Markus Bockmuehl, Claudia Setzer, Frank Moloney, and Phil Cunningham have my deep appreciation for their careful reading, their kind words, and their well-taken observations. Their responses indicate, inter alia, that there is much more to be said about the parables Short Stories addresses, the other parables of Jesus, the role of the parables in the life of the church, and the value of the parables for instruction in antiquity as well as today. I thank them also for finding interpretations of both the parables and my study of them that I did not see. Much like the parables themselves, one's own work can give rise to ideas that might not have been an original (i.e., intended) part of the presentation.
To continue this conversation, and especially given the focus of the College Theology Society and of its journal, Horizons, which is “rooted in a commitment to the long and deep Catholic tradition of ‘faith seeking understanding,’” this response focuses on the issue of practical theology. It specifically engages three areas discussed by all four responses: the persistence of anti-Jewish interpretations, the question of method, and pastoral challenges.
Anti-Jewish Interpretations
I appreciate Professor Bockmuehl's phrasing of my work as “serious (nonpolemical) Jewish interest in Jesus of Nazareth.” That parenthetical term should be underscored. Polemical turns, whether by Christians in depicting Jesus' Jewish context as toxic or by Jews in describing Jesus and/or his followers as ignorant or evil, are neither historically accurate nor civil. When the academy mimics much of contemporary American political discourse, everyone loses. As a Jew whose primary job is to train Christians who seek ordination or a career in religious education, it is my responsibility to treat their sacred texts, and the readers of those texts, with respect.
Thus, I had not intended to be engaged in “sniping” (Professor Bockmuehl's term), although it is quite possible that my frustration with the enormity of parable interpretation's anti-Jewish baggage came though. It is also possible that my Americanisms do not translate well across the pond (but here I am engaging in apologetic when I should accept the criticism and move on). For another disclaimer: I had not, as Professor Moloney suggests, “searched high and low to find examples of Christian interpreters who trace a rejection of Jewish purity practices somewhere in almost every parable.” To the contrary, the materials were so endemic that the issue was less finding a bomb hidden in the field than it was locating sand on the seashore.
Professor Moloney's notice that I “may be right about what Jesus of Nazareth thought of Jewish purity traditions. But there is rabbinic evidence that Second Temple Judaism and its aftermath had differing understandings of those traditions, and abundant evidence that the early Christian Church found them impractical” is helpful in this discussion because it raises the question of how people in the church today understand purity. I do not think the church's response to purity was an issue of “impracticality”: avoiding pork is no more impractical than avoiding meat during Lent. The purity laws were not adopted by the church because the church, as an increasingly Gentile body, was never called to follow those laws. The purity laws distinguish Jews from Gentiles.Footnote 9 Nor do I have evidence that Jesus abrogated any purity practices from Torah. That he would have disagreed with some Pharisees would not be surprising: so do the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Method
For readers who seek extensive discussion of how the criteria of authenticity apply to the parables, John Meier's A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 5, Probing the Authenticity of the Parables, is the best treatment to date (specifically, January 5, 2016).Footnote 10 Although I have labored in the historical Jesus vineyard for years, I am finding less and less helpful the early tools (e.g., the criteria of dissimilarity, multiple attestation, coherence), and less and less helpful atomistic approaches to the harvesting. My approach in Short Stories was to (attempt to) say something that had not previously been said (as several commentators note, mine is hardly the first book to address the topic), to weed out the anti-Jewish stereotypes that deform the gospel message, and to recover for Jewish as well as Christian (and other) readers a message that is both credible historically and meaningful in a present-day context.
Professor Bockmuehl helpfully notes the work of Brad Young (whose work I do cite), David Stern, and Clemens Thoma on rabbinic parables; I would also add the works of, especially, Annette MerzFootnote 11 and Steven NotleyFootnote 12 to this list. I did not, however, much engage rabbinic parables, save for cases where they offered a specific rejoinder to the anti-Jewish readings that are themselves often based on select rabbinic readings. Rabbinic parables, like Aesop's fables, Buddhist koans, and the more general texts that fall into the genre of the mashal have much in common with Jesus' parables, but they are not “background” to them. They are also written to a different audience, in a different context. Jesus' parables are his own: like his interpretation of Scripture, his ethical stances, his view of eschatology, and his understanding of messianism, he is both embedded in his own culture and offers his own variations on the themes. I do not want to force his parables into some generic straitjacket, any more than I would want to force the canonical gospels into the genres of ancient biography, midrash, or myth.
While the question of the construction of Jesus' Jewish (i.e., first-century Galilean and Judean; I do not, unlike Professor Bockmuehl, use the term “Palestinian,” as that would itself be anachronistic) context is inevitably speculative, I did try to keep to what we know, based on earlier and contemporary sources and by using rabbinic traditions with care.
On the matter of parables and allegories: the parables addressed in the volume are not allegories, in the sense that every item in the story relates to something in the outside world. However, in some cases tropes are necessarily in play: for example, references to a vineyard will call to mind Isaiah's Parable of the Vineyard. I did not devote chapters to those parables that do function as allegories, such as the Wicked Tenants; we might ask whether Jesus himself, at “some (perhaps late) stage of the ministry” (so Professor Bockmuehl), changed the genre itself, from a general message applicable to listeners in the Galilee and anywhere else to a specific condemnation of the Jerusalem leadership. Nor did I spend much time on the Sower, where Mark's allegorical interpretation goes astray: first the seed is the word (Mark 4:14) and then it is the one who receives the word (4:15–20). Personally, I think this parable is meant to comfort the Apostles, whose own sowing yielded a meager harvest among Jewish audiences, but that is another matter for another article.
Pastoral Challenges
No Christian should ever dismiss the witness of the gospel text in favor of some “historical Jesus” whose actions and words are reconstructed by a present-day scholar. It is the canon of the New Testament, and neither an anterior hypothetical nor a noncanonical text such as the Gospel of Thomas, on whose basis the church finds its roots. Christians should attend primarily to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and not to the studies of Levine, Bockmuehl, Setzer, Moloney, or Cunningham. Yet I do think that anyone who claims to love Jesus or to follow his teachings should want to know more about his context, just as today one would want to know everything there is to know about one's love, from the baby pictures to the childhood neighborhood to the friends and family. Filling in the historical details makes the parables more profound and more challenging, and it makes Jesus more interesting and admirable. For the church, Jesus has to be more than a really interesting rabbi. But he must be that interesting rabbi as well. Historical-critical work should enhance the meaning of the gospels, and it should also enhance the life of the church and its members.
Nor should parables be reduced to single messages, and here I very much appreciate Professor Setzer's recognition of this approach. I do think that personal or recontextualized readings are healthy: to preclude them would be to shut off human imagination (or, for those more theologically inclined, the influence of the Spirit). It would also reduce the parables to historical artifact rather than allow them to be a living text. For example, to note that the Greek word for “pearl” is margarita and then to read the Pearl of Great Price as a warning to those whose “pearl” is alcohol, or power, money, beauty, fame, and so forth, and then to realize the danger of some ultimate concerns is not, I think, what first-century Jews heard, but that is a splendid warning. To read the Prodigal as about unconditional love is exactly what some of my students at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison find salvific, and I would not take that reading from them, even if I do not think it is the message first-century Jews would have seen. Thus I would not push such readings to the margins. Not all good interpretations over the centuries are grounded in the history of Jesus himself. But when modern readings are based on a false understanding of early Judaism, as many of them are, then the interpretation goes astray.
Professor Cunningham correctly notes that “perhaps the congregation that Sunday needs to be comforted, not afflicted.” Exactly so. And sometimes a contemporary reading of the parables would do this. But perhaps for that morning, when comfort is needed, a parable would not be the best text on which to base the homily. The church will also have an Old Testament reading, a psalm, and an epistolary reading in the lectionary; it will have the proclamation of reconciliation; it will have the blessing on the community. Not all texts fit our purposes, nor is one reading the summation of the Mass, just as the parables are but one part of the message of the Christ of faith.
