The parables have always troubled me, and I often found their apparent meanings unsatisfying. I sympathized with the elder brother of the prodigal son and thought his grievance justified, while the gloating over the suffering of the rich man in hell while Lazarus enjoyed paradise seemed excessively cruel. Mark, who presents parables as riddles, seemed to me quite right. Amy-Jill Levine's work has clarified two things for me: the parables are supposed to be disturbing, and the later interpretations attached to them have so colored our understandings that we frequently fail to distinguish them from the parables themselves. This book captures the strange, unsettling, and open-ended quality of Jesus' stories by trying to hear them as his first-century Jewish hearers would have. It allows us to hear them anew, as stories that startle and suggest, not as pat moral tales. Consider, for example, Levine's suggestion to think of the Good Samaritan story in terms of a wounded Israeli Jew on the road, rescued by a member of Hamas.
To hear the parables as they might have been heard in their first-century setting, Levine shows us, requires a fair amount of dismantling. Perhaps like that pearl in the parable, they began by irritating, and people began smoothing them over, or domesticating them, already at the level of the gospels' composition. Luke in particular tells readers how to understand the parables by framing them with his own themes. Levine shows how Luke has supplied the meaning of the Parable of the Prodigal Son by telling us it is about repentance and forgiveness and by linking it to other parables of something lost and found—namely, a coin and a sheep. She helps us consider the parable before Luke got to it—there is no repentant son, the father is prodigal in his indulgence, and the elder son may be the one who was lost, that is, overlooked.
Similarly, to hear the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9–14) as a contemporary of Jesus requires one to understand that the tax collectors were Jewish collaborationists in Roman oppression, that the Pharisees were a respected group with populist support, and that the Temple had room for many sorts of people, including non-Jews, women, and pro-Roman tax collectors. Indeed the Temple operated under the supervision of the local Roman administration. Levine argues that the final line of the parable, referring to both parties, can be translated, “To you I say, descending to his house, this one is justified, alongside that one.” The merit of the Pharisee will extend to the tax collector, so the story exhibits a “both-and” view of God's generosity, not an “either-or” one. The either-or interpretation has flowed from the saying Luke tacked on: “Because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Luke, then, is already domesticating the parable, a process Levine suggests probably started as soon as parables began to circulate.
Some parables may provide discrete, usable units, but no satisfying conclusions. In the story of the Widow and the Judge in Luke 18:1–8, we might learn to question stereotypes of weak widows. Yet Levine notes that neither character inspires, and the elements of a widow getting vengeance on an adversary by threatening a dubious judge are not morally uplifting. “Our task,” she suggests “may be to resist the parable rather than rescue it” (242).
Another aspect of parable de-construction is the removal of reflexive anti-Jewish interpretations, coming from both right and left, from both conservative Christian scholars unaware of (or prior to) decades of scholarship on the Jewish context of the early Jesus movement, and liberationist and postcolonialist scholars preaching social justice. The discomfort and unwieldiness of the parables have led many to search for heroes and villains to explain who “wins” in the story. With rather shocking frequency, the part of the villain is assigned to first-century Jews and Judaism. To underscore Jesus' uniqueness, Christian scholars have sometimes separated Jesus from Judaism and painted his “background” in negative images unfamiliar to anyone who knows Jewish history. Although this is an area in which I have worked for most of my scholarly career, I was surprised at its ubiquity in parables scholarship, the nearly automatic anti-Jewish interpretations that had to be cleared out of the way before studying each parable. The purity laws in particular seem to be trotted out at every turn, despite the fact that not all Jews observed them, their purpose was not to marginalize others, and most important, they are not relevant to the cases described! Levine has documented these interpretations and met them head-on, giving an excellent rejoinder in her explication of the boundaries of sacred and profane operative in everyday life (117–18).
The book shows how some Christian scholars have raided both the Bible and rabbinic literature, taken material out of context and read it quite literally, assuming that certain laws described how all Jews lived. Even the humble mustard seed, in the hands of those untrained in reading Jewish texts, became a noxious weed whose very planting offended Jewish purity laws (160–62). Yet, as archeological and inscriptional evidence shows, Jews lived with their non-Jewish neighbors and welcomed them into their synagogues on a regular basis. Furthermore, even a cursory reading of Acts will reveal Paul's preaching to Jews and Gentiles in synagogues in the Diaspora and will show him, a Pharisee, easily conversing with Roman officials. Both rabbinic stories and the tales of Paul in Acts should be taken with a large helping of salt, but literalism cannot be applied to one case and not to the other.
The author asks, what if the words meant what they said? What if a seed were a seed, yeast were yeast, a coin were a coin? The jump toward allegorizing has been too quick, she shows, and robs the parables of their possibilities. By forcing things to stand in for other things, we may lose the original meaning. Jesus meant to leave stories open-ended and evocative. Thus a woman hides yeast in a large amount of flour, or a mustard seed is put in the ground, and we are left to ponder what will happen.
The author's claim is that the core parables go back to the historical Jesus, albeit filtered through oral traditions and revised by later transmitters, including those who translated them from Aramaic into Greek. Levine notes that the parables are good candidates for getting at Jesus' teaching because they repeat themes found elsewhere in his sayings, and often do not fit easily into the setting assigned them by the gospel authors. Themes that resonate with Jesus' person and sayings elsewhere in the gospels include the immediate coming of the kingdom, wealth and poverty, personal relations, feasting over fasting, and leaders as servants. All of this is sound thinking, but as with all historical Jesus scholarship, we must settle for probability. We can approach, but never entirely capture the teachings and person of Jesus.
I had some minor quibbles with the author on scholarly matters. I wondered about her questioning the reality of the Q-source (158) or the idea that Paul promoted celibacy in marriage (144). The existence of Q remains hypothetical, but it seems part of the best answer to the Synoptic problem. As I read 1 Corinthians 7, Paul would prefer married people not embrace celibacy. Regarding the idea that Pharisees were not required to fast twice a week (188), there is nevertheless the Didache's suggestion that some “hypocrites” did so. Finally, some interpretations of the parables are labeled “banal” (166) or “a platitude” (16). In many cases I might agree, but subjectivity is a problem in interpretation. One person's banality is another person's inspiration.
Reading this book is the equivalent of taking a very good introductory course in the New Testament. By osmosis the reader picks up source and redaction criticism, form criticism, historical Jesus work, and a nice summary of what we know about the Pharisees and the Samaritans. Material is presented in such an engaging manner that one might hardly realize how much one is learning. For scholars there are in-jokes, for baby boomers references to Rocky and Bullwinkle, and for everyone, puns and examples from real life, like the middle-school group project, where participants vary in effort, but get the same reward.
Reading the book is also like taking a course in biblical and rabbinic storytelling. The reader comes to see folkloric elements in the parables and learns the nature of midrash, the rabbinic expansion of the Torah. Historical questions like the status and identity of the am ha'aretz (182) are laid out. Most important, readers come to see Jesus as a brilliant darshan (Torah interpreter) who draws from Israel's Scriptures and the world as it is, to talk about how the world might be.
Jews have been attracted to Jesus, the ancient Jewish teacher, for a long time. The recent commentary, The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Levine and Marc Brettler, attests to the fifty-plus Jewish scholars who have spent at least part of their careers studying his story. This is not new, however, and today's scholars continue the line of Jewish scholarship on Jesus and Christian origins that has gone on for more than a century. In Germany, Abraham Geiger (1810–64), one of the founders of Reform Judaism, admired Jesus, considering him a Pharisee of enlightened views similar to Geiger's own. Joseph Klausner, an early Zionist, also admired Jesus, publishing a book on him in Hebrew in 1925. That same year Stephen Wise drew a crowd of 3,000 when he spoke on the topic “A Jew's View of Jesus” at Carnegie Hall on Christmas Day. Jews frequently have claimed Jesus as one of their own, while blaming Paul for all that went wrong with later Christianity and its relations with Jews. Now Paul, too, is increasingly understood as steeped in first-century Judaism. We Jews have not always known what to do with our interest in Jesus and his teaching, as we revere him neither as divine nor as our Savior. But he is not a stranger, either, and I think we see a connection that is closer to, or at least different from, what we feel toward other great teachers like the Buddha or Muhammad. Levine's work suggests that Jesus is someone we can recognize as a Jewish teacher, whose words of social inclusion and demands for justice in this world resonate with our own sense of Judaism.
This book emits joy. The author clearly has found studying the parables with others and writing about them to be deeply fulfilling, but also great fun. Reading it, I laughed out loud at times, and on a deeper level, enjoyed the plucky widows, resourceful women, needy father, and other very human types who emerged from its pages. I also felt challenged to think about how to live in the world, to consider Levine's view of one parable's challenge to see the kingdom “already present, inchoate, in this world” (167).
Most scholarly works follow a certain pattern. They carefully review previous scholarship on their topic, then show why those understandings were biased, inadequate, or just plain wrong. Then the author gives the “correct” interpretation—namely, her/his own—supported by copious material. I kept expecting this from Levine. She ably reviewed earlier scholarship, pointing out its flawed and sometimes pernicious effects, supplied some building blocks for meaning, including discussions of history, meanings of particular words, and evidence of redaction. I was primed then for her to give me the single, correct interpretation, but it did not appear. She left things open and asked more questions, leaving me chewing on the material and looking for my own answers. Now where did she learn to teach that way?
