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.

Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Good Samaritans (PART I: Chapters 1 & 2)

 

The first two chapters of my forthcoming (11/24) book:

Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: 

From Prodigals to Good Samaritans 

Part I: An Introduction to Howard Thurman and his View of the Religion of Jesus 

Chapter 1: “With their Backs against the Wall”: Howard Thurman and Jesus 

Howard Thurman’s Life 

Jesus and the Disinherited 

Conclusion 

Chapter 2: Thurman’s Vision of Establishing Community 

The Unity of Life and Community 

Mysticism and Social Change 

Mysticism and Social Change: Civil Rights 

The Role of the Fine Arts in Building Community 

The Fine Arts, “Heightened Consciousness,” and Community 

The Fine Arts and creating a “Unity of Fellowship” 

Visual Art and the Parables

Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Good Samaritans (PART II: Chapters 3 & 4)

My forthcoming book has a new title. It is no longer What do Parables Want? It is Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Good Samaritans. 

Here is a continuation of the series of posts of the outline of the book. I started with the later chapters and am working backwards in these posts.

Part II: How Do Parables Work? What Do Parables Want?: The Parable of the Rich Fool as a Test Case for Jesus and the Disinherited 

Chapter 3: How Do Parables Work? 

Introduction: Rembrandt, The Money Changer (Der Geldwechsler) 

Jesus’ Parables in Context 

Jewish Contexts 

Greco-Roman Contexts 

Interpreting Parables and Fables 

Parables as Teaching Tools that create Pictures in the Mind 

Fables/Parables can have Multiple Morals, Meanings, and Applications 

Multiple Meanings and the “Enthymematic” Nature of Parables/Fables/Meshalim 

Filling in the Gaps in Rembrandt’s The Moneychanger/Rich Fool 

Conclusion 

Chapter 4: What do Parables want?: The Rich Fool Parable as a Test Case 

Introduction 

The Narrative Context of Luke 12:16–20 

The Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:16–20) 

The Intertexture of Luke 12:16–20 

Social and Cultural Texture: Texts and Contexts in Dialogue 

Conclusion: From the Rich Fool Parable to considering Howard Thurman’s Contributions to understanding the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan Parables