More excerpts from chapter 7 of the revised and expanded edition of What are They Saying about the Parables?
Similar but unheeded exhortations to hear women’s voices fully can be found in the history of parable interpretation. Carol Thysell's "Unearthing the Treasure, Unknitting the Napkin" that provides a transition to other reception history studies that I will later discuss in a series of posts, "What Do Parables Want?"
Thysell found examples of such voices in two early modern era interpretations of Matthew’s parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14–30). Both Marie Dentière, in 1539, and Rachel Speght, a century later, interpreted the parable as justification for women preaching and prophesying: Dentière “objected to the prohibition against women’s public preaching because it would be ‘too impudent to hide the talent which God has given to us,’” and Speght supported women having a public ministry by noting that “none but unprofitable servants knit up Gods talent in a Napkin.” As Thysell notes, these women used similar appeals to the parable to argue “for their own right to preach and to publish for mixed audiences” and “to make an argument for the right and responsibility of all women to contribute to the common good of society” (9).
It is important to note that we use models that give us partial glimpses of ancient cultures—important glimpses that include “voices of the silenced”—and these insights demonstrate the cultural differences that divide us from ancient Mediterranean peoples. Such knowledge is instructive, especially when previous suppositions and “certainties” are unveiled. But what then? The gap between the ancient past and the present widens further, and as Carolyn Osiek states, “the bridge is not long enough” to cross the interpretive chasm (113).
As Osiek also notes, for non-Western persons the cultural and social contexts may become more familiar now that the Western, post-enlightenment framework undergirding most New Testament study is illuminated and (partly) dismantled. We do not have to anachronize Jesus’ parables to make them relevant. The challenge is to modernize them authentically. Social-scientific criticism, for example, allows us to understand better the first-century social, cultural, and historical contexts of the parables, but it also reminds us that achieving the status of an “objective observer” is an elusive chimera that can never be captured. Pieces of the puzzle will still be missing; parables remain recalcitrant and delightfully enigmatic. With the knowledge gained from these revelations, though, we can understand the writings from other cultures and ages more fully and can avoid much of the patronizing interpretations that still pervade many studies.
In addition, even in the twenty-first century, some scholars still seek to reaffirm the patriarchal traditions found in biblical texts, so these texts continue to be (ab)used to justify the oppression and silencing of women. For the vast majority of Christians, however, this approach is unacceptable, and the gap between these ancient texts and modern society grows wider as does the belief that Christians should no longer depend on cultural analogies of ancient societies to portray the activity of God. Yet the standards of the kingdom of God as depicted in Jesus’ parables, although incorporating elements of that patriarchal system, actually can provide a devastating critique of that system. Those higher standards, even while seen within their social system, may also serve as criteria by which all social systems are to be evaluated. In the words of Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza: “Thus liberation from patriarchal structures is not only explicitly articulated by Jesus but is in fact the heart of the proclamation of the basileia of God.”
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