"The Work of Christmas," by Howard Thurman (reprise)

  

Another year; another opportunity to rededicate ourselves to this message from Dr. Thurman:

"The Work of Christmas," by Howard Thurman 

Howard Thurman’s poem, “The Work of Christmas” is my favorite Christmas poem, and I post it every year. It provides a vision of a society informed by Jesus’s parable of the Sheep and Goats in the Gospel of Matthew and the biblical principle of hospitality: 

When the song of the angels is stilled, 

When the star in the sky is gone, 

When the kings and the princes are home, 

When the shepherds are back with their flock, 

The work of Christmas begins: 

To find the lost, 

To heal the broken, 

To feed the hungry, 

To release the prisoner, 

To rebuild the nations, 

To bring peace among brothers, 

To make music in the heart. 

Thurman reminds us of how Jesus wants us to respond to our fellow human beings in ways that God demands and in ways that echo, as Jesus of Nazareth declared in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, how God loves and treats us. 

May we truly make "music in the heart" for others and therefore ourselves in 2025.

Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans

 

Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community:
From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans.

Just arrived!: My new book, Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans.

From the Paulist website:

David Gowler integrates parable scholarship with extensive research on Howard Thurman's life and writings to explore how Thurman's insights about the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan parables provide a way forward in our quest for community. An online teacher's guide further explores how parables and visual art can heighten spiritual consciousness, demand an ethical response, and create and deepen community.

Endorsements

"Gowler's scholarship prepares us to enter Jesus's parables with greater vision and understanding. Accompanied by Thurman's insights and identification with Jesus as one of the disinherited, the parables' transformative significance confronts every reader."
—Luther E. Smith, Jr., PhD, author, Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet

"David Gowler's beautiful book Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community offers helpful insights into Thurman's wisdom and how we can apply it to our own broken lives and world. A book well worth studying."
—Rev. John Dear, author of The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence, and director of BeatitudesCenter.org

"David B. Gowler, one of our finest students of the parables, uses Thurman's sermons on the parables as portals to the understanding of communal and collective interaction and the deep-lying layers of personal spiritual truths."
—Peter Eisenstadt, author of Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman, and affiliate professor of history, Clemson University

The focus of the book is about an important contribution Thurman can make in our current social and political situation. The book can be found here.

Woman and/in Parables (1): The Lost Coin book (Beavis, Matthews, Shelley, and Scheele)

 

More excerpts from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded edition of What are They Saying about the Parables? 

This post begins a series about studies that were added in the second edition of WATSA Parables? (for earlier contributions and more details about these new sections, see the book). 

This post examines three contributions in a collection of essays of feminist interpretations of parables about women, women’s work, and female imagery edited by Mary Ann Beavis, The Lost Coin.

The Lost Coin makes a significant contribution to understanding the roles women play in Jesus’ parables. For example, the chapter on the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:2–5) features three interpretations, one each by Mary W. Matthews, Carter Shelley, and Barbara Scheele (46–70). 

Matthews argues that the unrighteous, corrupt, shameless, and unjust judge does not symbolize God; instead he represents “structural injustice,” and the widow represents “Everychristian,” the fact that every Christian is called to be persistent, to keep “badgering” unjust authority—“to fight injustice to the best of your ability, no matter how overmatched you are”—until it relents (53). 

Shelley uses a feminist hermeneutic that deconstructs patriarchal, androcentric, and absolutist readings of the parable and replaces them with a reading of resistance like one she envisions Jesus performing. A resistant reader (1) names the text’s sexist subtext (the poor judge is nagged by a “harridan”) and instead envisions the widow as a person in need; (2) exposes the contradictions in the patriarchal reading (e.g. the idea that that poor judge has to capitulate to this nagging, powerful woman is replaced by the idea that the widow is powerless and deserves sympathy and support); (3) undermines the text’s pretensions to authority (e.g., the patriarchal society of men ruling over women is replaced by a world where God created men and women as equals and are in caring relationships with God and others); and (4) recognizes the text’s fake claim to universality (e.g., instead of men being created by God as superior to women, God is the champion of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien; 56–57). In this reading, the parable teaches Jesus’ followers to pray for wisdom, guidance, and persistence, and to act by speaking and persisting for the cause of justice for all human beings, especially the powerless and the voiceless (61). 

Scheele reads the parable in the context of her attempts to obtain proper medical and educational care for her disabled brother, only to be defeated time and time again by those in “authority,” lawyers and caseworkers. The woman in this parable and the women in a scripture retreat group inspired her to bypass the caseworkers and go directly to specialists. She eventually (with the help of many others) was able to secure a treatment plan that the caseworkers begrudgingly and complainingly—like the judge in the parable—put into place (66–67). Thus, for Scheele, the God figure in this parable is not the judge; it is the widow, the one who seeks justice: “God, imaged as the female figure of Holy Wisdom, both prays and actively searches for people who will be faithful to the scriptural codes of justice” (68).

Next up: Elsa Tamez.

Mbengu Nyiawung and Masilamani Gnanavaram on the Good Samaritan Parable

More excerpts from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded edition of What are They Saying about the Parables? 

This post is about the contributions to our understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan from Mbengu Nyiawung and Masilamani Gnanavaram. 

Mbengu Nyiawung builds upon Oakman’s arguments (see the previous post) about the “foolish Samaritan” by describing him as a risk-taking “Good Sama” who serves as a paradigm for socio-economic development in Africa. After placing the parable into its first-century Mediterranean perspective, Nyiawung delineates the avoidance of risk-taking by the priest and Levite in contrast to the “altruistic” risk-taking of the Samaritan in (a) time, (b) resources, (c) identity, (d) life, and (e) religious identity. Nyiawung then compares the robbed man to socio-economic development in contemporary Africa, whose “poverty, misery, and pain” to “external robbers” (“colonizers, superpowers, and other hostile powers,” 277) and “internal robbers” (e.g., some corrupt African elite). He concludes that the solution is not “sympathizers” but “doers”: African people who are proactive, altruistic, compassionate, and risk-taking (“Good Samas”; 280–87), people who ask, “To whom am I a neighbour?” (281–82). 

The parable of the Good Samaritan creates a reversal of expectations. In a similar way, once we read parables with (acquired) peasant eyes and hear them with peasant ears, our Western, post-enlightenment interpretations of them are often reversed. Thus it is no surprise that such “peasant readings” cohere with many biblical interpretations from a liberation perspective, as Masilamani Gnanavaram’s contextual interpretation of the Good Samaritan in light of “Dalit theology” in India illustrates. 

Gnanavaram reads the parable through the “hermeneutical key” that God is the God of the oppressed and has a preferential option for the poor (59). Traditional historical-critical methods are inadequate, and the common Western interpretations that limit the message of the Good Samaritan to “love your neighbor” in the contexts of charity and philanthropy are misreadings of the parable. Especially in light of the inequitable distribution of natural resources, economic wealth, and opportunities, interpreters have to recognize the socio-cultural aspects inherent in the parable: The Good Samaritan should be read as a challenge to existing systems of domination and oppression, including the repentance of the oppressors, and as a model for identifying with the oppressed, liberating compassion and life-giving actions, and the need for the marginalized and oppressed to struggle together for liberation (80–82).

Sources:

Mbengu D. Nyiawung, “In Search of a Samaritan: The Risk-Taking Motif in Luke 10:30–35 as a Paradigm for African Socio-Economic Development,” Neotestamentica 52:2 (2018): 267–87. The article uses the “African Biblical Interpretation” method to initiate dialogues “between the text, the original audience and the original context” and “the context of the present-day audience” (268). 

Masilamani Gnanavaram, “‘Dalit Theology’ and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, JSNT 50 (1993): 59–83.

Monastery of Kaisariani (near Athens): Rich Fool fresco

The Rich Fool Fresco, Monastery of Kaisariani, Katholikon Narthex

The Monastery of Kaisariani, on the western slope of Mt. Hymettos near Athens, includes a Byzantine-era Katholikon (“main church”) built in the late eleventh century. The frescoes in the church and the narthex date from the sixteenth century, although in some ways they continue the iconographic program of the middle Byzantine period, such as portrayal of Christ the Pantocrator (“ruler of all” or “almighty”) in the great dome of the church (Forrest). In other ways, however, they diverge significantly (see below). 

An inscription on the west wall of the narthex states that those frescoes were painted in 1682 by Ioannis Ypatos. The seven parables portrayed in the narthex’s southern vault are the Rich Fool, next to the Rich Man and Lazarus, Sower, and Wicked Husbandmen parables on the west wall and the Prodigal Son, Good Samaritan, and the Pharisee and Tax Collector on the east wall. These parables are crowded into a small space with detailed and often graphic renderings of the events in the parables. The artwork is thus direct with simple but profuse brushstrokes, with the images painted on a black background, which makes the color contrasts and formal tones more striking, even with the simplicity of their composition and forms. Thus these 17th-century murals can be labelled as more “folk art” with an “anti-classical” tendency (Chatzidakis, 18–19). 

The Rich Fool Fresco's context in the Narthex

This fresco of the Rich Fool both reflects and diverges from the observations found in the “Painters Manual” of Dionysius of Fourna about conventional depictions of this parable. The manual cites Luke 12:16 about the land of a rich man producing plentifully and then advises that the illustration should also include the following: “Houses; a man wearing a red robe and a fur hat stands bewildered; before him is a heap of corn, and men pull down and rebuild granaries. He appears again lying on a golden bed, and demons surround him, taking away his soul with tridents.” 

The depiction of the parable in the church’s narthex generally follows that formula, portraying in representation the parable’s plot development: The inscription on the top left of the fresco cites Luke 12:16 about the land (chōra) producing abundantly. The rich man, dressed in red sits at a well-appointed table relaxing, eating, and drinking (12:19). Behind him is a magnificent house; to the left are two workers collecting and displaying part of the abundant crop; at the bottom are three men sawing and working on the wood for his new barns. On the upper right an angel announces the man’s imminent death, holding a scroll that begins with the word “fool” (aphrōn; Luke 12:20). On the bottom right, the fresco depicts the man lying on his bed, and an angel holding down his head and stabbing him to death with a lance. The fresco thus explicitly portrays what the parable foretells—the “fools” death—and viewers are left to wonder: “The things you have prepared, whose will they be?” 

Sources:

Chatzidakis, Theano. The Monastery of Kaisariani. 

Forrest, L. W. The Monastery of Kaisariani: History and Architecture. Phd dissertation, Indiana University, 1991. 

The “Painter’s manual” of Dionysius of Fourna. Translated by Paul Hetherington.

 

Parables and Their Social Contexts: Douglas Oakman and the Good Samaritan Parable

 

More excerpts from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded edition of What are They Saying about the Parables? This one is about Doug Oakman's contributions to our understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Oakman argues that in the face of the exploitative urban elite, the concentration of land holdings in the hands of a few, rising debt, and other destabilizing forces, Jesus responded by calling for a reversal of the centralization of political power and economic goods. In addition, Jesus advocated exchanges built on “general reciprocity”—giving without expecting anything in return (e.g., the remission of debts). Such general reciprocity fosters unity and propitiates potential enemies, but for Jesus it also fosters the reestablishment of kinship among all peoples. Love for enemies is a corollary of this general reciprocity, which profoundly expresses human dependence on God’s graciousness and willingness to provide for material human needs. 

Oakman also explores how the parable of the Good Samaritan epitomizes this love for one’s enemies. Because peasants were compelled to give up a precious amount of their hard-earned sustenance to outsiders, the common orientation of peasants was to distrust strangers—especially those who dealt in commerce. Outsiders were seen as possible threats to their existence or livelihood, and a cultural chasm existed between city dwellers (where landowners tended to live) and peasant villagers. 

The parable presupposes typical peasant valuations of the characters but does not simply identify with their interests. Peasant sympathies, Oakman argues, would have been with the bandits of this parable. Yet Jesus abhors the violence of the bandits while accepting some of the basic goals of banditry—justice and securing subsistence for the poor. In addition, most modern interpreters ignore the indications in the parable that the Samaritan was a trader—a profession despised by peasants. For Jewish peasants, the Samaritan is a cultural enemy (Samaritan), an evil man (a trader), and a fool. The Samaritan was foolish because he treated the injured man graciously as if he were a family member and was naive about the situation at the inn: Because inns were notoriously synonymous with crime and evil deeds, for this gullible Samaritan to trust the injured man to the care of such an evil place—and to give the innkeeper a blank check—was a folly that could prove deadly to the injured person. 

Oakman concludes that Jesus fully expected peasants to laugh all the way through this story. But Jesus compares the enormity of God’s generosity to the actions of a hated foreigner of despised social occupation, and, in fact, God’s mercy even reaches the point of danger and folly. God’s kingdom is found in the most unlikely, even immoral, places. And God, like the Samaritan, is indebted to pay whatever may be required. As Oakman reiterates in another work, the parable subverts traditional village morality and opens new possibilities: general reciprocity as characteristic of the kingdom of God and as a radical protest against the exploitative agrarian situation in early Roman Palestine. 

These arguments can be found in: Douglas E. Oakman, “Was Jesus a Peasant?: Implications for Reading the Samaritan Story (Luke 10:30–35),” BTB 22 (1992): 117–25.

"The Reception History of the Letter of James" in The Oxford Handbook of Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles

Delighted that my chapter, "The Reception History of the Letter of James," was just published in The Oxford Handbook of Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles. Congratulations and thanks to Patrick Gray, the volume's editor.

Parables and Their Social Contexts: "Peasant" Readings/Hearings (Douglas Oakman)

 

More excerpts from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded edition of What are They Saying about the Parables? 

Ancient Economies: 

"Peasant" Readings/Hearings of the Parables 

Douglas Oakman argues that Jesus’ words and actions articulate a coherent response to first-century economic realities. In antiquity, economic exchanges within and between villages were based on reciprocity (exchange by gift or barter). The larger “political economy,” however, was characterized by redistribution—the extraction of a percentage of local production from the powerless to the powerful (e.g., taxes, tithes, or rents). The exploitative political-economic system instituted throughout the Roman Empire, including under the Herods, redistributed wealth from the non-elites to the elites, impoverished the (rural) peasant population, and that heightened tensions between elites and nonelites. Peasants (an apparently anachronistic term that Oakman argues is accurate) provided the labor and generated the wealth on which agrarian societies were based, but because peasants were left struggling to maintain their lives at a subsistence level, they were often forced to curtail consumption or enter into a hopeless, downward spiral of debt. One rationale for this deprivation (besides greed) was that if the vast majority of the agrarian population (i.e., those not in the major cities) were kept struggling to survive, they would not have the strength or resources to mount a revolt against the rulers. Such oppression disturbed the reciprocal economic relations within villages and promoted what Oakman calls a “survivalist mentality” (78–80) because of the narrow margin between subsistence and starvation. 

A peasant’s view of “the good life” revolved around three interrelated values: a reverent attitude toward the land, strenuous agricultural work as good (but commerce as bad), and productive industry as a virtue (whereas elites such as Roman senators would consider such labor shameful). Jesus created his parables within the context of these peasant realities (100–102). Yet Jesus—because he was an artisan (a building laborer who worked with both wood and stone)—also had social contacts and familiarity with the social circumstances of the wealthy. Many parables thus demonstrate detailed knowledge of large estates, behavior of slaves and overseers, and other economic aspects of the elite. 

The parable of the Sower, for example, agrees with the peasant view of the primary producer in an immediate relationship with God. The sower is not negligent, as some modern interpreters suggest; instead God provides the harvest in spite of all the natural, inimical forces that threaten the crop. But through this parable Jesus critiques the peasant values of frugality and strenuous labor by declaring that God will provide the harvest (107–9). The providence of God is also clearly seen in the parable of the Weeds among the Wheat (Matt 13:24–30), which invites nonelites to stop “hoeing” and to wait for the imminent reign of God (129). This advice, once again, undermines the values of Jesus’ peasant audience, which focuses on frugality and hard work. 

In the face of the exploitative urban elite, the concentration of land holdings in the hands of a few, rising debt, and other destabilizing forces, Jesus responded by calling for a reversal of the centralization of political power and economic goods. In addition, Jesus advocated exchanges built on “general reciprocity”—giving without expecting anything in return (e.g., the remission of debts; 168). Such general reciprocity fosters unity and propitiates potential enemies, but for Jesus it also fosters the reestablishment of kinship among all peoples. Love for enemies is a corollary of this general reciprocity, which profoundly expresses human dependence on God’s graciousness and willingness to provide for material human needs.

Next up: Doug Oakman's important and innovative reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Parables and their Social Contexts: John H. Elliott and the "Evil Eye"

    

More from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded version of What are They Saying about the Parables? 

This post talks about one of the many contributions of John (Jack) H. Elliott, who was one of the pioneers of the renaissance of the social-scientific method starting in the late 1970s. 

Elliott’s analysis of the “Evil Eye” in the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard provides a different interpretation from that of William Herzog (see March 25, 2024, post below). Belief in the Evil Eye includes the notion that certain individuals had the power to injure another person just by a glance. Because the foremost malevolent emotion associated with the Evil Eye was envy, Elliott believes that the parable contrasts divine compassion with invidious human comparison: An Evil Eye accusation (20:15) is employed to denounce envy as incompatible with life in the kingdom of heaven (52–53). 

Elliott states that the landowner appropriately contrasts his goodness with the evil of his accusers and deservedly shames them by exposing their “Evil-Eyed envy” (60–61). Such envy manifests a failure to comprehend God’s benefactions, an unwillingness to renounce “business as usual,” and a refusal to rejoice in the blessings of others. Thus, for Elliott, the householder represents God: The story illustrates the unlimited favor of God, condemns Evil Eye envy as incompatible with social life as governed by the rule of God, and affirms Jesus’ solidarity with the poor and undeserving (61–62). 

The analyses by Herzog and Elliott appear incompatible, and Herzog’s interpretation seems closer to demonstrating Jesus’ solidarity with the poor. In my view, however, the differences primarily stem from the ideological perspective taken on a social-scientific level: Elliott’s analysis is closer to an “emic” perspective—an interpretation that centers more on the viewpoint, categories of thought, and explanations of the group being studied. Herzog’s interpretation, on the other hand, even though it evaluates the first-century social contexts, comes from a more “etic” perspective—the perspective and classifying systems of an external investigator. 

Elliott focuses on the pervasive notion of the Evil Eye and its implications for the story, especially in its Matthean context (i.e., he follows Matthew’s interpretation of the parable). Herzog, on the other hand, openly declares his etic agenda. He believes that it is important to minimize interpreters’ anachronizing tendencies, but it is also crucial to acknowledge that every interpretation “modernizes Jesus.” Such modernizing is not only unavoidable but is necessary to make Jesus’ teachings understandable and relevant to modern persons. 

Thus Herzog, in contrast, uses Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” to assert that the “social construction of reality” of peasants is dependent on the elites in their society. In other words, peasants internalize the world as understood by their oppressors because the elite deposit their worldview in the peasants’ minds and hearts (e.g., through dominant language patterns). It takes a new vocabulary and “outside teachers” for peasants to realize their situation and to facilitate building a new social construction of reality (19–21). For Herzog, Jesus served as this type of “outside facilitator” because his parables were designed to stimulate social analysis and to expose the contradictions between the actual situation of their hearers and the Torah of God’s justice (28).

Parables and their Social Contexts:: Ernest van Eck

   

More from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded version of What are They Saying about the Parables? 

This post talks about some of the contributions of Ernest van Eck who interprets the parables of Jesus as the “stories of a social prophet.” 

Van Eck's methodological approach has three foundational principles. First, parables should not be interpreted in their current literary contexts but “within the political, economic, religious, and sociocultural context of the historical Jesus.” Second, interpreters should use the tools of social-scientific criticism to try to avoid anachronistic interpretations of the “social realia” found in parables. Third, whenever possible, ancient papyri should be used to identify possible social realities and practices assumed by parables (19). 

Van Eck then explores the parables of the: Sower (Mark 4:3b–8), Mustard Seed (Q 13:18–19), Feast (Luke 14:16b–23), Lost Sheep (Luke 15:4–6), Vineyard Laborers (Matt 20:1–15), Unmerciful Servant (Matt 18:23–33), Tenants (Gospel of Thomas 65), Merchant (Matt 13:45–46), Friend at Midnight (Luke 11:5–8), Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–26), and Minas (Luke 19:12b–24, 27). He follows the same structure in each analysis: (1) the parable’s history of interpretation; (2) the parable’s “integrity and authenticity” with the aim of arriving as closely as possible to the “earliest layer of the Jesus tradition”; (3) the cultural scripts that help modern interpreters read the parable in its first-century social context; (4) the resulting interpretation of the parable; and (5) a decision on whether the parable stems from the historical Jesus. The concluding chapter argues that Jesus’ parables are “symbols of social transformation.” 

In my view, social-scientific approaches to the parables can help modern interpreters identify and avoid anachronistic, ethnocentric, and domesticating interpretations. Jesus, for example, was an impoverished first-century Jewish artisan who was a member of a politically, militarily, and economically oppressed minority and who spoke prophetic words of judgment against the oppressors of his people. His parables and other teachings focus extensively on issues of money and power, including condemnations of the wealthy elite because of their oppression of the poor. 

Such socio-economic contexts thus are essential for understanding numerous aspects of the parables of Jesus, but they are not the only contexts that deserve exploration. Van Eck’s conclusions about the parable of the Sower, for instance, ignore the fact that sowing was a standard analogy for instruction. Instead, van Eck focuses on what he believes is “behind the parable,” the exploitation of “peasant farmers,” which results in some unlikely allegorical/metaphorical interpretations: For example, the seed that falls on the road symbolizes “tax, tribute, and rents”; the road designates exploitation since roads assisted the elite in siphoning wealth from peasant farmers; and, since birds (especially the eagle) symbolize the Roman Empire or imperial ideology, the seed eaten by birds symbolizes that part of the harvest “devoured by the elite.” The point of the parable, van Eck argues, is that in the kingdom of God, the bountiful harvest should be shared with everyone, and, if that is done, everyone will have enough (80–102). In the end, such extensive allegorical reinterpretation serves as a warning about these conclusions. Van Eck correctly argues that modern readers must “fill in the gaps” of social facets and dynamics that an ancient audience would have understood, but those unexpressed elements also include literary-rhetorical gaps that engage hearers/readers and must be “filled in.” Van Eck does not ignore the rhetorical effect of the parables (e.g., 41) but sometimes underestimates its importance (e.g., 64, note 47), in my view.

Parables and their Social Contexts: John Kloppenborg

   

More from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded version of What are They Saying about the Parables? 

This post talks about some of the contributions of John Kloppenborg.

Kloppenborg’s The Tenants in the Vineyard provides a comprehensive approach that includes evaluating the Tenants parable more fully in its historical context through the extensive use of ancient papyri. Kloppenborg compares the versions of the parable found in Mark 12:1–12, Matthew 21:33–46, Luke 20:9–19, and the Gospel of Thomas 65. He concludes that Matthew’s and Luke’s versions are dependent on Mark—with redactions characteristic of each (e.g., 198, 203)—and that the version in Thomas, which does not include Mark’s allegorizing details, is closer to the form in which Jesus told the parable (e.g., the parable originally did not contain an “explicit allusion” to Isaiah 5:1–7 and ends with the death of the owner’s son; 172). Mark’s version turns the parable into an allegory of judgment, and Kloppenborg discusses the history of such allegorical interpretations in later Christianity (50–105) as well as recent studies of this parable as “realistic fiction” (106–48). 

A major contribution of Kloppenborg’s approach is that he documents his socio-economic, historical conclusions based on extensive social realia: ancient papyri. The versions of the parable in Mark and the Gospel of Thomas both reflect themes that are found in ancient papyri about viticulture: wealthy, absentee vineyard owners; their tenants; and negotiations/conflicts between them with intermediaries. These wealthy landowners harshly oppressed their tenant farmers with heavy rents, and Kloppenborg concludes that Jesus’ parable repudiates the wealthy and their socio-economic power structure: “a reading of the ‘originating structure’ of the parable as critical of wealth, inheritance, and status is the most coherent one, given what we know of other values of the Jesus movement” (351).

Parables and the Social Sciences: Contributions of Willam Herzog II

 

Chapter 7 of the revised and expanded version of What are They Saying about the Parables? talks about how work in the social sciences has increased our understanding of the parables (I begin up with works in the 1970s and continue to the present day). 

This post talks about some of the contributions of William Herzog, whom I met for the first time at an SBL meeting in San Diego (we happened to share a taxi), shortly after the first edition of WATSA Parables? had come out. He was a kind and gracious human being (he passed away in 2019). 

Herzog’s 1994 Parables as Subversive Speech provides the first modern explicit and detailed analysis of the social setting of the parables. The crucial difference in Herzog’s approach is that he views the parables through the lens of a “pedagogy of the oppressed” (the description comes from the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire). Herzog’s brief critique of the façade of an “objective observer” is one of the most cogent I have read (15–16). Thus Herzog brings his own ideological perspective into the open, a move that should be applauded and emulated, even if one does not agree with his perspective or his interpretations of specific parables. 

The focus of the parables, Herzog argues, is not on a vision of the glory of the reign (kingdom) of God, but on the gory details of how oppression serves the interests of a ruling class. Parables explore how human beings could respond to break the spiral of violence and the cycle of poverty created by such exploitation. Therefore, the parables of Jesus were forms of social analysis just as much as they were forms of theological reflection (3). 

Herzog claims, for example, that a recognition of the social code of honor significantly alters our understanding of the Laborers in the Vineyard parable (Matt 20:1–16). Previous interpreters negatively evaluated the voices of the complaining workers so that the action of the owner of the vineyard symbolized God’s generous goodness (82). Herzog proposes instead to divest the parable of theological accretions to focus more clearly on the social world depicted: the agrarian world of rural Galilee and Judea. 

The characters of the parable are not abstract theological types but belong to identifiable social groups in advanced agrarian societies. The landowner is a member of the urban elite who owns a large estate that produces a great harvest. The day laborers, on the other hand, are members of the “expendable” class who live at or below subsistence level. 

Note: Herzog argues that the “excess” children (i.e., those who cannot be fed) of peasant farmers and others constitute members of the “expendables” who ranged from 5 percent to 15 percent of the population. The elites in the ancient world squeezed the dwindling resources of the peasants through taxation and other forms of redistribution, so these persons were forced into the most degrading and lethal form of poverty. Herzog estimates that “expendables” typically lived no more than five to seven years after entering this class, but others continually were forced into this lethal poverty (65–66). 

Although the wealthy landowner has a steward as retainer, Jesus portrays him as hiring the workers directly to depict a direct confrontation between these two social groups. They represent the two extremes of agrarian society: a ruthless and exploitative landowner and the poor, desperate expendables who are fighting a losing battle for survival (90). 

Herzog argues that when the last-hired workers are paid first, the landowner deliberately insults the first-hired workers. Because he pays the workers who worked just one hour the same as the workers who toiled all day, he shames the labor of the first-hired (20:8–10), and they respond to his provocation (20:11–12). Therefore, the wage settlement initiates an honor/shame contest with the steward delivering the insult (20:8). The workers, however, fight to maintain their meager position in society. The episode concludes with the final riposte from the shrewd but exploitative landowner (20:13–15) who feigns courtesy with a condescending form of the word “friend,” banishes the spokesperson of the workers with an “evil eye” accusation, and blasphemes by asserting his control over what should properly be seen as Yahweh’s land (94). The landowner thus demonstrates his sinful allegiance to the aristocratic view of the elites: Despising peasants enabled them to rationalize their exercise of power over these “expendables” and to justify their exploitation (69). So this parable, instead of using the landowner as a symbol for God, codifies the incongruity between the coming reign of God and the earthly systems of oppression that pretend to be legitimate guardians of its values (97). 

For a critique of Herzog’s analysis (besides my What Are They Saying about the Parables? revised and expanded edition!), see V. George Shillington, “Saving Life and Keeping Sabbath (Matthew 20:1b–15),” in Jesus and His Parables, ed. V. George Shillington (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 87–101. Shillington argues that Herzog pays too little attention to the subjects in the parable who did not have a full day’s wage. Shillington thus has a more positive view of the landowner who “learned from his trip to the marketplace at the end of the day that gross inequality of life exists between worker and worker, and between the workers and himself” (98). One wonders, however, if Shillington accurately gauged just how shocking this information would be to a first-century landowner. Cf. Herzog’s statement about the elite “despising” peasants (69).

Second expanded edition: What Are They Saying About the Parables? (Chapter 6, Part 6): Willi Braun and Luke 14's Great Dinner

 

Willi Braun’s study of the parable of the Great Dinner in Luke 14:16–24 also exhibits the productive nature of Hellenistic-Roman comparative texts and demonstrates the multifaceted interaction it has with its social, cultural, and literary environments. The healing of the man with dropsy is the fourth and final Sabbath healing performed by Jesus in Luke, and it takes place during the third and final meal that Jesus shares in a Pharisee’s house. In Luke 14:1–14, Jesus chastises (again) the social elite for seeking after honor.  

Braun’s investigation of Hellenistic-Roman texts brings to light an element of the narrative that modern readers had previously not recognized. Dropsy is a metaphor used by the Cynics because of the paradoxical symptoms of dropsy: The person suffering from dropsy has an unquenchable craving for fluids, even though the body is already inflated with fluid, and when the person drinks more fluids, it serves not to ease but to advance the dropsy. The symbolism is clear to readers familiar with this first-century metaphor: At a meal scene with social elite, the man with dropsy symbolizes the rapacious and avaricious persons whom Jesus denounces in Braun’s words, “with a barrage of terms that reads like a Hellenistic thesaurus of slurs” (69). 

With his use of Hellenistic-Roman texts, Braun constructs an extremely plausible hypothesis: The parable is a rejection of all types of self-aggrandizement, love of money, love of honor and prestige, and a radical statement of a perspective that rejects the social and economic mores of the elite. 

Conclusion 

 

The early Christian era was an age of active polyglossia, that is, a time when different national languages were interacting within the same cultural systems. Scattered throughout the entire Mediterranean were cities, settlements, and other areas where several cultures and languages directly “cohabited,” and they interwove with each other in distinctive patterns. Parables thus germinated and flourished in these fields of active polyglossia because parables themselves are dialogues that actively engage a wide range of different cultures, societies, and peoples.

Second expanded edition: What Are They Saying About the Parables? (Chapter 6, Part 5): Parables and Paideia

 

Parables and Paideia 

In addition to ancient rhetoric, many New Testament scholars cast their comparative nets in areas beyond only Jewish cultural waters and discovered in the broader range of Hellenistic-Roman literature and culture many aspects that expand our understanding of the first-century contexts in which the parables were spoken/written and heard/read. Ronald Hock, for example, pointed to the limitations of previous scholarship’s investigations of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) and called for a broader comparative framework for reading the parable, one that includes rhetorical, literary, and philosophical texts from the Hellenistic-Roman intellectual tradition. 

Hock argues that the repeated claims that the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man was adapted from an ancient Egyptian folktale are overstated—the “parallels…are neither compelling nor as explanatory” as suggested in scholarship. He laments the fact that sources from the larger Hellenistic-Roman environment are seldom considered seriously as comparative texts, and he argues that the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in particular “has an unmistakable Cynic coloring” (462). To demonstrate his thesis, Hock cites two Lucian texts Gallus and Cataplus, in which the poor man Micyllus is compared with rich men. Micyllus, a poor, marginalized artisan, goes hungry from early morning to evening, and he must bear the slights, insults, and beatings of the powerful. At their deaths, Micyllus and the rich tyrant Megapenthes make the trip to Hades. Megapenthes, like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, tries to strike a bargain to alter his situation, but to no avail. Finally, Micyllus and Megapenthes face Rhadamanthus, the judge of the underworld. Micyllus is judged to be pure and goes to the Isles of the Blessed. Megapenthes’s soul, however, is stained with corruption, and he will be appropriately punished (459–60). In Hock’s opinion, both this story and the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus illustrate Cynic views on wealth and poverty (463). 

Hock argues that many elements of these two parables, such as the reversal in the fortunes of the characters after death, partake in the broader arena of the social and intellectual life of traditional Mediterranean society (461). By limiting the comparative texts only to Jewish contexts, scholars place artificial blinders on their eyes, blinders that hinder access to the cultures in which this parable might have arisen and been told in the first century, and certainly in which it would have been heard. 

Other scholars provide examples from an even broader spectrum of Hellenistic-Roman culture. For example, the rather puzzling presentation of Jesus’ parables in Mark 4:1–34 (especially 11–12, 33–34) proved to be fruitful soil for much scholarly speculation, both with and without “depth of root.” Burton Mack’s analysis, for example, illustrates the fertile nature of various comparative texts from Hellenistic-Roman traditions. 

Mack acknowledges that the images of field, sowing, seeds, and harvest are standard metaphors in Jewish apocalyptic, wisdom, and prophetic traditions for God’s dealings with Israel. Mack, however, contends that this precise usage of such traditions would be conceivable for a later Christian thinker, but not for the historical Jesus (55). 

To cite just one example: The content of the parable of the Sower makes one “suspicious,” because agricultural images, especially that of sowing seed, were standard analogies for paideia (Hellenistic-Roman education) during this era. First-century Mediterranean ears would have heard this analogy/parable and “would have immediately recalled the stock image” for instruction, especially that of inculcating Hellenistic culture. These stock analogies used the sower (teacher) who sowed (taught) his seed (words) upon various soils (students). Therefore, this parable in Mark that illustrates Jesus’ “mysterious” teaching (4:11) actually was itself an established image of instruction. Because the imagery and the standard mode of referencing in the parable would have been clear to most first-century persons, the “mystery” has to reside in the nature of the culture and/or kingdom the parable seeks to illustrate (160). Mack then attempts to show how the entire section (4:1–34) constructs a cogent and clever rhetorical elaboration of the parable of the Sower—one that follows conventional modes of argumentation (152–58). 

Vernon K. Robbins’s analysis of Mack’s study demonstrates that social rhetoric of Mark 4 interacts with both Jewish culture and Hellenistic-Roman culture, and this interaction is twofold: On one hand, the argumentation is “deeply embedded” in Jewish and Hellenistic-Roman modes of culture, for example, by assuming many elements of those cultures; on the other hand, in this complex and variegated relationship, the parables in Mark 4 also reject, subvert, or transform other features found in Jewish and in Hellenistic-Roman cultures (80–81). 

Next: The Great Dinner parable in Luke 14.

“We need more Howard Thurman in our politics: The theologian and often-overlooked civil rights hero would have warned us against politics as a zero-sum game.”

 

Howard Thurman: Theologian, Mystic, and Overlooked Civil Rights Hero

A version of the following essay was published in Religion News Service on February 7, 2024. The following is the essay before it was edited for publiscation.

Our System needs to be Healed 

“Our system needs to be broken,” says Ted Johnson, profiled in a recent Politico Magazine article. Although I don’t recall ever meeting Mr. Johnson, we grew up just a few years apart in the same hometown, Centralia, Illinois. 

Centralia, named for the Illinois Central Railroad which formed the town in 1853, is in south central Illinois and surrounded by rich farmland. Centralia was also formerly known for its oil fields and coal mines; one of the latter, Centralia number 5 coal mine, exploded in 1947, killing 111 miners and is memorialized in the Woody Guthrie song, “The Dying Miner.” 

When Mr. Johnson and I grew up, Centralia’s population was almost 16,000, but by 2020, had fallen to about 12,000, symbolic of its decline. One of many examples of Centralia’s economic ill-fortune is that the Hollywood Candy Company, maker of the Payday candy bar (now made by Hershey), closed a few years ago—one of my summer jobs during college was at the Hollywood factory, unloading railroad cars by hand, making caramel, and roasting peanuts. 

I left Centralia to attend the University of Illinois and now live in Atlanta. Mr. Johnson, after 22 years of military service, retired at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and now is in New Hampshire, working as a senior project manager for an IT security company. He knows the pain of Centralia’s decline—his father died because he couldn’t (because of a snowstorm) be airlifted to a hospital in St. Louis (about 60 miles away) in time to save his life. 

Mr. Johnson voted for Barack Obama twice but now wants the system to be broken by Donald Trump. When asked the reason, he answered, “I got pissed.” 

The article notes that Mr. Johnson and other Trump supporters seem to be driven by “an explicit sense of vengeance.” Mr. Johnson, for example, feels that people—apparently “other” people since Mr. Trump is not included—should be held “accountable" for breaking the law. 

Mr. Johnson concludes that “it’s a zero-sum game,” and he wants “somebody that’s going to take care of the average guy.” 

One photo in the article caught my eye; it shows a cross prominently displayed in Mr. Johnson’s home. That image led me to reflect again on how the teachings of Jesus are the opposite of a zero-sum game and, colloquially put, should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. 

As Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited demonstrated, Jesus of Nazareth was an impoverished, first-century Jew who was a member of a politically, militarily, and economically oppressed minority. That book captured the essence of who Jesus was and what Jesus meant for those disinherited, like him, with their “backs against the wall,” including the ethical imperatives for those whose backs—like Mr. Johnson, apparently, and me—are not against the wall. 

In Jesus’s parable of the sheep and goats, for instance, human beings are judged based on how they treat the “least of these”—the hungry, thirsty, stranger, immigrant, ill-clothed, and imprisoned. Jesus offers one way for the “comfortable” to avoid this judgment: He told people not to invite their friends or neighbors to dinner, but instead to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” If they would help the disinherited without expecting anything in return, God would reward them “at the resurrection of the righteous.” 

A “zero-sum” mentality, in contrast, has negative effects on society, and anger and desire for vengeance have inherent costs, not just on society in general, but for those consumed by anger and vengeance—which sometimes corresponds with ill-will toward or even hatred of the “other.” 

As Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited argues, the “hounds of hell”—fear, deception, and hate—often triumph over Jesus’s message of love—his teachings about justice, reconciliation, restoration of community, and the resulting humanitarian actions toward all people. 

Thurman often spoke of how such ill will and hatred could become a foundation on which people attempt “to establish a dreadful emotional security”—giving energy and strength like a form of neurosis—which supports and helps one implement a “position” from which to attack perceived enemies and which even wills their “nonexistence” as human beings (cf. Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty Is the Point”: such cruelty helps bind the “in-group” into a “community” that celebrates punitive actions against marginalized people who, in their eyes, “deserve it”). 

Ultimately, however, Thurman argues that hatred 

destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows…. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. 

I recognize how fortunate I am, and I cannot accept that we are doomed to live in a “zero-sum game.” I believe, as Paul Wellstone said, that “We all do better when we all do better.” 

Thurman often made a similar point. He stressed the connectedness of humanity and argued that “I cannot be satisfied in Heaven if my brother is in Hell.…I cannot be at peace in my wholeness, if you are in part; I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.” Members of the human community, all of whom are of infinite worth as children of God, participate in a collective destiny. 

Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us shows how a zero-sum game perspective usually benefits a small group of wealthy individuals, because the oppression of the “other” usually is a “canary in a coal mine,” where systems exploiting the disinherited usually expand to exploit other groups. Therefore, people who support oppression because it hurts the “other”—and falsely believe it helps them—ultimately find themselves similarly oppressed by the powerful. 

For me and, I hope, Mr. Johnson, the “canary in a coal mine” metaphor is particularly poignant; the Centralia number 5 coal mine disaster happened because the wealthy and powerful people owning and overseeing the mine refused to respond to safety warnings, and 111 innocent people died. 

McGhee observes, like Thurman, that exploitative practices against other human beings are made possible by an “in-group” severing human ties between them and other human beings, an exploitation rationalized by the social distance that results from the “in-group” being unable or unwilling to empathize with the group they are exploiting. 

Instead, McGhee argues, a healthy, functioning society rests on the foundation of a “web of mutuality,” a sense of social solidarity, “a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.” The result is a “solidarity dividend” of benefits for all in society when people unify and work together for their common good. 

Similar to how Thurman argued that Jesus’s Jewish love-ethic—loving God and loving one’s neighbor as yourself—is the needed corrective to hatred and that it can benefit all of us in the human community, McGhee’s convincingly argues that altruistic Good Samaritan behavior can create a web of mutuality and a solidarity dividend that benefits all of society (cf. the conclusions of the “World Happiness Report”: when people’s well-being rises through experiencing altruistic help, they become more likely to help others, creating a “virtuous spiral.”). 

The teachings of Jesus challenge us to envision new possibilities in our relationships with others. Perhaps they can even persuade us to work toward bending the arc of history toward justice, acting in ways that help create a web of mutuality, and participating in an ever-expanding virtuous spiral of altruism. 

In other words, loving our neighbors as ourselves. 

As Thurman urges us in quite a few of his sermons, “Let’s try it and see.” 

For more, see the forthcoming book: David B. Gowler, Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans (Paulist Press; Nov 2024).

 

Second expanded edition: What Are They Saying About the Parables? (Chapter 6, Part 4): Rhetoric--Parsons, Martin, Farmer, and Gowler

Mikeal Parsons and Michael Martin devote a chapter to the fable in their book, Ancient Rhetoric and the New Testament. They begin by noting that the exercises on fable in the progymnasmata not only taught foundational literary skills through such practices as paraphrase, expansion and compression, and refutation and confirmation, all of which led to “compositional mastery” of the fable; fables also involve character formation (45–49).

In a significant expansion of Beavis’s list of basic similarities, Parsons and Martin note that the parables of Jesus exhibit “the same literary features and practices” as found in (other) examples of fables in antiquity (for details see the book). Jesus’ parables (1) feature the same kinds of subjects and classifications; (2) exhibit “realism”; (3) exhibit a similar amount of “moralizing” as described in the progymnasmata and found in ancient fables; (4) display the same simple, conversational style as prose fables; (5) occasionally contain the same kind of inflection (e.g., variations in case and number) as prescribed in the progymnasmata and also occasionally found in fables; (6) are often woven into the larger narrative in a manner delineated in the progymnasmata and evident in most Greek and Hebrew fables; (7) undergo the same kinds of paraphrase and expansion/contraction explained in the progymnasmata and evident in the transmission of fables—comparing the differing versions of the same parable in Matthew, Mark, and/or Luke reflect such “editorial” practices (59–62). 

The importance of the progymnasmata for parable studies goes well beyond the fable, however. In 1961, for example, William Farmer discovered a progymnastic pattern in some sections of Luke in which an introduction is followed by three closely-related sayings and the third “saying” is an illustrative parable (13:1–9; 15:1–32; cf. 12:13–21, where the Rich Fool parable illustrates the saying in 12:15).  This structure, he argues, is generated by the progymnastic rhetorical tradition of citing, paraphrasing, expounding, and illustrating a chreia (307–10).   

Theon, who defines chreia as “a recollection of a saying or action or both, with a pointed meaning, usually for the sake of something useful,” notes that a chreia can be expressed as an enthymeme.  As Richard Vinson discovered, the narrative enthymeme is one of Luke’s preferred rhetorical techniques. Enthymemes in Lukan parables, for example, are distinctive qualitatively and quantitatively, because they allow characters to speak for themselves to a greater extent than in Mark or Matthew’s parables—e.g., characters explaining their motives—which creates a more complete characterization of them. 

In my writings, I extend this concept in parable interpretation by demonstrating how the Lukan parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:16–20) works “enthymematically.”  For example, the unexpressed element of an enthymeme serves as a way to engage the hearers/readers more actively in a way parallel to how parables require hearers/readers to fill in enthymematic literary, social/cultural, and other gaps.

Second expanded edition: What Are They Saying About the Parables? (Chapter 6, Part 3): Mary Ann Beavis and Joshua Stigall

 

A reminder that the second edition of What Are they Saying about the Parables? is revised and expanded in every chapter and two additional chapters are completely new. I am continuing a summary of some sections of the book (many details and analyses are missing from these summaries). For more details, get the book itself. 

In her article, “Parable and Fable,” Mary Ann Beavis argues that ancient Near Eastern stories were the prototypes of both Greek fables and Jewish parables (478). The affinities between the two are thus traceable to their common origins. Beavis illustrates these affinities by selecting several Greek fables and describing five basic similarities between these fables and narrative parables: 

1. Similarities in narrative structure 

2. Similarities in content 

3. Religious and ethical themes 

4. An element of surprise or irony 

5. Secondary morals or application 

Beavis’s article is inherently a plea to broaden the avenues presently under discussion. She appropriately questions the presupposition of many New Testament scholars that the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic meshalim are the only appropriate comparative material available for examining the literary and cultural milieus of the Synoptic parables. That fact that the fable was used in elementary exercises in Greek composition makes her overall scenario convincing: School children learned composition by hearing, reciting, and writing down in their own words fables that were read or told to them (477). 

 Joshua Stigall built on Beavis’s insights concerning fable by interacting more substantively with discussions of the fable in the progymnasmata (primarily Theon’s). Stigall uses Luke’s parable of the Rich Fool as a test case and concludes that Luke’s construction of the parable is remarkably similar to Theon’s teaching about the fable, such as the way the parable is woven into a larger narrative, a moral is explicitly included (Luke 12:15, 21), and, in relation to the parable as it is found in the Gospel of Thomas, has been expanded rhetorically.

Next up, the significant work of Mikeal Parsons and Michael Martin on ancient rhetoric and the parables.

Christopher Rowland: Speaking of God in an Inhumane World: Essays on Liberation Theology and Radical Christianity. Volume 1

Delighted to announce the publication of a new book I edited: a series of essays by Christopher Rowland, Dean Ireland's Professor Emeritus, University of Oxford, on Liberation Theology and Radical Christianity. My editor copies are on the way to me:

Christopher Rowland, Speaking of God in an Inhumane World: Essays on Liberation Theology and Radical Christianity. Volume 1. Edited by David B. Gowler. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2024.

The second volume has already been submitted and is in the copyediting stage. Its title is: Speaking of God in an Inhumane World: Essays on Müntzer, Winstanley, Blake, Stringfellow, and Radical Christianity.