![]() A good parable, like a good joke, needs no interpretation Jesus as master storyteller would not have explained his tales. Critical scholarship has regularly found the stories to be as authentic as anything in the Gospels but has attributed their concluding words of explanation to the early Christian tradition or the Gospel writers themselves. The history of the interpretation of Jesus’s parables has been checkered. Along with their contexts in the Gospels, this quality reveals that they are fictional works designed to disclose spiritual truths. At least one element in most parables, however, pushes the boundaries of plausibility. It presents a series of events involving a small number of characters (people, animals, plants, even inanimate objects), most of which seemed realistic in Jesus’s world. With or without an explicit comparison, it highlights aspects of the kingdom of God. A concise definition of a parable is that it is a short, metaphorical narrative. ![]() The Greek word parabolē, like the Hebrew mãshãl that it translates, was used for a wide variety of forms of figurative speech. We have come to recognize them more by their form than by any single word that introduces them. Only about half of the stories in the New Testament Gospels typically termed “parables” have that label attached to them in the text. Parables tended to polarize crowds, drawing some people closer to Jesus while driving others away. At times, they seem to conceal truth at least as much as they reveal it (Mark 4:11–12). It is often hard to re-create the trauma that some of Jesus’s stories would have caused his original audiences. Overfamiliarity, however, can breed misunderstanding. Characters like the prodigal son, good Samaritan, or Pharisee and tax collector have become well-known even outside the church. The parables of Jesus have captivated readers for nearly 2,000 years.
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