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Memory and Jesus' Parables journal for the study of the historical jesus 16 (2018) 156-172 brill.com/jshj Memory and Jesus’ Parables J.P. Meier’s explosion and the restoration of the ‘Bedrock’ of Jesus’ Speech Ruben Zimmermann Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz [email protected] Abstract This article interacts with John P. Meier’s view concerning the parables that can be shown to be “authentic,” i.e., shown to have been uttered by the historical Jesus. His highly critical and largely negative result (only four parables remaining parables of Jesus) demonstrates once more that historical Jesus research that is intrinsically tied to questions of authenticity has run its course. Such an approach can only lead to minimalistic results and destroys the sources that we have. By contrast, the so-called memory approach tries to understand the process and result of remembering Jesus as a parable teller. Collective memory requires typification and repetition in order to bring the past to mind in a remembering community. Parables as a genre are such media of collective memory that shape and form not only the memory itself, but also the identity of the remembering community. Thus, the many parables of Jesus in early Christian writings are more than ever an indispensable source for historical research on the remembered Jesus, a point that is demonstrated in the final section of this ar- ticle using kingdom parables as a test case. Keywords Jesus – parable – genre – John P. Meier – collective memory – historical Jesus research – history – kingdom parables At the beginning of this essay I will set forth two contradictory statements: First: The historical Jesus did not tell parables. Second: The remembered Jesus told many parables, in particular Kingdom-parables. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/17455197-01602006Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:52:25AM via free access <UN> Memory and Jesus’ Parables 157 In the following, these two sentences are developed in three steps. First, I will take up the thesis of John P. Meier’s latest volume in his work on the histori- cal Jesus, a volume that is devoted to parables. Meier is both a prominent and preeminent example of the manner in which parable research is applied to historical Jesus research. Second, I will present my own approach to the study of the parables within the context of the memory approach to Jesus. Third, and finally, the differences in the two approaches will be examined using the “Kingdom of God” parables as an example. 1 A Dead End in Historical Jesus Research–Engaging the Work of J.P. Meier Throughout the various stages of historical Jesus studies, scholars have agreed that parables represent an authentic voice of Jesus.1 Parables were said to be the “bedrock”2 or the “core of Jesus’ speech,”3 perspectives that supported the view, as Snodgrass puts it, that “the parables are indeed the surest place where we have access to Jesus’ teaching.”4 However, this general consensus in scholarship has now been challenged. According to John P. Meier in his most recent book, volume 5 of the “A Mar- ginal Jew” series, with the subtitle “Probing the Authenticity of the Parables,” the historical Jesus did not tell parables—or, to be more precise, there are only four demonstrably authentic parables passed on to us. These “happy few,”5 as Meier calls them, are (1) The Mustard Seed (Mark 4:30–32par.), (2) the Evil Ten- ants of the Vineyard (Mark 12:1–12par.), (3) The Great Supper (Matt 22:2–14par.) and (4) the Talents/Pounds (Matt 25:14–30). Although Meier himself stated in vol. 2 of the Marginal Jew, “That parables were a privileged form of Jesus’ teaching is a fact accepted by almost all questers 1 See the brief history of research in R. Zimmermann, Puzzling the Parables: Methods and Inter- pretation (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 2015), 58–74. 2 See the oft-cited statement of J. Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (3d ed. New York, NY: Charles Scribner´s Sons, 1963), 7: “The student of the parables of Jesus, as they have been transmit- ted to us in the first three Gospels, may be confident that he stands upon a particularly firm historical foundation. The parables are a fragment of the original rock of tradition.” (German “Urgestein”). 3 See F. Hahn, Theologie des Neuen Testaments i (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 67. 4 K. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rap- ids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 31. 5 John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew. Rethinking the Historical Jesus: Vol. 5: Probing the Authenticity of the Parables (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 230. journal for the study of the historical jesus 16 (2018)Downloaded 156-172 from Brill.com09/26/2021 05:52:25AM via free access <UN> 158 Zimmermann for the historical Jesus …. The abundance of parables in the Synoptic tradition, distributed among all the sources, plus the absence of equally deft, artistic parables elsewhere in the nt, argues well for the origin of many—though not all—of the Gospel parables in Jesus’ teaching,”6 in vol. 5 he has now challenged this view on the basis of, in his words, “seven unfashionable theses.”7 I will cite only thesis seven here: “Relatively few of the parables can meet the test of the criteria of authenticity that other sayings and deeds of Jesus are supposed to meet.”8 Whereas throughout vols. 1–4 Meier asserts that “authenticity could be supported by one or more of the criteria of historicity,” in vol. 5 “such a positive outcome is often not to be had.… In most instances, no criterion of historicity can argue convincingly for the origin of a given parable in the mouth of the historical Jesus.”9 As is well known, Meier is an advocate of the criteria approach in its purest form. In the recently-published vol. 5 of his work, he repeats the “five primary criteria,” which Meier views as having “proven themselves especially useful:10” (1) Criterion of Embarrassment (2) Criterion of Discontinuity (3) Criterion of Multiple Attestation (4) Criterion of Coherence (5) Criterion of Jesus’ Rejection and Execution It is readily apparent that the significant amount of the parable tradition found in the Matthean and Lukan Sondergut fails with regard to the criterion of mul- tiple attestation. “Only the Mustard Seed, as a Mark-Q overlap, clearly enjoys multiple attestation.”11 More difficult to evaluate is the question concerning “embarrassment”; for such a query, at its core, contradicts the multiplicity of 6 John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew. Rethinking the Historical Jesus: Vol. 2: Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University press, 1994), 145. 7 See Meier, Probing the Authenticity, 30–82. 8 This is the second part of thesis seven. It starts with: “Relatively few of the Synoptic par- ables can be attributed to the historical Jesus with a good degree of probability,” Meier, Probing the Authenticity, 48. 9 Meier, Probing the Authenticity, 5. 10 Meier, Probing the Authenticity, 12–17. In addition to this he also mentions the “Secondary (or Dubious) Criteria” including “Traces of the Aramaic language” and “echoes of the ear- ly 1st-century Palestinian environment” or “nature of a narrative”. Meier, however, states, that “secondary criteria offer no significant help in detecting parables that come from Jesus” (Meier, Probing the Authenticity, 17). 11 Meier, Probing the Authenticity, 194. journal for the study of the historicalDownloaded jesus from 16 Brill.com09/26/2021 (2018) 156-172 05:52:25AM via free access <UN> Memory and Jesus’ Parables 159 meaning inherent in the parable genre. As Meier recognizes, “an ingenious modern critic is free to use his or her skill to interpret a parable in an em- barrassing or shocking way, but then the next critic is equally free to offer a different and nonshocking interpretation.”12 This observation leads Meier to the following conclusion: no parable fulfills the criterion of “embarrassment.” With a view towards the criterion of “discontinuity,” Meier considers, on the one hand, the ot and Jewish meshalim and, on the other hand, the oral tradi- tion of early Christian communities. Here Meier considers it highly unlikely that “there was a chain or group of oral tradents who preserved, repeated, and handed down Jesus’ authentic parables for three or four decades.”13 In similar fashion, Meier considers the other criteria and finds all of them wanting, re- sulting in the conclusion that the criteria approach can only lead to a negative result with regard to the parables.14 In addition to the criteria approach based examination of the historical au- thenticity of the parables, Meier also represents those embracing redaction- critical argumentation. Within the context of his consideration of each of the sources (chapter 39), Meier argues that the parables are embedded so tightly into their context that it is hardly possible to dissolve original and authentic material from it. The example of the parable of the Good Samaritan, one of the best-known parables of Jesus15 and a parable that is placed second in the list of 22 authentic parables of Jesus set forth by the Jesus Seminar,16 serves to highlight this point. 12 Meier, Probing the Authenticity, 52. With regard to the parable of the leaven, Meier states, that “some authors claim that in ancient literature leaven was always as symbol of cor- ruption. Therefore, its appearance in the parable of the Leaven as a positive symbol of the kingdom of God is the sort of discontinuous and/or embarrassing rhetoric that one would expect from the historical Jesus.
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