I came across this quote a while ago and I’ve been thinking about it lately. It’s from MacCulloch’s magisterial history of Christianity.
First, it’s not a claim I’ve heard before. I have heard that parables do appear in early rabbinic literature, but this says that parables appeared in the Gospels as a literary form before they started to show up in other writings. Do any of you happen to know if that’s true?
If it is true, it’s a reminder that the Church and rabbinical Judaism both developed in parallel, not sequentially. There was a great deal of common use of new forms in the early history of both. Rather than seeing them as rivals (as you might if you read the texts uncritically) they need to be seen as a different forms of the descendants of Abraham struggling to understand what God was doing in the world during the height of Roman Empire in the West. Studying the writings of the rabbi’s can give us as Christians a deeper understanding of how people were thinking, and that helps us get behind the texts in a way that makes their nuance more apparent.
In John Dominic Crossan’s book, “The Power of Parable”, he gives persuasive argument that the books of Ruth, Jonah and Job are book length parables that challenge Biblical laws. i.e. Maobites are so terrible they can never, ever, be part of the “people of God”, the Jews. Ruth was a Moabite and the great grandmother of King David. The books were written about 600 BC.
Crossan is always an interesting read. Tom Lippart
Thanks. I’ve heard Ruth and Jonah described that way. Job is to my mind something different. I wonder where or when a tale or fable departs from being a parable.
Amy Jill-Levine in THE MISUNDERSTOOD JEW, p 41 describes some OT parables, saying “The rabbinic tradition is replete with parables.”