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).