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The Modem Interpretation of the Parables of Jesus and the Problem of Hermeneutics

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The Modem Interpretation of the Parables of Jesus and the Problem of Hermeneutics The Modem Interpretation of the Parables of Jesus and the Problem of Hermeneutics NORMAN PERRIN Professor of New Testament Divinity School, University of Chicago The dynamic interaction between text and interpreter is the heart of the hermeneutical enterprise. The challenge of the parable and the interpretative response it has provoked disclose and display this interaction more fully than any other contemporary interpretative work. HE MODERN hermeneutical discussion has made us all aware of Tthe ways in which an exegete's presuppositions affect his exegesis, and there is no plainer example of this than the exegesis of the parables of Jesus. Here the exegete's theological position, his fundamental con­ cern, his methodological presuppositions, his Vorverständnis, can play a quite surprisingly large role in the way in which the parables are finally understood. The purpose of this article is to illustrate this point in con­ nection with the work of a number of very important interpreters of the parables and then to offer some reflections on the hermeneutical problems thus revealed. Let us begin with the father of the modern interpretation of the para­ bles of Jesus, Adolf Jülicher, whose two-volume Die Gleichnisreden Jesu)- ι. (Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963). I—1888, 18992; II—1899, 19102. 131 is still required reading for anyone who intends a serious study of the parables, although perhaps not all 963 pages ! To read the second volume, or any two hundred pages of it, is to be forced to a series of recognitions. In the first place one comes to reject allegory once and for all. As Jülicher shows over and over how the allegorizing tendency in the New Testa­ ment church and later has obscured an originally vivid and simple picture or story, one finds oneself thinking in terms of cobwebs being swept away. Then, next, the reader becomes convinced of Jülicher's further contention that a parable must have had an original point, and only one, that its first hearers must have been able readily to grasp. Such vivid simplicity can­ not have been meant to be obscure in meaning. So far so good. But then one comes to the meanings which Jülicher himself finds in the various parables; at first they too are convincing but after a while one begins to wonder. The House Built on Sand (Matt. 7124-27 par.) has the point that hearing and not doing in the case of Jesus' message is as senseless as building a house without bothering about the foundations (II, 266). The Friend at Midnight (Luke 11:5-8) is intended to encourage the hearers to constancy in prayer (II, 276), as is The Widow and The Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1-8; II, 288). The Great Supper (Matt. 22:1- 14 par.) makes the point that as with the feast-giver, so with God; if Jesus' first hearers do not respond, then others will be given the oppor­ tunity (II, 432). The Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20: 1-16) is concerned with the fact that God has one salvation for all mankind, "for high priest and aristocrat, for tax collector and prostitute" (II, 467). The Sower (Mark 4:3-9, 14-20 par.) is a story to which the hearers would have responded with the recognition that such is indeed the way it is in sowing and harvesting; as they would also have readily made the proper application that it is this way too with the word of God in men's hearts (II, 536). The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) teaches that a self-sacrificial act of love is the most valuable thing in the eyes of men and of God. No privilege of office or birth can take its place (II, 596). Each of us should read Jülicher for himself and make his own list; but the result would, I believe, always be the same: about halfway through we become uneasy. In my case at about the conjunction of The Laborers in the Vineyard and The Sower I began to realize that one could put together Jülicher's interpretations of the various parables and come up with a manifesto of nineteenth-century German theological lib- 132 The Modern Interpretation of the Parables of Jesus and the Problem of Hermeneutics Interpretation eralism. At that point I recalled that in the first volume there are some very romantic passages about Jesus' mastery of the parabolic idiom. For example : In his parables Jesus has bequeathed to us a masterpiece of popular speech. He is in this area the master; so far as we know no one else has ever approached his achievement .... The master is here no one's pupil, he has stolen no one's pen or brush. What he offers is his own creation ( Ι, 182 ). Moreover, among Jülicher's other publications is a classic statement of the relationship between Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity, as this was seen at the height of the German liberal Leben-Jesn-Forschung.2 All in all one begins to ask questions about the relationship between Jülicher's theological position as a representative of nineteenth-century German liberalism and his interpretation of the parables of Jesus. After Jülicher, the next step forward in the interpretation of the parables of Jesus to be considered here came through the work of Joachim Jeremías whose Die Gleichnisse Jesu3 has developed through the years into the single most important book on the parables and perhaps the greatest single contribution to modern knowledge of the historical Jesus.4 Jeremías himself is self-confessedly concerned to recover the historical words of Jesus because they are, for him, the source of revelation and authority. He is aware of the fact that Albert Schweitzer was able to raise very serious questions about the "quest of the historical Jesus" and that form criticism has made that quest immeasurably more difficult. Nonetheless, he continues it because he is convinced that with proper attention to such things as the historical facts about thought and life in first-century Palestine (upon which he has spent a lifetime of study and about which he probably knows more than anyone alive) and the escha- tology of Jesus, Schweitzer's questions can be met. At the same time he welcomes form criticism with its emphasis upon the history of the tradi­ tion because it enabled him to write a history of the transmission of the 2. "Die Religion Jesu und die Anfänge des Christentums" in Die Kultur der Gegenwart, P. Kinneberg, ed. I, [1906]. 3. (Zürich, Zwingli-Verlag, 1947). Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testa­ ments, No. 11. 4. Since Jeremías constantly revises and rewrites his major books, one should note that the first German edition appeared in 1947 and that the subsequent substantial revisions appeared in the third and the sixth editions (1954 and 1963 respectively). The first English translation was from the third and the revised translation from the sixth German edition. 133 parables in the tradition of the church. His work, in effect, consists of writing a history of the parabolic tradition, establishing the earliest form and then demonstrating the authenticity of many of the parables by means of the criterion of dissimilarity (parable and not allegory, the eschatology of Jesus and not of the early church, etc. ), and by means of linguistic and environmental factors (Aramaic language; the situation and conditions of first-century Palestine). Then he interprets the recon­ structed original parable by setting it in the context of the ministry of Jesus, and especially in the context of the eschatology of Jesus.5 As a sample of his work, let us take his interpretation of The Great Supper (Matt. 22:1-14 par.). Jülicher's interpretation of it has been given above. From the versions in Matthew and Luke, Jeremías recon­ structed an original story, which the subsequent discovery of the Gospel of Thomas proved correct, a story of a feast-giver who filled his banquet hall with beggars after his original guests unanimously rejected an in­ vitation they had initially accepted. This, he then showed, had its roots in a well-known Palestinian story of a rich tax collector and a poor schol­ ar, a story also used in Luke 16:19-31 (The Rich Man and Lazarus). The apparent unreality of the parable—the unanimity of the rejection of the original invitation by the intended guests and the deliberate invitation of the beggars and homeless in their place—thus becomes explicable in terms of the mores of first-century Palestine on the basis of a well-attested story concerning a rich tax collector, one Bar Macyan. Further, there is a note of joy throughout the parable; and its message is : God fulfills his promises and comes forward out of his hiddenness. But if the "children of the kingdom," the theologians and the pious circles, pay no heed to his call, the despised and the ungodly will take their place; the others will receive nothing but a "too late" from behind the closed doors of the banquet hall.6 What is absolutely typical of Jeremías here is the careful reconstruction of the original, the interpretation in terms of what the first-century Pales­ tinian hearers would have known and taken for granted, and an inter­ pretation in terms of the content of the message of Jesus. So far as the first and second of these things are concerned, he cannot be faulted. The 5. Wherein the decisive impulse came to him, as he himself makes clear, through G. H. Dodd's The Parables of the Kingdom (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936).
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