What Are They Saying about the Parables?: Jewish Contexts (Chapter 5, Part 7): Reading Jesus’ Parables in their Jewish Contexts (Oldenhage and F. Stern)

 

What Are They Saying About the Parables? 

Second revised edition with three additional chapters and new content in every chapter

Reading Jesus’ Parables in their Jewish Contexts 

One of the most serious critiques of New Testament scholarship in general and parable studies in particular concerns the implicit and even explicit anti-Jewish interpretations that denigrate Judaism in order to contrast and elevate the “religion” of Jesus. Tania Oldenhage, for example, illustrates the existence of this problem in such works as Joachim Jeremias’s influential The Parables of Jesus, following on the earlier critiques of Jeremias and others by E. P. Sanders in his Jesus and Judaism. Thus a major emphasis in recent parable scholarship, similar to recent historical Jesus scholarship, is to situate Jesus and his parables firmly—and more correctly—within Judaism. 

Frank Stern’s A Rabbi Looks at Jesus’ Parables attempts “to strip away twenty-one centuries of interpretation and analysis to discover how listeners in Jesus’ audiences might have understood his stories.” Stern argues that Jesus’ Jewishness is essential to his life and teachings, and interpreters must attempt to “clear” the parables of centuries of Christian interpretations and present them in their first-century Jewish context (1). 

In Stern’s view, Jesus taught in parables because his teachings sometimes contained dangerous secrets (3). For example, the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds in its current context (Matt 13:24–30, 36–43) contains a “confusion of metaphors”: The righteous ones are called the “good seed,” and the “sons of the evil one” are the weeds in the interpretation given in verse 38, so the better parallel would be for the righteous ones to be symbolized by the wheat, not the seeds (43). Many of the parable’s ideas are found in earlier Jewish traditions, such as a harvest symbolizing the Last Judgment (e.g., Hosea 6:11), but two aspects stand out as unique: Jesus defines the righteous as those who accept his teachings (access to God was possible only through Jesus, 275) and proclaims the urgent message that “the conflagration was imminent,” so imminent, in fact, that the future was already present, the kingdom of heaven had begun in Jesus’ ministry (44). Instead of a standard Jewish tradition of the conflagration coming first “to punish the wicked and rescue the righteous,” Jesus was convinced that the “biblical period” had come to an end with John the Baptist and a new era of the kingdom of God had begun. In this intermediary period between the inauguration of God’s reign and the imminent conflagration, sinners and believers lived in the same world, just as the wheat and the weeds existed in the same field until the (final) harvest (46–47). A stunning aspect of this message is that Jesus believed that he was in charge of the angels who would punish the wicked and that the harvest would come at his command, an aspect that would explain why his teachings generated opposition among his contemporaries (49). 

Stern's book notes how “the Jewish and Christian communities drifted apart,” and Stern hopes his book will bridge that gap by teaching Jews more about the New Testament and Christians about their Jewish roots (278–80).

Next up: Two important books by Amy-Jill Levine: The Misunderstood Jew (on the historical Jesus) and Short Stories by Jesus (on the parables).