the New Testament

  An Introduction to Its Background, Theology, and Themes (Volume I: The Gospels and Acts)

  • Mark J. Keown(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Lexham Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 13

  THE TEACHING OF THE KINGDOM: ParableS

  WHAT IS A Parable?

  W hereas in John, Jesus teaches the crowds in long dialogues with metaphor (e.g., bread, light, shepherd, and vineyard), in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus’ primary mode of communication to the crowds is through Parables.

  The classic definition of a Parable is “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.” At another level, a Parable is a form of teaching. Telling a story is a timeless means of conveying truth (e.g., Aesop’s Fables). In Jesus’ ministry, it is no different. Snodgrass defines Parables generally as “stories with two levels of meaning.”1 The story is about events grounded in the everyday, providing a lens through which a deeper reality can be interpreted; in Jesus’ case, Parables point to the kingdom of God. A Parable is a saying or story told by Jesus that challenges the hearer (or reader) to discern and act upon a second deeper spiritual level of meaning.

  The Greek term is parabolē . The term carries the sense of “comparison.” It has a range of meanings that is broader than the English word “Parable.” The meaning derives from the Hebrew māšal (Aramaic = mathla ), translated as parabolē in the LXX (twenty-eight out of thirty-nine times). At times, its use anticipates Jesus. Matthew cites Psalm 78:2, which anticipates the psalmist speaking in Parables hidden from creation (Matt 13:35). It is used in a New Testament sense in Ezekiel 17:2, where God tells the “son of man,” Ezekiel, to utter a Parable against the house of Israel, followed by a Parable of two great eagles that planted two twigs that grew into vines symbolizing Israel and Babylon. This resembles the mustard-seed Parable (see Ezek 24:3;

  Philo,

  Conf.

  99

  ).2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Biblical Preaching

  An Examination of the Biblical Demand for Preaching

  • Robert Curry(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  63

  What is a Parable and how does it function? When done properly, offering a definition of a Parable is no easy task for fear of omitting some of its distinctive marks or adding something superfluous. So how then is a Parable defined? C. H. Dodd’s definition is classic: “At its simplest the Parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”64

  The power or force contained within a Parable is found in its aesthetic value, a living quality that reaches out to the reader. The Parables reflect much of Jesus’ ministry: the “good news,” the eschatological nature of his preaching, his call to repentance, and his conflict with the Jewish leadership. The Parables are what characterized the teaching of Jesus, for they reveal the mind and historical situation of Jesus. The Parables moved the reader toward the kingdom of God.

  How are the Parables to be preached? What is the preaching of a Parable intended to do? In reality, preaching a Parable can be a daunting task and its proclamation is not easily done. Thomas Long writes, “Preaching on a Parable is a novice preacher’s dream but often an experienced preacher’s nightmare.”65 The problem is the Parables appear at first to be ideal for preaching, but eventually the preacher realizes that the Parables are multi-layered and rich in meaning. Craig Blomberg alludes to Colin Morris’s warning that the preacher must be sure “to not do badly what the Bible has already done well,”66

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Interpreting the Parables

  • Craig L. Blomberg(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IVP Academic

    (Publisher)

  [43] These affirmations rely on four additional key principles.

  6. “Multiple points of comparison” is not the single element that makes a narrative an allegory; any narrative with both a literal and a metaphorical meaning is in essence allegorical. The primary pioneer of this assertion was Madeleine Boucher, who already in 1977 observed that for most literary critics there are only two “modes” of meaning—literal and tropical (pronounced with a long o—that which is popularly called “figurative”). Some examples of tropes include circumlocution (a “roundabout” way of speaking), metaphor, synecdoche (the substitution of the part for the whole), metonymy (the substitution of one thing for something else closely associated) and irony. Any one of these tropes may be developed into a full-fledged narrative; when a metaphor is thus developed, allegory results. Allegory is “nothing more and nothing less than an extended metaphor in narratory form (the term narratory here being used to include both dramatic and narrative works, that is, all works that tell a story).”[44]

  Boucher further argued that allegory is a device of meaning, not a literary form or genre. So a Parable may be an allegory even if its constituent elements do not involve separate metaphors, so long as the overall point of the Parable transcends its literal meaning (e.g., the story is about the kingdom of God rather than just, say, farming, fishing or banqueting). The only types of Parables that are not allegories, then, are either those that are so short that they are just simple comparisons rather than full-fledged narratives, or those that are extended synecdoches rather than extended metaphors, as in the Parable of the rich fool or of the Pharisee and publican, where the main characters are representative of an entire class of similar people. As for Jesus’ purpose in speaking in Parables, since he wanted to win his audiences over to his point of view, he had to be intelligible to them. Nevertheless, they could have found his meaning “mysterious,” since many may have been either unable or unwilling to identify the proper spiritual equivalents for Jesus’ down-to-earth metaphors.[45]

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Good News of the Return of the King

  The Gospel in Middle-earth

  • Michael T. Jahosky(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  313

  Although there is not universal agreement on which of Jesus’s Parables those are, most scholars agree that the Parables of the prodgial son (Luke 15 :11–32 ), the good Samaritan (Luke 10 :25–37 ), the wicked tenants (Mark 12 :1–12 ), the wedding banquet (Matt 22 :1–14 ), the widow and the judge (Luke 18 :1–8 ), the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16 :19 –31 ), and the laborers in the vineyard (Matt 20 :1–16 ) are among those that fit our description. Unfortunately, some of these Parables have been domesticated by being reduced to “earthly stories with heavenly meanings.” That is, they have been misread and turned into crude allegories. John Dominic Crossan has labeled the Parables described above as “Challenge Parables.”314 The “challenge Parable” fits the description we gave in the previous paragraph because “it challenges us to think, to discuss, to argue, and to decide about meaning as present application.”315 That is, the allegorical correspondence in Jesus’s Parables breaks down and presents us with a shocking twist that challenges what we thought the story was about. Challenge Parables are multivalent, amibiguous, and suggestive; one does not simply decode a challenge Parable.316 Challenge Parables are like this because they are ultimately stories about God, even when they do not appear to be. According to Kreglinger, “Avoiding overt ‘God-talk’ is an important strategy that Jesus employs. By luring the reader into thinking the Parable is just about everyday life, the defense mechanisms of Jesus’ religious audience are down, and they are tricked into an understanding of God that is at least surprising, but often shocking and seemingly unacceptable.”317

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Other People's Stories

  Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy

  • Amy Shuman(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  Allegory and Parable as Subversive Stories

         Allegory is a primary trope for translating experience. Allegory in personal narrative is remarkable because although it is deeply contextual, depending on its occasion, listeners, and larger communicative situation for meaning, its meaning is not restricted to or even accountable to the experiences described. Of all the personal narrative genres, it pays least attention to the ownership of experience. In my terms, allegory is a form of narrative that travels beyond its owners; moreover, it is intended to travel. Allegory is designed to be translated across contexts and across experiences, all within the framework of multiple, unrelated, but nonetheless particular, “performance arenas” for interpretation.1 Allegory is also, not surprisingly, one of the means by which people empathize with others.

  By allegorizing experience, people distant from an experience draw their own meanings from it and claim some mutual understanding. Empathy, then, depends on the sort of translation that allegory provides. At the same time, allegory, when understood as the use of one’s personal story to create meaning for others, is the kind of appropriation that tellers, claiming ownership of an experience and its interpretation, sometimes reject or resist. Positioned at the intersection of the personal and more than personal, allegory in personal narrative is an important site for understanding the limits of empathy.

  Personal narratives align the self to the world. And because a story can be told as not only personal but also as representative of a larger, collective experience, this alignment makes it possible for stories to have meanings beyond their contexts. However, the alignment between the self and the world is a point of negotiation, if not contest, requiring constant reassessment of both the concept of self and the larger categories a personal experience might represent. Personal narrative as allegory is a means for representing personal experience in larger contexts, invoking, in Jameson’s terms “the collectivity itself.” Each negotiation is a way of understanding personal experience as more than personal. As I have discussed, personal stories can be understood as more than personal in several ways:

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Hermeneutics

  Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation

  • Virkler, Henry A., Ayayo, Karelynne(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Baker Academic

    (Publisher)

  Perhaps it is best for biblical interpreters to remember that in many instances a definitive classification may not be possible, and Robert Stein rightly recognizes that “the greater danger for most interpreters is to see too much meaning in specific details rather than too little.” 8 Similarly G. B. Caird concludes, “Parable and allegory, then, are partial synonyms, and it is less important to distinguish between them than it is to distinguish between allegory, which the author intended, and allegorical embellishment or interpretation, which he did not.” 9 Exercise 48. Read Luke 15:11–32. One interpreter argues that the single basic point of this passage is that just as the older son will not accept and rejoice in the loving forgiveness that his father has extended to his brother, so the Pharisees and teachers of the law are unwilling to accept God’s loving forgiveness of tax collectors and sinners through the ministry of Jesus. Another interpreter believes that three truths are communicated in this text: (1) Sinners may confess their sins and turn to God in repentance, (2) God offers forgiveness for undeserving people, and (3) those who claim to be God’s people should not be resentful when God extends his grace to the undeserving. Do you agree with the first or the second interpreter? Can you classify this text as either a Parable or an allegory? Explain your answer to each question. A proverb can be understood as a compressed Parable or allegory, sometimes exhibiting characteristics of both. Proverbs are typically short, pithy sayings that express general truth in a memorable and catchy manner. The following sections will discuss the nature and interpretation of proverbs, Parables, and allegories at greater length. Proverbs Walter C. Kaiser Jr. has described proverbs as sayings that are “terse, brief, have a little ‘kick’ to them, and a little bit of salt as well.” 10 Many people view proverbs as nice slogans—good mottoes to hang on one’s wall

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Stories with Intent

  A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus

  • Klyne R. Snodgrass(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  An obvious example is the Parable of the Unjust Judge, who is not like God at all. It is also possible for the contrast to be between human action and the action expected of God’s people. (See the discussion of the Unjust Steward, pp. 401-19 below.) What about Allegory? I have not included Jülicher’s fourth category, allegory, as a distinct kind of Parable. This is the term that has caused horrendous debate. Typically an allegory is defined as a series of related metaphors, 75 and the Parable of the Sower would be an obvious example. But life is never so simple, and in addition Jülicher thought allegories are obscure and need to be decoded. They are supposedly more obfuscating than revealing. Consequently, in biblical studies (but also in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary studies) allegory has frequently been viewed with disdain and suspicion. The claim is made that allegory says something other than what it means by placing pictures in front of reality, but Parable does the same thing. Both are framed on the reality they seek to portray. The claim that other forms enhance understanding while allegory presupposes understanding is absurd. When people speak of allegory, they frequently refer to extreme examples like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but allegories can be as varied as Parables. Few people are even aware that The Wizard of Oz is an elaborate political allegory about conditions at the beginning of the twentieth century in the U.S.A., with “Oz” (the abbreviation for “ounce”) and the yellow brick road both referring to the gold standard (which was debated at the time), the scarecrow representing the farmers, the tin man the industrial workers, and the cowardly lion reformers, especially William Jennings Bryan

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Challenge of Jesus' Parables

  • Richard N. Longenecker, Richard N. Longenecker(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  Then he began to speak to them in Parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from them his share of the produce of the vineyard. But they seized him, and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent another slave to them. This one they beat over the head and insulted. Then he sent another, and that one they killed. And so it was with many others—some they beat, and others they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this Scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?” When they realized that he had told this Parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away. (Mark 12:1-12)

  Other allegories are found in Mark 4:3-9 (“the Soils”); Matt 13:24-30 (“the Wheat and the Tares”); and Matt 21:1-10 (“the Marriage Feast”). In all of these examples the term parabolē is used to describe the allegory.

  The issue of whether the allegorical interpretations associated with the Parables of “the Soils” (Mark 4:13-20) and “the Wheat and Tares” (Matt 13:36-43)—as well, the allegorical details found in the Parables of “the Wicked Tenants” and “the Marriage Feast”—are authentic is greatly debated. Yet even if every allegorical feature found in these Parables and their interpretations were to be attributed to the early church and not to Jesus, the fact would remain that the genre “Parable” found in the New Testament includes “allegory.”

  6. Conclusion

  The term “Parable” in the Bible possesses an extremely broad semantic range. It can refer to the three-word proverb “Physician, heal yourself” (Luke 4:23) or to a lengthy story Parable such as the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). Lying at the core of the Old Testament mashal and the New Testament parabolē

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Cognitive Poetics in Practice

  • Joanna Gavins, Gerard Steen, Joanna Gavins, Gerard Steen, Joanna Gavins, Gerard Steen(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  parabolic projection operates intertextually within a literary framework. This will be done by means of a literary case study. Lastly, I will draw this chapter to a close by briefly considering the wider implications of parabolic literary theory, regarding meaning both in the mind and the brain. In sum, what this chapter will seek to demonstrate is that Parable is a fundamental, continuous, cognitive instrument of thought that we employ, largely unconsciously, both in real-world meaning construction and in literary interpretation procedures.

  Some preliminary background

  Before getting to grips with the central theory of the parabolic mind, let us first set out some preparatory background. A good starting point in this chapter on how cognitive parabolic reasoning operates is to remind ourselves of how the default, i.e. biblical, notion of Parable works. Traditional Parables are located in the New Testament of the Bible in the sections where Jesus can be found preaching about the kingdom of God. These stories were a kind of ‘metaphor in narrative form’, the primary purpose of which was to challenge the ingrained perspectives of the hearers. Parables therefore were told in order to project extra (essentially didactic) domains of knowledge into the existing world-views of the listeners. The result of this would have been a modification in the interpretative cognitive models of those listeners.

  The well-known story of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20: 1–16) provides a useful starting-point for an analysis of how Parables operate. In this parabolic tale, a number of people are set to work at different times of the day: some early in the morning and some late in the afternoon. When evening comes, the workers are paid the same amount. Those who worked all day then become angry: as do the Parable’s listeners. But Christ explains to them that in his father’s kingdom of heaven ‘the last (i.e. the poorest and weakest) shall be first’. ‘Mercy’ therefore, rather than ‘explicit reward’ is what is promised and indeed given. This didactic narrative twist, leading to a fundamental cognitive reappraisal of the world, can be seen in virtually all the biblical Parables.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book