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).