Chapter 1 Genres of Parables: A Cognitive Approach

In: The Power of Parables
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Gerd Theissen
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The traditional typology of form history knows three genres of parabolic speech in the Jesus tradition: example stories, similitudes, and parables.1 We distinguish them from two other figurative forms of communication, namely, allegorical speech and symbolic acts. We find allegorical speech in the traditions ascribed to Jesus in the form of secondary allegorical interpretations of some growth parables. We encounter symbolic acts in the narratives about Jesus from his baptism to his last supper. This typology belongs to the standard knowledge in exegesis. However, in scholarship we must call such knowledge into question again and again. The criticism of the classical genus typology is due to two observations: first, we cannot clearly assign some texts to a certain genus; second, the New Testament itself summarizes all genera as parabolai, without distinguishing subgenera. I try to do justice to both observations by using the Greek word parabolē/parabolai for the genus as a whole. Furthermore, I draw a distinction between the “genus typology” of form history, which goes back to Adolf Jülicher’s seminal work on Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (1899),2 and a “genus syncretism,” which denies clear-cut subgenera of the parabolai, as is done by Ruben Zimmermann in the Kompendium der Gleichnisse Jesu (2007).3

This contribution suggests a synthesis of the old “genus typology” and the new “genus syncretism.” The classical form history is the thesis, genus syncretism the antithesis. We need a synthesis. I suggest as a basis for such a synthesis the “cognitive approach” in exegesis.4 This approach presupposes some universal forms of our thoughts, even if they exist only in cultural variations. We create order in our mind by two contrary cognitive acts, by separating on the one hand and connecting on the other hand. In exegesis, we create order first by separating differently structured texts as different forms. This justifies the traditional “genus typology.” On the other hand, we create connections between these different forms by crossing the boundaries that we find in such a typology of structures; this justifies the “genus syncretism.” An interpretation of the parabolai of Jesus can, in my opinion, do neither without the separations of the traditional genus typology nor without consideration of the syncretism of mixed forms in many texts. Both belong together. Our mental activity in the production and reception of texts includes both drawing clear boundaries and transgressing such boundaries. With regard to the relationship between the genus typology and the mixed forms in our texts, we suggest the following interpretation:5 The structures of the texts are deep structures of a genus within the langue or the literary competence of an author. Their blending in the surface structures of our texts belongs to the parole or the performance. If there are no longer any clear boundaries in our deep structures, there is also no transcending of boundaries in the surface texts. Both together explain the miracle of human creativity in the production and reception of texts.

In what follows, the first part will offer a short sketch of the cognitive approach. The second part justifies the classical genus typology, and the third part justifies its antithesis (i.e., the form-syncretism) and also proposes a new synthesis. I try to interpret the relationship between the typology of the parabolai and their realizations in texts as a relationship between literary langue and performative parole. Some exemplary interpretations of parables will demonstrate that we recognize the pointe of these parables much better if we discover how the performative parole of these transgresses the borders of the genres within the literary langue. Thus, I want to show that the cognitive approach contributes not only to the definition of genres of the parabolai, but also to the interpretation of individual examples of parabolai. At the end, we conclude with some remarks on the significance of the cognitive approach not only for insights into the transmission and reception of parables, but also for the production and creation of parables.

1 The Cognitive Approach

The cognitive approach is not well known in German New Testament scholarship, whereas in Scandinavia, there exists a network of “cognitive friends” in exegesis. Together with other scholars, the Hungarian István Czachesz has developed this approach in contact with this network in Groningen and Heidelberg, and represents it today in Tromsø in Norway. He has written a very informative introduction to this approach.6 I will confine myself to two basic ideas of this approach that are important for our question.

The first basic idea goes back to Pascal Boyer.7 He says that religious ideas and practices spread when we can optimally memorize them due to their memorability. Optimal memorability is a combination of minimal counterintuitive features and a network of intuitively plausible ideas. Counterintuitive are concepts that contradict the expectations of our everyday ontology, in which we distinguish five domains of being: inanimate things and artefacts on the one hand, and plants, animals, and persons on the other. In antiquity, most people would have added divine beings as a sixth realm. In our time, most people and even many theologians would say that divine beings do not belong to our “natural” ontology.

Today, we can find the everyday ontology very early in infancy; it is also cross-culturally widespread. There is a universal knowledge that tells us a plant is bound to a place, an animal is moving, and persons have consciousness. Religious ideas violate such expectations: a virgin gives birth to a child, the risen Christ walks through walls, and water turns into wine. Such counterintuitive ideas attract attention. People transmit them sustainably if these ideas are embedded in intuitively plausible ideas. If there is, for example, a connection of the virgin birth with a high estimation of sexual virginity, or with an awareness that gender is also a prison from which only a few ascetics free themselves, there is a good chance that the idea of a virgin birth will be accepted into our cultural memory. Furthermore, we should distinguish paradoxical ideas from counterintuitive ideas. It is only paradoxical, for example, if a woman has twenty children. This is unlikely, but it does not violate any rule of our everyday ontology. Paradoxical traits are also more memorable than normal traits; their transmission often transforms them into counterintuitive ideas.

When we apply this to the genres of parabolai, we can now make the following distinctions: Example stories remain within the same domain of being; they tell something about human persons. The audience should imitate their behaviour or reject it. Everybody ought to behave like the Samaritan! Nobody should behave like the rich corn farmer. The figures in the stories and the addressees belong to the same domain of reality.

In contrast, similitudes and parables transcend the boundaries of the domains of being. In similitudes and parables, the growing of plants or the behaviour of people becomes an image of God’s action. They are always counterintuitive as a whole, crossing boundaries in the transition from image to the imagined matter, that is: from matter, artefacts, plants, animals, and human beings in this world to God beyond this world. This is true for both similitudes and parables. Nevertheless, we can also distinguish between them.

Similitudes, as a rule, use pictures from a familiar everyday world. What happens is happening repeatedly. These pictures correspond to our semantic memory. Parables, on the contrary, contain paradoxical features within their pictures. What they relate to is unlikely. They correspond to our episodic memory. Nevertheless, the images of parables likewise remain within the realm of the possible. It is true that it is unlikely that an administrator will reduce his master’s debts (Luke 16:1−8). However, nothing happens there that goes beyond the rules of our everyday world. These paradoxical (or extravagant) traits are image signals that point to God, that is, to a completely different domain of being. In this respect, paradoxical traits within the images support the counterintuitive character of similitudes and parables as a whole: they point beyond a fundamental boundary between this world and God.

Both similitudes and parables differ clearly from allegories, where we encounter counterintuitive features already in their pictures. If a dragon has seven heads (Rev 12:3), this offends our categorical expectations concerning animals. Allegories differ from parabolai in that there is something in their imagery that violates our everyday ontology. In sum, it is true that the combination of the counterintuitive, the paradoxical, and the intuitive gives all the genres of Jesus’s parabolai a great memorability.

The second basic idea, which Harvey Whitehouse has applied to rituals, is a distinction between semantic and episodic memory, a distinction I have already used.8 Semantic is a memory of the typical that recurs repeatedly. Thus, the liturgy has a typical sequence. We have stored the liturgy in our memory, but cannot distinguish between individual divine services. However, extraordinary incidents we remember very well, for example, the service in which a drunken preacher ended his sermon with “Cheers.” We memorize something like this in our episodic memory, that is, we also keep in our memory the time, the place of worship, and perhaps the proper name of the preacher. Psychological research has demonstrated the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. With this distinction, Whitehouse classified two forms of religious rites: on the one side, rites that happen only rarely and cause a great emotional arousal, which we memorize; and, on the other side, repetitive rites, which exert a taedium effect because we repeat them very often. They become boring. He called these the “imagistic” and “doctrinal modes” of religiosity.

We encounter ritual elements in the symbolic acts of Jesus, which we can compare with the parabolai. Among the symbolic acts, we may distinguish the recurring guest banquets with tax collectors and sinners on the one hand, and unique events such as the temple cleansing on the other hand. These two types of symbolic actions correspond in the texts to similitudes representing typical events and parables representing unique events. If one distinguishes symbolic actions from such parabolai, one may adopt the following “concept of a symbol” as a basis (among many variants of symbol concepts):9 a symbol is a real event or object, which at the same time has a pictorial meaning. Roses are real plants. If a man gives roses to a woman, they may become a symbol of love. We must therefore take symbols literally, but in addition, give them a second meaning. The cross is a central symbol of early Christianity. It is a cruel, hard reality. However, at the same time, the cross has an additional meaning within the history between human beings and God. Either it is a substitute death for the reconciliation of God and human beings, that is, a hilastérion (Rom 3:25), or almost the opposite: a provocative action of God, a skándalon (1 Cor 1:23), that does not reconcile but instead destroys false harmony. The cross is a symbol with both a literal and many different pictorial meanings. Metaphors, on the contrary, unlike such symbols, must not be taken literally. When one metaphorically speaks of God as a father, one does not mean that God has begotten children (with a woman). All religious language is open for different interpretations, but above all metaphors and parables. Poly-semantic pictures in language allow more pluralism in life.

2 The Classical Typology of Genres

The two basic ideas of the cognitive approach outlined above are sufficient to justify the classic typology of parabolai. We make distinctions in this typology according to two criteria. Firstly, according to the criterion of an increasing pictorial distance, by which I mean the distance between the picture and that to which the picture points. Secondly, according to the criterion of increasing image deviation, by which I mean a deviation already within the picture from familiar pictures.

Let us deal first with the growing pictorial distance. The distance is very small within exemplary stories, but it does exist there too. Exemplary stories depict exemplary and reprehensible behaviour; they encourage imitation in the case of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30−37) or warn against imitation by means of the fate of the rich corn farmer (Luke 12:16−21). A role model is also a picture, but the picture and what the picture means remain in the same realm of being: persons become role models for other persons. A human person in example stories does not depict God. Rather, example stories speak of God either explicitly (cf. Luke 12:20; 18:11−13) or implicitly, as in the parable of the Samaritan by speaking of priests and Levites as his servants (Luke 10:31f.) or in the story of Lazarus by speaking of Moses and the prophets as the mediators of God’s word (Luke 16:29). However, none of the actors within the example stories is an image for God. Each one is an image of human beings. Here, too, there is a certain distance between the picture and the thing depicted. A role model is something other than an “after-image” (which imitates the role model), but both remain in the same realm of being.

Similitudes and parables, however, increase this distance by crossing the border between different domains of being: They make events in this world an image for the action of God, who stands beyond this world and intervenes in it. People in similitudes and parables thereby become the image of God. Therefore, what they mean does not remain within the domain of this world, but points to something completely different from the world: to God. While example stories speak without images directly or implicitly of God, similitudes and parables speak figuratively of God using images. It is only in their framework, in their introductions (cf. Mark 4:26−30), and secondary applications (Mark 12:11) that we encounter the word “God.”

Both similitudes and parables contain pictorial representations of God. Nevertheless, there is one difference between them. In parables, the image distance (as the distance between the image and the object) is associated with an image deviation within the image, a deviation from familiar images or even a disturbance in these images. Parables depict unusual events such as the equal payment of workers for different working hours (Matt 20:1−16). On the contrary, similitudes depict normal, recurring events such as the growth of seeds. This difference has its base in our mental structures. On the one hand, we can assign similitudes to our semantic memory. They represent repetitive typical processes. Parables, on the other hand, can be assigned to episodic memory, in which paradoxes or extravagances ensure that we remember them as a singular event with place, time, and proper names. Of course, there are transitions. For a young person, the first kisses are something that one memorizes in one’s episodic memory. For adults, they are much more part of their semantic memory.

Allegories increase the extraordinary once again: The same payment may be unusual and paradoxical, but it does not violate what is conceivable among humans. However, the animal with the seven horns violates our categorical expectations of animals. Therefore, we notice immediately that the horns have a secret meaning. Probably, they mean seven emperors. It is not the picture as a whole that is significant, but individual parts within the picture. The boundaries of domains of being are crossed; animals that offend natural laws become images for political rulers. It is only through a code that the listener or reader can decode the sense of the horns.

If we start from the categories of the cognitive approach, then the classical genre typology corresponds largely to some universal cognitive structures of our thinking. I will summarize the most important distinctions once again: Example stories remain in the same realm of being, in all other parabolai the relation between the “significant” and the “significat” crosses the border to another realm of being. Allegories, on the other hand, incorporate counterintuitive traits that violate our everyday ontology already within the “significant.” An animal with seven horns disrupts our categories of thinking. Among the parabolaí, we can assign the similitudes on the one hand to our semantic memory that contains recurrent and typical events, and the parables on the other hand to our episodic memory, because they tell of extraordinary events with paradoxical traits. In both cases, the texts as a whole point to another realm of being: to God. They do not violate in their pictorial half the rules of our human world, but only when referring to God as a whole. Then they become counterintuitive, because God is not a sowing farmer, not an employer, not a property owner.

The fact that the parabolai of Jesus in all their subgenera have so successfully impressed themselves on our cultural memory is explained within the cognitive approach by their memorability, that is, through a combination of unusual and familiar traits. This is why the parabolai imprint themselves lastingly on our memory. That is why this approach is also important for today’s Jesus research, because this Jesus research is a search for the “remembered Jesus.”10 The memory approach belongs to the cognitive approaches that say: “History, as a discipline of knowledge, is not what happened in the past, it is an accounting of how the past was remembered and why,” and: “The more significant a memory is, the more interpreted it will become.”11

So far, I have defended the classical form typology. However, the cognitive approach justifies not only this typology, but also the violation of this typology by what I call a “genus syncretism.” One problem of the traditional genre typology is indeed the fact that at least nine parabolai are classified as parables by Adolf Jülicher, whereas Rudolf Bultmann interprets them as similitudes, as is shown in the following table:12

Table 1
Table 1

Difference in classification of New Testament parables by Adolf Jülicher and Rudolf Bultmann

We can add some further examples of parabolai that we can classify both as similitudes and as parables. Martin Dibelius differentiates not only between “similitudes” with usual and “parables” with extraordinary events, but also identifies four stages in this regard: similitudes with (1) recurrent and (2) typical events on the one side, and parables (3) with extraordinary and (4) constructed events on the other side.13 With regard to one parabolē he deviates from Jülicher and Bultmann:

Table 2
Table 2

The Parable of The Sower as categorized by Jülicher, Bultmann and Dibelius

According to Jülicher, the Jesus tradition has preserved fifty-three “Gleichnisse” (parabolai). Must we revise his classification because Bultmann classifies ca. twenty percent of these parabolai in a different way? Must we avoid classifying the parabolai in subgenera? Is a “type syncretism” more adequate?

3 Type Syncretism

In my eyes, type syncretism is not an alternative to the classical genre typology, but presupposes it. According to the cognitive approach, human thinking not only distinguishes between the five realms of being (things, artefacts, plants, animals, persons), it also crosses the borders between them. Generally, it is precisely by crossing such borders that we become creative. This crossing of borders is typical of poetry, religion, science, and psychosis.14

  1. Poetry transcends these boundaries: poetic metaphors transfer statements from one realm of being to another. When Jesus sends his disciples like sheep among the wolves (Matt 10:16//Luke 10:3), animals become images for persons.

  2. Religious imagination likewise crosses boundaries. It is even more radical, because it summarizes all five domains of being as creation and crosses the border between being and not-being in the concept of God as creator.

  3. Science crosses such borders. Our everyday ontology knows that life arises only from life, plants from plants, and animals from animals. However, natural science teaches us that all life has its origin in matter.

  4. Psychoses lead people to make cross-border statements. What is, on the one hand, a characteristic of great poetic creativity and scientific ingenuity is encountered here as a pathological phenomenon. Psychotics suddenly see a demon in a familiar human being, where we see only a human being.

In the cognitive approach, such cross-border phenomena (e.g., in the metaphor) are comprehended by the “blending theory.”15 This theory describes and analyzes connections and mixtures between our concepts of different realms of being. This also applies to our texts: Here, we encounter different genres of parabolai very often mixed in concrete texts. It is precisely this transgressing of genres that allows the recognition of their intention. In all communication, we use the strategy of deviation from traditions and even of violating them in order to transmit a new or important message. Because we are familiar with some biblical parabolai, we overhear the hidden provocative message in them. Even the parable of the Lost Sheep that creates joy in heaven (Luke 15:3−7) creates some real problems on earth: for the ninety-nine sheep in the desert, it is the parable of a Lost Shepherd. Is this parabolē a parable that describes an extraordinary event (Jülicher), or a similitude (Bultmann), or, alternatively, both? Looking for the lost sheep is the usual task of a shepherd fitting to a similitude, caring for outsiders among human beings is the extraordinary challenge and demands a parable.

In between the two forms of parabolai that we call similitudes and parables, we discover four groups. In these groups, the distance between their imagery and their intended meaning increases. On the one side, the similitudes of growth discover within everyday events something very unusual. On the other side, the similitudes of a surprising find of a treasure or a pearl are images of an extraordinary event, but they transmit the message that such a fund is the ordinary experience of those who follow Jesus. In between these, we must place the parabolai of a loss: although a lost sheep or coin is a rare occurrence, it is part of our everyday world. In the two parabolai with a contrasting end, everyday actions such as fishing or building a house become transparent to the last judgement at the end of the world, to salvation and condemnation.

3.1 The Parabolai of Growth

All “similitudes” of growth, including the parable of the Sower, tell of an everyday event that occurs repeatedly. However, these similitudes want the listeners to discover, with the help of these everyday stories, something extraordinary that happens rarely. The similitude of the Sower (Mark 4:3−8) demonstrates this: The usual sower risks losing much seed. This is inevitable. Nevertheless, he is very successful. The similitude opens our eyes to the astonishing success of a sowing man, despite huge losses.16 The “similitude” of the Growing Seed (Mark 4:26−29) shows the hard labour of a peasant and discloses that the decisive event happens by itself without his intervention. If we interpret the peasant as an image of God, the similitude contains the message that God trusts the earth and the seed to produce fruit by itself. The earth is the people. God’s seed activates them. God trusts that they will produce voluntary good deeds.17 The “similitude” of the Mustard Seed (Mark 4:30−32//Matt 13:31ff.//Luke 13:18ff.) teaches us that the growth of mustard is at the same time an everyday event and a miracle: the smallest seed is the origin of a plant similar to a tree. What seems today to be very small and without significance may very soon be great and important. That is also true of the kingdom of God.

3.2 The Parabolai of a Find

The parabolai chapter, Matt 13, describes the growth of the community of the kingdom. It begins with the sowing man (Matt 13:3−9) as an image of its origin. Much of the seed falls on soil outside the community. The seed is not limited to its interior. The community is open to the outside. In the parable of the Tares among the Wheat, on the contrary, an internal border is the topic: the community is a corpus permixtum (Matt 13:24−30) of different groups and must secure the internal tolerance between these groups. After the interpretation of this parable, two short parabolai follow, first the parable of the Treasure in the Field (Matt 13:44), then the parable of the Pearl (Matt 13:45−46). Both are formally as short as similitudes, but in terms of content, they both relate such extraordinary things that, in this regard, they are parables. You do not find a treasure in the field or a precious pearl every day. The fact that Matthew tells both parables in the past tense, albeit mixed with the present tense in the first parable, supports this. There is no doubt that this is a fusion of a parable and a similitude.18 However, it is precisely through this fusion that the parable expresses something very important: it speaks of a quite extraordinary step, the step into following Jesus, as if it were a recurring normal event. Becoming a follower of Jesus requires a radical decision from the average Christian. Ordinary people must behave like heroes. The “main point” of the parable is that every Christian experiences something as wonderful as finding a treasure in the field. Everyone acquires something like a precious pearl on becoming a follower of Jesus. The extraordinary becomes an ordinary event in the life of all who convert to Jesus.

3.3 The Parabolai of the Lost

The composition of the three parabolai of the Lost in Luke 15 is also very meaningful. The first two parabolai, the search for the lost sheep and the lost penny, are similitudes in the present tense. They depict the search for the lost as a normal, recurring act of God. However, it is also true that a sheep does not get lost every day. It is not every day that one loses a penny. For God, it is normal to look for a lost person, but for the lost person, it is the crucial event in their life. God alone is active in the two parables—first as a man who looks for his sheep as a shepherd, then as a woman who looks for her lost penny. The sheep and the penny remain passive. There is no talk of their conversion.

The following parable of the Prodigal Son corrects this. Here, the conversion of the human being is the great theme. In the parable, we should take the returning son as a positive role model after he has represented a negative role in the past, but the rejecting older son as somebody who plays in the present time a negative role but with the challenge and chance to convert into a positive model.19 We should both repent and accept those who are repentant. The parable comes very close to an exemplary story. The fact that the father becomes transparent to God (as in parables) is not an argument against this observation. The prodigal son expressly says that he has sinned against Heaven and against him. This very direct statement shows that the father is a real father in the parable. There is a distance between him and God (i.e., “the heaven”). Thus, the father remains in the realm of human beings. God is distinguished from him. This tells us a great deal: the reader and listener are to take this earthly father as an example and accept, like the father, people who have gone astray. The parable of the Prodigal Son is both an exemplary story with human models that all should imitate—and a parable that makes the father transparent to God’s infinite grace.

In addition, this third parabolē has a retroactive effect on the understanding of the first two parables: all should take part in the search for the lost. All should play the role of the good shepherd and the woman who seeks the penny. The message of the three parables is then underlined once more by the fact that Jesus tells these parables in a frame that refers to a symbolic act of Jesus. Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners. Pharisees and scribes take offence at this (Luke 15:1ff.). Jesus represents all three figures in these parables: the shepherd, the woman, and the father. Nevertheless, the listener is not only the addressee of his actions: the listener himself should imitate Jesus’s behaviour, namely, the search for the lost. The mixture of different subgenera of the parabolai is a part of the message.

These examples may demonstrate that in the concrete texts a blending of genres transfers a significant message. We can recognize the concrete intention of the parabolai of Jesus only when we see clearly distinguishable structures, on the one hand, and the mixture of these structures, on the other hand.

4 The Relationship between Genus Types and Their Realization in Texts

Our main result is that we must distinguish between two levels of structures. We can describe the relation between them according to the model of depth structure and surface structure. The structures of a genre belong to the depth structures. They are part of the literary competence of narrators and transmitters of the stories. The concrete realizations of the stories, on the other hand, are part of the surface structure, in which the narrator may mix and blend depth structures. In these surface texts, the stories therefore cross boundaries between depth structures. If we deny the difference between boundaries in depth, we cannot discover any blending between them on the surface. The blending of well-differentiated depth structures within the surface texts is the key to the parabolic creativity of the Jesus tradition. However, this relationship between deep structures and surface realizations is not a relationship between timeless structures and concrete realizations in time. Both the structures and their realizations change over the course of time. The surface texts change every time a narrator repeats them or an author adapts them for a new literary context. The depth structures of a genre change only in the long run.

Those who seek knowledge only in clearly differentiated structures will be disappointed when they try to differentiate the literary genres of the parabolai of Jesus. But those who discover human creativity in breaking through order and in the mixing of structures will appreciate such a disorder as an access to the actual intention of an author: the parabolai of Jesus have a great punch-line; they open our eyes to the miracle in everyday life and to the normal when it is broken through. God becomes visible in the everyday; the everyday becomes transparent to him.

I conclude with a reflection on the significance of this cognitive approach for the interpretation of orally transmitted texts. The cognitive approach explains above all the memorability of a tradition. It explains why the parables were successful in the tradition.20 The parabolai of Jesus were a success because of their mixture of counterintuitive and intuitive features. They thus became the most famous and well-known part of the Jesus tradition. The cognitive approach can help to explain this. Because the cognitive approach concentrates on the reception and transmission of texts, one may think that this approach contributes to the “death of the author” (Roland Barthes). Does the author disappear behind the transmitters and redactors? A sceptical position says that in the search for the author, we cannot go beyond what has survived in the memory of the transmitting followers of Jesus in Judaism. However, in my opinion the cognitive approach does not imply such a scepticism. Why not? There are not only successful transmitters of traditions who know how we can successfully implement something in the tradition. The rules for a successful transmission are also rules for the successful production of texts. What the cognitive approach has recognized, we know from media logic. People accept a message above all if it deviates from the usual, on the one hand—either as a small scandal or as an original thought—and if it is, at the same time, embedded in many thoughts by which the listeners feel confirmed. Everyone who creates texts knows this. I suppose that the possible author Jesus as a poet and preacher formed his message as a combination of paradoxical or counterintuitive statements and plausible thoughts. Provocative statements like the eschatological message of the kingdom of God and God’s judgement, on the one hand, and very familiar wisdom statements like the universally plausible golden rule, on the other hand, belong together in his teaching. The details of what he said may remain an open question. I believe, however, that we can recognize even today the basic structures of his parables. He was one of the great Jewish parable creators comparable with the parable poets in rabbinical literature in antiquity, but also comparable with Franz Kafka in our modern times.

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  • Von Gemünden, Petra. Vegetationsmetaphorik im Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt: Eine Bildfelduntersuchung. NTOA 18. Freiburg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993.

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  • Whitehouse, Harvey. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004.

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1

The contribution presented here owes many suggestions to the “Power of Parables Conference: Narrative and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity” conference held in Utrecht, June 24–26, 2019. I am very much indebted to Dr Brian McNeil and Albert Gootjes for correcting my English.

2

This typology of Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1910) was accepted by Rudolf Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 5th ed., FRLANT 12 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961), 179−222.

3

Ruben Zimmermann et al., Kompendium der Gleichnisse Jesu (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007), 3−28; Ruben Zimmermann, “Parabeln—sonst nichts! Gattungsbestimmung jenseits der Klassifikation in ‘Bildwort,’ ‘Gleichnis,’ ‘Parabel,’ und ‘Beispielerzählung,’” in Hermeneutik der Gleichnisse Jesu: Methodische Neuansätze zum Verstehen urchristlicher Parabeltexte, ed. Ruben Zimmermann, WUNT 231 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 383−419.

4

Ronit Nikolsky, István Czachesz, Frederick S. Tappenden, and Tamás Biró, Language, Cognition, and Biblical Exegesis: Interpreting Minds (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), especially István Czachesz and Gerd Theissen, “Cognitive Science and Biblical Exegesis,” 13−39; cf. also the contribution of Ronit Nikolsky in this volume.

5

See also István Czachesz and Gerd Theissen, “Kognitive Ansätze in der Exegese. Ihr Beitrag zur methodischen Erforschung der Bibel,” in Kontraintuitivität und Paradoxie. Zur kognitiven Analyse des urchristlichen Glaubens, ed. Gerd Theissen, Lung Pun Chan, and István Czachesz, BVB 29 (Münster: LIT, 2017), 31–65.

6

István Czachesz, Cognitive Science and the New Testament: A New Approach to Early Christian Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

7

Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

8

See Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004). On the difference between episodic and semantic memory, see Philip G. Zimbardo, Psychologie, ed. Siegfried Hoppe-Graff, 6th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1995), 327−332.

9

See Petra von Gemünden, Vegetationsmetaphorik im Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt: Eine Bildfelduntersuchung, NTOA 18 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 1−49. This systematic presentation of different forms of pictorial texts corresponds to the mainstream of literary criticism and is a good basis for further research.

10

See Jens Schröter, “Der ‘erinnerte Jesus’: Erinnerung als geschichtshermeneutisches Paradigma der Jesusforschung,” in Jesus Handbuch, ed. Jens Schröter, Lena Nogossek, and Christine Jacobi (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 112−124.

11

Anthony Le Donne, Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 35−36.

12

See Jülicher, Gleichnisreden, 2:7−8; Bultmann, Synoptische Tradition, 184−192. Zimmermann, “Parabeln—sonst nichts!,” 400, has a table of seven parabolai. He combines the parable of the Treasure and the Pearl. The parabolē of the Yeast is missing. On the other hand, he adds, perhaps erroneously (?), the parabolē of the Playing Children (Luke 7:31−35/ Matt 11:16–19). Both Jülicher and Bultmann classify this parabolē as a similitude.

13

Martin Dibelius, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1933), 252. Likewise, Bultmann, Synoptische Tradition, 188, reckons with transitional forms between similitudes and parables: “Ist der prinzipielle Unterschied … auch klar, so ist doch im Einzelnen der Übergang fließend.”

14

See Ilkka Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion, CC 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 217–225.

15

Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner differentiate between two “input-spaces” and a third “generic space” that selects elements from the input spaces and creates a fourth “blended space”; see Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way we Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2003). A good introduction to the “blending theory” with an application to rabbinical parables is Albertina Oegema, “Negotiating Paternal Authority and Filial Agency: Fathers and Sons in Early Rabbinic Parables,” QI 30 (PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2021), 74−85.

16

Von Gemünden, Vegetationsmetaphorik im Neuen Testament, 209−234, esp. 211f.

17

See Gerd Theissen, “Die Bilderwelt des Gottesreichs. Familien- und Pflanzenmetaphorik bei Johannes dem Täufer und Jesus von Nazareth,” in Sprachbilder und Bildsprache: Studien zur Kontextualisierung biblischer Texte, ed. Markus Lau, Karl Matthias Schmidt, and Thomas Schumacher, NTOA 121 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 173−199.

18

Ulrich Luz calls them both “Gleichnisse” and “Parabeln”; Ulrich Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (Mt 8–17), EKKNT I/2 (Zürich: Benziger Verlag; Neukirchen Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1990), 348−356.

19

Albertina Oegema and Annette Merz, “Kinder als handelnde Subjekte in neutestamentlichen und rabbinischen Gleichnissen,” ZNT 48 (2021): 27−43.

20

The rabbinic parables have been very successful as a genre in creating new parables in order to interpret biblical texts. But in quite another way, the parables of Jesus were also very successful. It is true that they did not inspire the creation of new parables as means of interpretation, but they were interpreted again and again within the Christian worship by sermons: about 25 percent of the texts in the oldest order of the pericopes were parables or contained parables.

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The Power of Parables

Essays on the Comparative Study of Jewish and Christian Parables

Series:  Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series, Volume: 39

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