The Parables Then and Now

The teachings of Jesus are central to the ethics, beliefs, and ethos of Christianity, past and present, and the parables of Jesus--his preferred mode of teaching--are considered the bedrock of the Christian tradition. Past scholarship excavated the parables to reconstruct the teachings of the historical Jesus within his ancient Jewish context, often inadvertently (or worse, intentionally) denigrating Judaism in efforts to highlight the "uniqueness" of Jesus’s teaching. More recent scholarship has turned attention to situating the parables in their larger Greco-Roman context; others have begun to attend to the reception of the parables in the verbal and visual traditions of the Christian movement. Especially fruitful are insights gleaned from African American readings of the parables.

This collection seeks to build on this recent work, highlighting the continuity of Jesus’s teachings within both the larger Greco-Roman context of the first-century world, as well as his Jewish context (which, after all, is part of that larger Greco-Roman context). The contributors explore certain "hot topic" issues in parable studies, such as: what is the relationship between parables and ancient fables? Does the Gospel of John contain parabolic teaching material from Jesus? How do we explore distinctive features of Jesus’s teaching without inadvertently (or worse, intentionally) denigrating his originating Jewish context? How does the reception history of the parables shape our understanding of their meaning(s)? How best to incorporate Jesus’s teachings in the parables in the life of contemporary Christian communities?