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.