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    Short Stories by Jesus Participant Guide: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi
    Short Stories by Jesus Participant Guide: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi
    Short Stories by Jesus Participant Guide: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Short Stories by Jesus Participant Guide: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

    By Amy-Jill Levine

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    About this ebook

    Jesus was a skilled storyteller and perceptive teacher who used parables from everyday life to effectively convey his message and meaning. Life in first-century Palestine was very different from our world today, and many traditional interpretations of Jesus' stories ignore this disparity and have often allowed anti-Semitism and misogyny to color their perspectives.


    In this Bible study based on her Short Stories by Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine analyzes these "problems with parables" taking readers back in time to understand how their original Jewish audience understood them. With this revitalized understanding, she interprets these moving stories for the contemporary reader, showing how the parables are not just about Jesus, but are also about us—and when read rightly, still challenge and provoke us two thousand years later.


    This participant guide provides an introduction to the main text as well as further Scripture commentary and reflection questions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781501858178
    Short Stories by Jesus Participant Guide: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi
    Author

    Amy-Jill Levine

    Amy-Jill Levine (“AJ”) is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. An internationally renowned scholar and teacher, she is the author of numerous books including The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner's Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week, Light of the World: A Beginner’s Guide to Advent, Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven, and Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus. She is also the coeditor of the Jewish Annotated New Testament. AJ is the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. In 2021 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. AJ describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who until 2021 taught New Testament in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

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      Book preview

      Short Stories by Jesus Participant Guide - Amy-Jill Levine

      Introduction

      In Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi, Amy-Jill Levine uses her scholarship on first-century Jewish history to hear Jesus as a Jewish teacher speaking to a Jewish audience. Her point is not to dismiss any helpful Christian interpretations that have been made of the parables over the past two thousand years. Rather, she seeks to recover their original provocation and so help to explain why people first decided to follow Jesus. In her work on the parables, she tries to imagine what these short stories would have sounded like to people who had no idea that one day Jesus would be recognized as divine, or even that he would be crucified. How would these people have heard the words of this Jewish storyteller? And how can those same stories, two thousand years later, challenge us to look deep into our own lives?

      Parables are stories that are sometimes only one or two sentences long. Much of Jesus’s teaching was introduced in parables, and the Gospel writers left most of the parables without interpretation so we can figure them out ourselves.

      Every reader will hear something different, and the parables may mean different things over time. Audiences get different interpretations from the parables depending on where they are, what their experiences have been, or what challenges they’re facing in their lives. For example, the story of the Pearl of Great Price might mean more to a woman who owns and appreciates many fine jewels than it would to someone who lacks access to such luxury items. Or it might mean less. Certainly, their understanding of the story, of the merchant who sells all he has to buy a single pearl, and of an expensive and breathtaking piece of jewelry, will be different. Instead of reducing each parable to a single meaning, we do well to leave all avenues open for different interpretations.

      Even as we delve into how the original audience might have heard the parables, we should also be aware of how they affect us in the present day. What makes the parables mysterious, or difficult, Levine writes, is that they challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives. It can be uncomfortable to leave a text open to multiple interpretations, but this may be the challenge inherent in the parables.

      Jesus is not a one size fits all teacher: some people he called to abandon everything; others he asked to provide hospitality. For still others, he simply granted a healing or forgiveness; others he asked to remember his teachings. Paul, too, tells us that different people have different callings and different gifts. Therefore, we should expect to see different things in the parables.

      Levine points out that religion has been defined as designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We know from the parables in the Old Testament that parables serve to do the afflicting. That is, they challenge us to look deep into our hearts, to learn something about ourselves that we may have ignored, to learn more about our faith and our values. If we find that we really like a parable because we’ve got it all figured out so it doesn’t continue to challenge us, we are probably not reading very well.

      The key to a parable, as we will see in this volume, is to figure out what part of it challenges you and makes you uncomfortable. Does the parable afflict you? Then you are probably on the right track.

      We should also resist the urge to turn the parables into allegories or platitudes. When we settle for easy interpretations—be nice like the good Samaritan; we will be forgiven like the prodigal son; we should pray like the widow—we miss the point of parables. Levine advises readers: We might be better off thinking less about what they ‘mean’ and more about what they can ‘do’: remind, provoke, refine, confront, disturb. . . .

      Part of understanding the parables and recognizing their challenge is to dig into the history that surrounds them. Context matters, and context reveals a lot about how and what these parables mean. If we consider the original audience, and the original place and time these stories were told, we hear details and challenges that we might not hear now if we only read them in the comfort of our homes and Christian context. We know who Jesus is, and we might tend to hear his words based on that. But at the time he was telling these stories, there was no Christian context. Jesus was just a Jewish storyteller, one of many, and so how might his stories have resonated with and provoked listeners in the specific times and places they were told?

      One of the values of Levine’s text comes in digging into this history and identifying the original context of these parables. Doing so helps today’s reader separate what is normal from what is absurd. It’s important to know how Jews and Samaritans regarded each other, and how day laborers and vineyard owners figured out their working relationships. It is important to know what options were open to women in antiquity in terms of family life and finances; it is important to know how fathers and sons were expected to relate to each other. If we don’t know anything about Pharisees or tax collectors, or who went into the Temple, we don’t know whether what we are hearing in the parables is something that happens every day or something far out of the ordinary. When parables are read without regard to their historical context, the door is open for incorrect or problematic readings.

      Levine provides a keen analogy for how important context can be to understanding a story. She reminisces about the children’s television cartoon The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and its cast of mysteriously named characters. Children would have seen a moose and a squirrel up to all kinds of shenanigans, endless entertainment for the under-ten set. What children missed, though, was the social satire embedded in the program. Children didn’t know why the bad guys had Russian names like Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. They wouldn’t have associated Boris with Boris Godunov, the czar, let alone the play by Alexander Pushkin or the opera by Modest Mussorgsky; they would not have understood that Natasha was a femme fatale. As a young child, Levine could appreciate the moose and the squirrel, but not the sharp social commentary that the cartoon also offered. She lacked the context.

      Parables are like this. We can understand them as children’s stories and find them amusing or offering a simple moral point. But if we hear them as adults, and if we hear them in their original contexts, they are even more profound. Their deeper meaning depends on an understanding of what’s going on in the world around the stories.

      The context for Jesus’s stories includes not only the historical world of first-century Judea and Galilee within the broader Roman Empire, but also Israel’s sacred scriptures and the echoes they would evoke among Jesus’s Jewish hearers. The parable of the Prodigal Son begins, There was a man who had two sons, and this would immediately remind readers of other men with two sons: Adam’s Cain and Abel, Abraham’s Ishmael and Isaac, Isaac’s Jacob and Esau. Understanding this literary context sheds light on the meanings and expectations in the parable. Similarly, knowing the historical reality behind the parable helps illuminate the subtle interactions and messages it contains. For example, Jesus’s original listeners would have been well aware of the enmity between Jews and Samaritans, and this would have made

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