The parables of Jesus have always exercised a magnetic attraction in popular as well as scholarly engagement with the gospels. Like few other biblical or early Christian texts, they are accessible to all without ever being either trivial or lacking in depth and complexity. Their contemporary appeal and power to engage remain proverbial: at the time of this writing, the cover of the Economist promises “The Parable of the Hoverboard.”Footnote ¹ Preachers like them because they capture their audience's visual imagination and locate their audience's needs and desires tangibly in relation to the core message of Jesus. Biblical scholars, too, have long found them suited to sustaining a self-perpetuating industry of book production (at least 1,100 volumes at last count, judging from my brief recent catalogue search at one of America's leading theological libraries).

One might conclude, therefore, that the parables are hardly promising territory for a genuinely fresh intellectual contribution to the study of the New Testament. But that could be a mistake.

One of the more encouraging and unexpected stimuli of New Testament scholarship over the past century or so has been the reemergence of serious (nonpolemical) Jewish interest in Jesus of Nazareth—in some respects for the first time since late antiquity. Such twentieth-century Jewish interest took a variety of quite different forms and focused on a range of topics, including occasionally the subject of the parables—in the work of David Flusser, Joseph Klausner, Jakob Petuchowski, and David Stern, for example. One of the greatest benefits such writers have brought to New Testament critical scholarship is the ability to engage the texts genuinely and constructively without being restrained in their interpretative register by inherited default conventions of theology and piety—or for that matter of the habituated critical prejudice of professional guilds.

Among the more engaging writers in this area over the last three decades has been Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish professor of both Jewish and New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University. Having already published books in the areas of feminist interpretation and the Jewish setting of Jesus and the New Testament, she has now provided us with a highly engaging treatment of Jesus' parables as provocative “short stories.”

The burden of her book is in a sense a familiar one: to peel away the varnish of hermeneutical habit in conventional biblical scholarship and piety on the parables, in order to let them speak in a fresh and unfamiliar voice attuned more to a first-century Palestinian Jewish setting. Although she well understands and sympathizes with the desire for pastoral application and interpretation for today, she rightly worries about the long history of platitudinous moralizing and lazy allegorizing to which these pithy stories have conventionally been subjected in scholarship and the church. Such domestication, she believes, inevitably lacks any sense of what made these stories so arrestingly effective and captivating for their first audiences.

Levine believes that the ecclesial and scholarly tendency to accommodate the parables too swiftly to the service of familiar Christian tropes has the effect of occluding and erasing the continuing freshness of their message, taking them instead as a reassuring sop to existing presuppositions of culture, probity, or piety. So we should beware of facile appropriations of the Prodigal Son (so-called! Luke 15:11–32) for a call to repentance and forgiveness of sin and so forth.

She also warns repeatedly—and in my view rightly—of the continuing appropriation of many of these parables in the service of deeply ingrained and perhaps rarely recognized anti-Jewish prejudice. Egregious examples include the priest and the Levite who pass by on the other side before the Good Samaritan's arrival (Luke 10), and who have frequently been pressed into the service of outrageous extrapolations about “Jews,” “ritual law,” or the Old Testament. Similarly, in stories like the Lost Coin (Luke 15:8–10) or the Widow and the Judge (Luke 18:1–8), contemporary preachers in favor of women's rights like to see Jesus' female protagonists showing off an enlightened and progressive Savior in supposed contrast to a backward Judaism mired in misogyny.

In order to keep the analysis within manageable boundaries, Levine's book concentrates on a selection of the most significant and best-known of the parables. In addition to those already noted, its nine chapters cover the kingdom of heaven compared to yeast (Matt 13:33), the Pearl of Great Price (Matt 13:45–46) and the Mustard Seed (Mark 4:30–32 and parallels), the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9–14), the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1–16), the Widow and the Judge (Luke 18:1–8), and the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). Each exposition is prefaced by the author's own lively and informal translation.

She concludes that Jesus teaches parables as “a controversial rabbi” from a treasury of “pearls of Jewish wisdom.” They offer an abiding invitation to living that provokes, challenges, and inspires while also evoking resistance and occasioning pause for thought in unexpected twists and disturbing turns. Parables do not simply comfort but convict. This is so for Christian and non-Christian readers alike—and Levine, as a Jewish reader of the New Testament, affirms that the parables “are at the heart of [her] own Judaism” (282).

Levine's book is clearly intended for a much broader audience than just fellow scholars. It is all the better for that, and admirably succinct and readable in achieving that aim. Yet it also takes its place within a history of scholarly parable interpretation, which it often references (albeit eclectically and at times somewhat snipingly).

For all the ongoing debate about their meaning (including, for example, their understanding of the kingdom of God, whether seen as future or timeless), these “short stories” are clearly and uniquely at the heart of Jesus' teaching. But for much of the last century's parables research, this also meant that they were in some sense altogether unique and sui generis. Because of that assumption, the historical “context” within which they were studied often stuck to the literary genesis of the gospels themselves. Parables were therefore subjected to minute form-critical and exegetical scrutiny, but examined above all intratextually or mainly in relation to other gospel parables—whether these were deemed to be from the lips of Jesus or subject to significant compositional input on the part of the Evangelists. Despite a stated interest in the historical origin and setting of these stories, such interpretation often remained markedly untroubled by the need for a detailed understanding of the parables in their Jewish context. Assumptions about the distinctiveness of Jesus at times serviced a feedback loop suggesting that we are most in touch with his authentic “historical” parables at the points of his greatest divergence from contemporary Jewish life and faith (the so-called criterion of dissimilarity, now widely discredited as a useful historical tool).

Levine does not do much of this conventional literary-critical spadework—indeed her inventory listed above indicates that her parables range freely across the Synoptic Gospels, without (for example) privileging Mark as the earliest gospel. She spends very little time, and then only in passing, on questions of authenticity, theories of gospel origins, or for that matter on the Evangelists' distinctive redactional slants in their handling of the parables. Once again it seems to me that this should be seen as a strength in her treatment of the parables.

Once upon a time this might have been regarded as problematic, and perhaps would still raise eyebrows among some scholars of conventional interest in the Synoptic problem or for that matter in old-school quests for the so-called historical Jesus. But recent openings to reader-oriented and big-picture contextual study of Jesus and the parables have certainly changed that picture and encouraged fresh approaches. So, for example, some scholars had long drawn attention to the illuminating parallels found in the parables of rabbinic midrash, but the connections have come to be much more fully appreciated since the later twentieth century (cf., for example, David Stern, Clemens Thoma, and Bradley H. Young). Levine builds on the work of these predecessors, although without citing any of them explicitly.

Graduate students of the New Testament know the history of parables research to be heavily scaffolded with conflicting literary-, source-, redaction-, and form-critical theories, not to mention with fundamentally contradictory ideas about the nature of the “historical” Jesus ranging from an eschatological prophet to a timeless egalitarian sage. Newcomers often find access to this balkanized critical discussion obscured behind impossibly high and ever-growing barricades of published scholarship.

Levine's project operates in a markedly different, more winsomely open register. A small handful of key scholars are engaged and acknowledged in the endnotes, but the discussion stays refreshingly clear of the tangle of scholarly contention and hairsplitting. (On the other hand, those who do desire to pursue further study may be a little hampered by the absence of a bibliography or list of suggested reading.)

At the primary level of engagement this permits the emergence of a challenging yet attractive figure of Jesus, set within a somewhat protorabbinic Jewish-Palestinian context. Levine evidently likes the Evangelists less: Luke, for example, comes in for repeated disapproval for misrepresenting what Jesus meant. She also has little time for patristic readers of the parables—somewhat caricatured here by means of the familiar trope of Augustine's allegories, which, Philo of Alexandria's allegorical penchant apparently notwithstanding, “would have mystified a first-century Jewish audience” (69).

Where the ancient and medieval church may often have obfuscated by allegory, contemporary scholarship typically still does so by means of sociology—sometimes, even to this day, to the tune of subtly anti-Semitic mood music. Levine is at her best in exposing the intellectually lazy commonplaces of much New Testament parables scholarship and demonstrating the power of the down-to-earth appeal of their Jewish register, often typically lost under thick layers of interpretative convention.

On the one hand, this is therefore a clear and altogether laudable attempt to understand the power of the parables in the light of their contextual meaning to the first Jewish audiences, while accepting at least in principle the possible validity of other (e.g., ancient and modern) readings. But some hermeneutical ambiguities remain. Are contemporizing readings “all to the good” (1), so that “interpretation should not be limited to this historical context” (17)? Or is the bottom line still that valid understanding remains strictly a function of that history, so that “if we get the context wrong, we'll get Jesus wrong” (8–9)? I wonder in that respect if this emphatically first-century Jewish reading of the parables, for all its obvious historical and homiletical strength, with which I resonate warmly, nevertheless implicitly relegates all contemporizing readings to the margins of secondary significance. To that extent it may not finally escape twentieth-century biblical criticism's gatekeeping temptation to impose historicist strictures on the meaning of biblical texts.

For a long time the almost unanimous consensus of (usually Protestant) critical New Testament scholarship since the Enlightenment was that the “real” and “original” meaning of the parables had suffered an unacceptable occlusion under the churchmen's heavy hand of spiritualizing and allegorizing interpretation. The classic illustration of such error was invariably Augustine's interpretation of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37), in which the wounded man represented Adam, Jerusalem his lost heavenly home from which he has fallen, the bandits the onslaught of Satan, the priest and the Levite the ineffectual dispensation of Old Testament law and ritual, the Good Samaritan Christ himself who binds up our wounds, and the innkeeper Saint Paul, guardian of the church. But historical criticism was united in its sense that the parables were in fact not to be read allegorically or “spiritually” at all—a view represented in most of the leading scholars from Adolf Jülicher (1857–1938) to C. H. Dodd (1884–1973) to Joachim Jeremias (1900–1979) and beyond.

An unspoken aversion to multiple meanings remains widespread in contemporary scholarship. It seems palpable in Levine's book too—and to be sure, my own training and formation make me sympathetic to that sentiment. At the same time, closer attention to questions of multivalent literary design and function, aesthetic and rhetorical appeal, have opened a greater sensitivity to issues of ancient and modern reader reception. Under this heading many new questions have come to be debated, and there is arguably considerable scope for fresh insights and approaches—not instead of attending to the historical setting, but alongside it.

Contrary to modern biblical scholarship's conventional assumption, Augustine was in fact alert to both of those perspectives, and in this respect by no means untypical of other ancient readers of the parables. Like him they allegorized, but also like him they typically acknowledged the primacy of the “literal sense” that always remained. In fact, of course, ancient sentiment (Jewish as well as Greco-Roman) widely agreed that any religious or mythological text worth taking seriously had to be seen to yield meaning at more than one level, and should be expected to do so allegorically. Famously this applies to Homer, the bible of the Greeks that generated rich textual, pedagogical, and commentary traditions of its own; but among both Jews and Christians in Alexandria and elsewhere it also applied routinely to the interpretation of the Pentateuch.

Such allegorical or “spiritual” interpretation, moreover, however alien it may seem to many of us (I certainly include myself), in fact served not uncommonly to safeguard rather than to subvert the power of the text's claim on the reader. In relation to our passage from Luke 10, for example, the suggestion has been made that the homiletical point of patristic allegory was often to resist the Christian audiences' preference for a facile moralizing identification with the Good Samaritan without first acknowledging Christ's rescue from their oppression and sin.Footnote ² This is not of course to deny or downplay the problematic aspects of these patristic readings, but simply to say that their outright dismissal in post-eighteenth-century biblical scholarship may be no less hackneyed and lacking in nuance than what came to replace them.

Biblical scholarship in the maturing twenty-first century seems a little more willing to recognize that Jesus' parables can and do serve as allegories, were in some cases intended to do so from the start, and even at their point of origin drew in some cases on existing allegorical parables. The best-known example of this may be the story of the Vineyard's Wicked Tenants (Mark 12:1–9 and parallels), to which Levine devotes only the most fleeting of acknowledgments (280–81). Even Mark as the earliest Evangelist already makes clear that the words have an intentionally allegorical sting—not, to be sure, against Israel or Judaism but against the high priestly aristocracy and their control of Jerusalem and the Temple (12:12; cf. 11:27). Drawing on the same precedent in Isaiah 5, different versions of such a vineyard allegory circulated quite widely in late Second Temple Judaism, including notably at Qumran (4Q500) as well as among the rabbis (e.g., Tosefta Sukkah 3:15 and Me῾ilah 1:16; also the Targum to Isaiah 5 as well as later midrashic parables like Pesiqta de Rab Kahana 3:9; 16:9).

Luke, too, is reprimanded more than once for misleadingly “allegorizing” the Parables of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, and Lost Son (e.g., 27, 41). It seems less clear to me that “allegory” quite captures what the Evangelist does here—but if it did, would he not be in good company with other contemporary accounts of the Vineyard or for that matter with Jesus' Parable of the Sower, none of which seem to me self-evidently to substantiate the assumption that allegory is inherently anti-Jewish (22 and passim)? Of course inattention to the literal sense can be and often has been exactly that, including in relation to these parables. But that is the fault of the allegorist in question, not of allegory as such.

The Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:3–20; Matt 13:3–23) is evidently programmatic for both Mark's and Matthew's parable collections, and heavily redacted by them both. This text finds no treatment here—and yet it seems worth asking whether we are really required to deem Mark's very early symbolic interpretation to be intrinsically misguided and illegitimate. Might both these Evangelists raise questions about any easy assurance that “a parable requires no external key to explain what its elements mean; an allegory does” (7)?

Further, both the Sower and the Vineyard are among a small number of parables that have always seemed to raise interpretative (not necessarily allegorical) questions pertaining to Jesus' messianic claim. This is a matter of interest to their historical setting and earliest reception: of course one would not expect Levine as a Jewish expositor to find such connections persuasive as truth claims. But in relation to the Vineyard parable in particular, if indeed it belongs to some (perhaps late) stage of the ministry of Jesus, it seems worth asking whether such a messianic intention may not have been inferred in the Jesus movement from the outset.

Such a self-referential dimension is admittedly more obvious for such Johannine “parables” as the Good Shepherd or the Vine. Yet questions arise too about the identity of the “king” of the Matthean kingdom language, about his “son” who is not only the heir and the bridegroom in the coming wedding banquet (e.g., Matt 18:23; 22:2–14), but who then turns up as the coming “king” himself (25:34, 40). Some would argue for a recurrent allegorical influence of the Song of Songs on certain parables like the Fig Tree or the Wise and Foolish Virgins, with potentially Christological implications (Mark 13:28–29; Matt 25:1–13; cf. Luke 12:35–40).Footnote ³ Levine discounts any Christological reading of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (279–80)—and of course rabbinic midrash finds the allegorical Bridegroom of the Song to be emphatically the God of the Exodus. But it seems right to wonder if in one or two cases the “surplus of meaning” (1) in Jesus' parables does not in fact raise self-referential questions for the speaker.

Scholars are paid in part to pick nits, and one could merrily while away the time with other nit-picking questions: is it not the case that Zacchaeus, a Hellenized form of Zakkai, abbreviates the name Zechariah, that is, “the Lord has remembered” (rather than “Mr. Righteous,” 32)? How confident can we be that no first-century audience could have heard in the prodigal's return any hint of what the rabbis called teshuvah, “repentance”? For all the exquisitely lampooned scholarly tomfoolery and eisegesis in the case of the Good Samaritan, can we categorically rule out even the possibility (93) that a pre-rabbinic Jewish audience might have imagined the priest and Levite to have been justified in their own minds by dubious but convenient purity worries? (Exceptions to a blanket met mitzvah obligation to bury were in some cases still subject to debate in the first century—for example, in the case of Nazirites.) And am I wrong to wonder if Osama bin Laden is really a serviceable analogue for the first-century status of the Samaritan (95)?

It is the mark of a rich and rewarding read that the respondent comes to the end of his assignment feeling there would be so much more to discuss. Levine's book is both accessible and challenging, humorous and surprising, full of contemporary allusions to her native culture, and rich in Jewish wisdom eisegesis, not unlike the parables themselves!