In his public ministry he never taught without using parables.
MARK 4:34
Looking for the most authentic teachings of Jesus?
Even the more skeptical Bible scholars—those who question the authenticity of anything and everything in the Bible—point to Jesus’ parables.
These experts say that stories such as the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son are Jesus’ teachings that suffered least from two corrupting influences:
• the fractured memory of the Gospel writers; and
• add-on comments by well-meaning scribes who later made copies of the Gospels and couldn’t resist inserting their own insights.
What made these parables so tamperproof?
Stories are easy to remember. We might not recall much of a sermon or a lecture, but good stories stick in the cobwebs of our memory like juicy flies in a spider’s trap.
Bible experts say there are several clues that Jesus’ parables are genuine.
They track with his preaching. The parables sum up his core ideas about how people should live as citizens of God’s kingdom.
They clash with the values of Jewish leaders. Many of his parables criticized the teaching and behavior of Jewish leaders in power. This would have angered those leaders. And it certainly did, according to the four Gospel writers and several Roman historians from the first century.
They draw their images from Jesus’ slice of history. Had the stories been added later, the scenes wouldn’t track so well with what archaeology and literature from the first century reveal about life in Galilee during Jesus’ day.
People before Jesus seldom used parables. Though a few notables, such as Plato and Aristotle, used parables before Jesus, there’s no evidence that anyone used them a lot. One-third of Jesus’ New Testament teachings are parables.
People after Jesus seldom used parables. Hardly any parables show up in ancient Christian writings outside the Gospels—not in the rest of the New Testament or in books written later by church leaders. This suggests that no one did parables like Jesus—before him or after him. They were his trademark.
Bible scholars get into yelling matches over this. They can’t seem to agree on how to define a parable.
The old standby is that a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. That certainly works with many parables, such as the most famous: the fictional story of a Samaritan man helping a robbery victim after a couple of Jewish leaders refused to lift a finger. That’s a story set on earth. But it teaches a spiritual lesson by giving a practical example of what it means to “love your neighbor.”
But what about this story, also widely considered a parable: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough” (Matthew 13:33).
Where’s the story? And where on earth is the heavenly meaning? This two-line snippet sounds more like a riddle than a parable.
A comparison, sometimes. Not all of Jesus’ parables are stories complete with a plot, hero, and villain. Some are similes—a short sentence or two that compares something in the physical world to something in the spiritual world.
“What is the Kingdom of God like? How can I illustrate it? It is like a tiny mustard seed that a man planted in a garden; it grows and becomes a tree, and the birds make nests in its branches” (Luke 13:18–19).
Using word pictures from planet Earth, Jesus managed to give his listeners a peek into the spiritual dimension. God’s kingdom will start small, like a tiny mustard seed or a small plug of yeast—or a lone rabbi and his 12 disciples.
Hidden meaning, sometimes. Many parables hide their meaning from all but the teacher’s closest followers. That was to help keep the teacher from getting in trouble with the authorities.
The Greek philosopher Plato used this approach 400 years before Jesus, with good reason. His mentor was Socrates—a philosopher whose ideas so offended the sensibilities of some good citizens that he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to execute himself by drinking poisonous hemlock. Afterward, when Plato taught in public, he sometimes remained cryptic. But alone with his devoted students, he let down his guard and explained himself more fully.
Jesus did the same. He said so when his disciples asked why he taught with parables: “You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given” (Matthew 13:11–12). So after Jesus taught some of the more perplexing parables to the crowds, “when he was alone with his disciples, he explained everything to them” (Mark 4:34).
Clear meaning, sometimes. On the other hand, many parables were clear enough for even Jesus’ most violent enemies to understand. In one such parable, Jesus told a story about evil tenant farmers who refused to obey the landowner—going so far as to murder the landowner’s son.
“When the leading priests and Pharisees heard this parable, they realized he was telling the story against them—they were the wicked farmers” (Matthew 21:45).
Both types of parables, Jesus said, fulfilled prophecy.
• Parables easy to understand fulfilled a psalm: “I will speak to you in parables. I will explain things hidden since the creation of the world” (Matthew 13:35).
• Parables reserved for devoted followers of Jesus fulfilled a prediction from Isaiah: “When you hear what I say, you will not understand…. For the hearts of these people are hardened, and their ears cannot hear” (Matthew 13:14–15).
A story, usually. Most of Jesus’ parables spin around a story, a word picture that most of his listeners could conjure up in their mind’s eye. The scenes were from their time and place in history.
Many of his parables dealt with farming: workers in a vineyard, a farmer spreading seed, and a farmer’s question about what to do with weeds in a wheat field. Galilee, where Jesus taught, was known for its fertile farmland. The Jewish historian Josephus, from Jesus’ century, said there were only two large cities in the region. The rest was countryside and small farming communities.
A spiritual meaning, always. The stories Jesus told pulled double duty. They were never just stories. The farmer throwing seed into his field wasn’t just a story about agriculture. From this mental image, listeners were supposed to make the connection to the spiritual message of how the Kingdom of God grows—with Christians spreading the teachings of Jesus like seeds scattered in a field. In fact, most of Jesus’ parables are about God’s Kingdom: what it’s like and how God’s people are supposed to live as citizens of that Kingdom.
One main meaning, often. Parables usually have one big idea pushing them. So say most Bible scholars—as least for the past 100 years.
But for about 1,900 years before that, most scholars searched for hidden messages in every fleeting detail. They treated the parables as allegories—with every element symbolizing something else.
There is some of that going on in many of Jesus’ parables. In the story of the Prodigal Son, for example, the father represents God patiently waiting for his lost children to come home. But some early scholars took the symbolism overboard, sometimes using the technique to manufacture ammunition for a war of ideas they were waging with others in the church.
Take, for example, the parable about mixing yeast into “three measures of flour” (Luke 13:21). Here’s what some early church leaders said the three scoops of flour represented:
• Three major sections of the Bible: law, prophets, and Gospels—uniting the sacred writings of Jews and Christians (Hilary Poitiers, about AD 315–367)
• Jews, Greeks, and Samaritans—uniting all races (Theodore of Mopsuestia, about AD 350–429)
• Three passions of the soul: reason that produces good judgment; anger so we can hate evil; and desire so we can aspire to live a good life (Jerome, about AD 347–420)
Symbolism in the details, sometimes. There are times when details in a parable represent something else. Jesus made that clear when he explained to his disciples the parable about a farmer whose enemy planted weeds among the farmer’s wheat. In the parable, Jesus said the farmer decided not to pull the weeds, for fear of damaging the wheat. In the early stages of growth, it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between the wheat and the weeds, or darnel ryegrass with poisonous seeds. The farmer would separate the two at harvesttime.
The disciples didn’t understand the point of the story. So Jesus explained.
“The Son of Man is the farmer who plants the good seed. The field is the world, and the good seed represents the people of the Kingdom. The weeds are the people who belong to the evil one. The enemy who planted the weeds among the wheat is the devil. The harvest is the end of the world, and the harvesters are the angels. Just as the weeds are sorted out and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the world. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will remove from his Kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil” (Matthew 13:37–41).
Big surprise in little package, often. Many of Jesus’ parables come to us as wisdom in a box, gift wrapped—and waiting to blow up in our faces like a balloon loaded with flour.
Jesus tells a simple story. But it’s rigged. He may have rigged it to blow up the moment he finished his last sentence. Other times, he let the listeners take the story home, where it would blow up once they figured out what the story meant.
It’s the story’s meaning that’s volatile.
Jesus may have gotten the idea for explosive stories from the prophet Nathan. The prophet used this kind of parable to prod King David into repenting of his adultery with Bathsheba. David had a harem of at least seven wives, yet he stole the only wife of one of his soldiers who was away at war, fighting for king and country.
If Nathan had confronted David directly, the king could have raised his defenses in reflex—refusing to give the matter any thought. But Nathan arranged for the king to think first and decide later about how to respond. Nathan told a story about a rich man who owned vast herds but who stole the one and only lamb of a poor man—and then slaughtered the pet lamb for a meal.
Livid, David said a man like that deserved to die.
“You are that man!” Nathan answered (2 Samuel 12:7).
It was just a short story—a word picture wrapped in a tiny package. But it packed a wallop of a surprise that changed David’s life. He repented right away. And God forgave him.
That’s what Jesus did with many of his parables. He confronted his listeners with their sinful behavior or their wrongly preconceived notions, giving them a chance to think first and act later.
Figuring out what a parable means isn’t an exact science. But we get a little help from the times when Jesus explained the meaning to his confused disciples. There are other guidelines that Bible scholars recommend as well.
Look for code words. Many figures of speech were well-known symbols in the Old Testament and other Jewish writings.
God is often described as a ruler, judge, landowner, or parent. That helps identify him as the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son and the landowner in the story of the tenant farmers who killed the landowner’s son.
Jewish people often appear as servants, children, a vine, or a flock. Judgment Day was often described as a harvest, as seen in the parable about separating grain stalks from weeds. And God’s Kingdom was often described as a bountiful feast or a joyful wedding.
Compare the retelling in other Gospels. One Gospel writer might have added a detail that another skipped.
In Luke 14, Jesus tells a parable about a rich man who prepared a huge feast, but the invited guests made excuses for not coming. So the man invited the poor, the crippled, and the blind—anyone and everyone. Matthew 22 tells much the same parable, identifying it as a wedding feast.
Read together, these two parables seem to say that the Jews—God’s chosen people—were the ones first invited into the wedding banquet (God’s Kingdom). But they by and large refused (as seen later in the crucifixion of God’s Son). So God would invite others (the rest of the world) to come and enjoy the celebration (heaven).
Pay attention to other parables or teachings nearby. The Gospel writers sometimes arranged the parables by topic. Luke 15, for example, is a chapter about finding something that’s lost. And Luke stacks the chapter with three parables on the topic: lost sheep, lost coin, and lost (prodigal) son.
The context helps us understand the point of the three parables. Jesus used these stories to answer the complaint of Jewish scholars, who said he shouldn’t be associating with “tax collectors and other notorious sinners … even eating with them!” (Luke 15:1–2). But Jesus was saying that these sinners were lost, and he was on a mission to find them—because God was waiting for them with a broken heart. That was the point of the parable about the father waiting for his prodigal son to come home.
Pay attention to the end of the parable. The key to a parable often lies in the last few words.
That’s how the Jewish leaders figured out they were the evil farmers in the story of the tenant farmers who killed the landowner’s son. In the story, the landowner rents his vineyard to several farmers. But at harvest time, they refuse to give him his share of the crops. Instead, they kill his servants who are sent to collect. Finally, the patient landowner gives them one more chance, sending his own son. But the farmers murder him, too.
Jesus asked the Jewish leaders what they thought the landowner would do to the farmers.
“He will put the wicked men to a horrible death,” they answered, “and lease the vineyard to others who will give him his share of the crop after each harvest” (Matthew 21:41).
Jesus responded by wrapping up his parable with a quote from the Psalms—one that the Jewish leaders knew well: “The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.” To make sure they got the message, he added a comment: “The Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that will produce the proper fruit” (Matthew 21:42–43).
These leaders of the Jewish nation were the “builders” who had rejected God’s plan for their nation. And they were the evil farmers destined to lose their land because of it.
Within a couple of decades, Christianity became a predominantly non-Jewish movement. And within about 40 years, the Jews were a people without a homeland—banned from their Holy City of Jerusalem for rebelling against Rome.
About 400 years before Jesus, the Greek philosopher Plato created a parable to make a point.
His point: We can learn very little through our senses, but a great deal through open-minded reason.
PARABLES OF THE RABBIS
Though historians have collected about 2,000 ancient parables from Jewish teachers, no one seemed to wield them as often as Jesus—or as skillfully.
Yet some of the rabbis’ parables sound very much like those of Jesus.
Compare Jesus’ parable about wisdom to a rabbi’s parable published a couple of centuries later in the Mishnah, a collection of sacred Jewish writings.
“[A wise person] builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock…. [A foolish person] builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash. “JESUS, MATTHEW 7:24–27
“What can we say about a man whose wisdom outweighs his good deeds? He is like a tree with many branches and few roots. The wind will easily uproot the tree, knocking it over. What can we say about a man whose good deeds outweigh his wisdom? He is like a tree with few branches but many roots. No wind in the world can move it.”
SAYINGS OF THE JEWISH FATHERS
(HEBREW: PIRQE AVOT 3:27,
AUTHOR’S PARAPHRASE)
His parable: Allegory of the Cave.
Plato painted a word picture of prisoners chained their entire lives below ground in a cave, unable even to turn their heads. All they could see were shadows of themselves and others projected in front of them on the cave wall. The words they heard, as far as they could tell, came from the shadow figures.
Released one bright day, these prisoners made the painful, eye-squinting ascent from the cave to discover that everything they thought they knew was just a shadow of reality. Their upward journey out of the cave illustrated how reason allows us to see what we otherwise never would have imagined.