Two more sections of the book completed!

Work on the reception history of the parables book has been going very well. Today I completed two sections, both of which are about modern New Testament scholars. I had been working on them for a few days but wrapped them both up tonight. They are:

Adolf Jülicher (in Chapter 4): This was an easy choice. Modern scholarly research on the parables essentially began with Jülicher’s first edition of Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, the most famous and influential scholarly book on the parables ever written. At the very least, this book set the scholarly agenda for a very, very long time.

David Flusser (Chapter 5): This choice is not as obvious. Flusser was professor of early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His work, including a book on Jesus originally published in 1968, played a role in the growing recognition within modern scholarship that Jesus and his parables should be interpreted in the context of first-century Judaism. Flusser's work on the parables was also significant for interpretations of Jesus' parables in light of the rabbinic meshalim as well as Greek fables (e.g., his Die rabbinischen Gleichnisse und der Gleichniserzähler Jesus).

I included sections about both scholars in my What Are They Saying about the Parables? book (2000), which aided the writing of these two sections for the new book. The research for this book, however, also involved quite a bit of reading of their works that are as of yet untranslated into English, which slowed things down a bit (Die Arbeit ging langsam).

The third New Testament scholar I am including in the book is Elsa Tamez (also in Chapter 5), but I wrote that section in mid-December.

Tomorrow I will begin a series of posts on John Calvin's interpretations of the parables, taken primarily from his commentary, A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark, & Luke.