LA MODIFICACIÓN NÚMERO ACTA APROBADO

As it was with the history of interpretation as a whole, the interpretation of parables began with the allegorical method. The principle behind this was that “the parables were considered to be simple for those on the outside, to whom the real meanings, the mysteries were hidden. These belonged only to the Church and could be uncovered by means of an allegory” (Fee and Stuart, 1993).

The problem with this method was same as the discussion on allegorical method of interpretation in Module One Unit Two. Let us use an example from this period: the interpretation of Saint Augustine on the parable of the Good Samaritan. St. Augustine sees the traveller as Adam, Jerusalem as the heavenly city from which Adam fell and used Jericho to mean Adam‟s mortality. The thieves were the devil and his demons who stripped him of his immortality and left him half dead (that is living as a man but spiritually dead). The Priest and Levite represent the ministry of the Old Testament and the Samaritan is Christ. As interesting as this interpretation may be, I can say with all certainty that this is not what Jesus intended to teach.

However, despite the gross inadequacy of the allegorical method, it flourished in the interpretation of parables from the early ages of the church through the Middle Ages. It is in this vein that Herrrick said “obviously, such allegorizing has disastrous affects on the practical authority of the Bible for its message becomes completely obscured and there is no reasonable method whereby we can adjudicate between competing interpretations.”

The Reformation

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This period has been tagged the era of great religious revolution. Before this period, learning seems to be the sole possession of the church, but the Renaissance prepared the way for the Reformation which began on the eve of All Saints‟ Day, 31 October 1517 when Martin Luther in his 95 theses challenges the church‟s position on indulgences. The Reformation thus led to systematic and scientific approach to the study of the Bible. Thus, people like Martin Luther began to reject allegorical interpretation of the parables.

However, this period was largely one of transition in that while some scholars depart from the allegorical method, some like Calvin stuck to it as the only way of interpreting the parables.

The Post-Reformation to the Contemporary Day

The Post-Reformation period led to the modern approach to the interpretation of parables. It began with Adolf Julicher in 1888. It was Julicher who nailed the coffin of allegorical interpretation when in his book Die Gleichnisreden Jesu he “argued strongly that parables contain a single picture and teach a single point” (Riesenfeld, 1970). Since Julicher, however, many scholars had built on his foundation. Only three of these are important here and their positions will be discussed briefly.

The first person to build on Julicher‟s work was C. H. Dodd. Because of the fruit of form criticism, Dodd proposed that the understanding of parable must include an enquiry into the life situation of the parable. He went further to identify two life situations for the parable: that of “Jesus ministry and that of the evangelist and his readers. Dodd (1961) writes:

The original “setting in life of any authentic saying of Jesus was of course provided by the actual conditions of His ministry. But the form critics rightly call our attention to the fact that the formed tradition of His teaching as it reaches us, has often been affected by the changed condition under His followers lived during the period between His death and the completion of our Gospel.

He then concluded that for proper understanding of a parable, one may have to remove a parable from its setting in the Church to that of Jesus‟ life.

J. Jeremias followed C. H. Dodd. He only moved a step away from Dodd by identifying the steps to be taken in removing a parable from its setting in the Church to that of Jesus‟ life.

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K. E. Bailey is the next important scholar in this realm. He agreed that the historical approach as taken by Dodd and Jeremias is right. He, however, proposed what can be termed a cultural angle to the historical approach. So, he proposed that the historical approach „must be re-examined in the light of additional evidence from the cultural milieu of the parables (and that) the aesthetics must be viewed in the light of Oriental literary forms” (Bailey, 1976).

After these ones have written myriads of interpretative approaches that are definitely out of tune with the spirit of the biblical age and definitely not too good methods for interpreting parables. Mark Bailey (1998) describes the interpretative enterprise as follows:

More recent trends have tended to see the parables as literary art at the expense of historical interpretation. Consequently some writers have returned to the approach that sees multiple meanings based on the subjective philosophical self-understanding of the interpreters rather than the historical objectivity of Jesus and His message. The past fifteen years or so have been dominated by a "sophisticated" literary criticism and structuralism which seems to be more concerned with the style of argumentation than the historical interpretation. From the pendulum-like extremes of Jülicher and the multiple meanings allowed by the extremes of the philosophical linguistic movement, a more cautious balance is being sought by recent conservative writers.

It is within this period that the advent of a reader-response approach to scripture berthed. An important example of this is the phenomenological approach of R. W. Funk and J. D. Crossan which paid more attention to the original impact and “surprising reversal” of the parable. You should note that “though evangelicals will find much useful material here, the presuppositions with which Funk and Crossan approach the text are at odds with scripture‟s self claims and evangelical understandings of scripture‟s divine inspiration” (Herrick).

Another interesting approach of this period came through Dan O. Via who proposed what is called the aesthetic-rhetorical approach that laid emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of the parables themselves. In this approach, Via sees the internal pattern of the parables as a clue to their interpretation and uses Aristotelian categories of comic and tragic plot lines to elucidate their meaning.

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It is cheering to know that in the last few years however, sanity has returned to the enterprise authors like Robert Stein, David Wenham, Craig Blomberg, and John Sider have sought to interpret Jesus' parables in a more conservatively manner after the interpretation have gone full swing and seemed to have retuned to the allegorical tendencies of the Early church era to the Middle Ages.

Self-Assessment Exercise

List the names of important scholars in each phase of the interpretation of parables mentioning their contributions to the interpretation of parables.