- Citation/Abstract
- Dissertation or Thesis
Abstract (summary)
"The Fables of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke" seeks to resolve two fundamental mysteries about Jesus and his parables. The first of these is ultimately of a historical nature and pertains to the genre typically called parable." All three of the Synoptic Gospels depict Jesus teaching using parables. Furthermore, every source used by Matthew and Luke—Mark, Q, M, and L—contains parables as part of its depiction of Jesus's method of teaching. For these and other reasons, most New Testament scholars view it as axiomatic that the historical Jesus taught in parables. Yet, according to the standard scholarly assessment, Jesus is also the first figure in recorded history to use the parable as his preferred didactic medium. The first fundamental issue, this remarkable curiosity, is whether the Synoptic depiction of Jesus as a teller of parables is really as unique as is commonly asserted.
The second mystery is why it is in Luke's Gospel, and only in Luke's Gospel, that we find such a disproportionate amount of parables not found elsewhere in the New Testament. Within the L material are about fifteen unique parables, including the most popular of the Jesus tradition, such as the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the most peculiar, such as the Crafty Steward. I offer an answer to both mysteries from the contemporary genre fable, which was having its Renaissance around the turn of the Common Era across the Mediterranean world. I set the parables attributed to Jesus in Luke alongside the first-century fable collections, fable tellers, and exercises of ancient education to demonstrate that the Gospel author presented the parables of Jesus as fables, and that Luke and his audience would have understood them as such.
The implications of this thesis are many and far reaching. The ancient fable requires a fundamental reevaluation of the correct way to interpret the most popular parables in the Christian tradition. The fable supplies a new historical and cultural context in which to situate Jesus, and hundreds of new primary texts with which to compare the parables attributed to him in Luke. The fable provides the key for understanding Luke's methods of composition and redaction of his parable source-material. The fable provides an answer to why Luke can depict a first-century Jewish figure as teaching in parables and it also resolves lighter matters, such as whether the parables attributed to Jesus are intended to make us laugh.
The project is divided into two parts. Part I addresses background issues and does not assume any familiarity of the reader with ancient fables. The first chapter dispels three essential myths about the ancient fable and introduces the secondary scholarship. The next two chapters introduce all the relevant primary literature for studying ancient fables. This literature includes the Greek and Latin fable authors and collections in the early centuries CE. The last chapter of the first part is devoted to ancient and modern theories of the parable and the fable, and it demonstrates that the two genres are synonymous.
Part II addresses the parables attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. The sixth chapter offers an analysis of the L parables from the perspective of fable literary criticism, comparing the plot-structures and narrative elements of the Lukan parables to their corollaries in the first-century fables. The next two chapters discuss how lessons were drawn from fables in the first century, identify this same approach in the Gospel of Luke, and issue a number of strong correctives to the standard approaches to parable interpretation since Adolf Jülicher. The next chapters demonstrate that the best explanation for the quantity and uniformity of the L parables is that Luke used a source: a collection of fables attributed to Jesus. I compare the L fables to the first-century fable books, identifying numerous commonalties. I then make a source-critical argument that warrants separating the special Lukan parables from the rest of the Gospel material and propose a Sitz im Leben for the document in early Christian catechesis. The final chapter concludes the study, identifies open questions and new areas of research, giving special attention to a new avenue for the study of the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels: the fable teller. A more in-depth summary of these chapters is found at the end of the introduction.
This is the first monograph to undertake a direct comparison of ancient fables with the parables attributed to Jesus in general and to the L parables in particular. With hundreds of new first-century examples to compare, this book introduces the functional equivalent of the Nag Hammadi Library or Dead Sea Scrolls for the parables attributed to Jesus, while also introducing a new field through which to interrogate the parables. To the extent that the teachings of Jesus and the parables attributed to him in particular form a cornerstone of Western thought, this project will give this foundation a firm tug in a new direction.