The Parables of the Kingdom

[John Reece]

Note to Geert van den Bos and all other cabalists: please, do not post anything in this thread.

The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961), by the late C. H. Dodd, is an out-of-print book that according to Amazon is available only from 3rd party sellers ― at inflated prices: as much as $146.32 used (only 9 copies available) and as much as $168.56 new (only 3 copies available from) as of 9-12-2015. I hope to present a series of paragraph size excerpts in this thread, because my perusals of so-called prophecy websites have prompted me to think about the difference between assertions about the kingdom of God on said sites compared with what Jesus himself said about the kingdom of God.

On the outside back cover of the paperback edition that I received today from a 3rd party seller via Amazon.com, I find this comment: "A book of which Dr. Alexander Whyte of old would have said to his students, 'Sell you bed and buy it.'" ―BRITISH WEEKLY

[robrecht]

Some people may also want to read his short book, written for a popular audience at the end of his career: The Founder of Christianity, which is on-line here:

http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=2241

[John Reece]

Some people may also want to read his short book, written for a popular audience at the end of his career: The Founder of Christianity, which is on-line here:

http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=2241

Thanks for that!

[John Reece]

From The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961), by C. H. Dodd:

Chapter I

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE GOSPEL PARABLES

The parables are perhaps the most characteristic element in the teaching of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels. They have upon them, taken as a whole, the stamp of a highly individual mind, in spite of the re-handling they have inevitably suffered in the course of transmission. Their appeal to the imagination fixed them in the memory, and gave them a secure place in the tradition. Certainly there is no part of the Gospel record which has for the reader a clearer ring of authenticity.

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[John Reece]

The Parables of the Kingdom

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But the interpretation of the parables is another matter. Here there is no general agreement. In the traditional teaching of the Church for centuries they were treated as allegories, in which each term stood as a cryptogram for an idea, so that the whole had to be de-coded term by term. A famous example is Augustine's interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

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[John Reece]

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A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, and dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely, of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead. The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament, which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the apostle (Paul). The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy, or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the Gospel was new, though it was lawful for him, "to live by the Gospel."―(Quaestiones Evangeliorum, II, 19―slightly abridged.)

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[John Reece]

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This interpretation of the parable in question prevailed until the time of Archbishop Trench, who follows its main lines with even more ingenious elaboration; and it is still to be heard in sermons. To the ordinary person of intelligence who approaches the Gospels with some sense for literature this mystification must appear quite perverse.

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[John Reece]

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Yet it must be confessed that the Gospels themselves give encouragement to this allegorical method of interpretation. Mark interprets the parable of the Sower, and Matthew those of the Tares and the Drag-net, on just such principles; and both attribute their interpretations to Jesus Himself. It was the great merit of Adolf Jülicher, in his work Die Gleicnisreden Jesu (1899-1910) that he applied a thoroughgoing criticism to this method, and showed, not that the allegorical interpretation is in this or that case overdone or fanciful, but that the parables in general do not admit of this method at all, and that the attempts of the evangelists themselves to apply it rest on a misunderstanding.

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[John Reece]

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The crucial passage is Mk. iv. 11-20. Jesus, in answer to a question of His disciples, says: "To you is granted the mystery of the Kingdom of God, but to those outside everything comes in parables, in order that they may look and look but never see, listen and listen but never understand, lest they should be converted and forgiven"; and then follows the interpretation of the parable of the Sower. Now this whole passage is strikingly unlike language and style to the majority of the sayings of Jesus. Its vocabulary includes (within this short space) seven words which are not proper to the rest of the Synoptic record.* All seven are characteristic of the vocabulary of Paul, and most of them occur also in other apostolic writers. These facts create at once a presumption that we have here not a part of the primitive tradition of the words of Jesus, but a piece of apostolic teaching.

*Μυστήριον, οἱ ἐξω, ἀπάτη are not found in the Synoptics outside this passage; ἐπιθυμία is found elsewhere only in Lk. xxii. 15, in a different sense; διωγμός and θλῖψις are found only in Mk. x. 30, and in the Synoptic Apocalypse (Mk. xiii.), passages which are for other reasons suspected of being secondary.

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[John Reece]

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Further, the interpretation offered is confused. The seed is the Word: yet the crop which comes up is composed of various classes of people. The former interpretation suggests the Greek idea of the "seminal word"; while the latter is closely akin to a similitude in the Apocalypse of Ezra: "As the farmer sows over the ground many seeds, and plants a multitude of plants, but in season not all that have been planted take root, so also of those who have sowed in the world not all shall be saved" (II Esdras viii. 41). Two inconsistent lines of interpretation have been mixed up. Yet we may suppose that the Teller of the parable knew exactly what He meant by it.

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[John Reece]

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Again, the idea that the parable is a veiled revelation of the coming behavior of those who heard the teaching of Jesus, under temptation and persecution, is bound up with the view expressed in 11-12 about the purpose of the parables. According to these verses they are spoken in order to prevent those who were not predestined to salvation from understanding the teaching of Jesus. This is surely connected with the doctrine of the primitive Church, accepted with modification by Paul, that the Jewish people to whom Jesus came were by divine providence blinded to the significance of His coming, in order that the mysterious purpose of God might be fulfilled through their rejection of the Messiah. That is to say, this explanation of the purpose of the parables is an answer to a question which arose after the death of Jesus, and the failure of His followers to win the Jewish people. But that He desired not to be understood by the people in general, and therefore clothed His teaching in unintelligible forms, cannot be made credible on any reasonable reading of the Gospels.

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[John Reece]

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The probability is that the parables could have been taken for allegorical mystification only in a non-Jewish environment. Among Jewish teachers the parable was a common and well-understood method of illustration, and the parables of Jesus are similar in form to Rabbinic parables. The question therefore, why He taught in parables, would not be likely to arise, still less to receive such a perplexing answer. In the Hellenistic world, on the other hand, the use of myths, allegorically interpreted, as vehicles of esoteric doctrine, was widespread, and something of the kind would be looked for from Christian teachers. It was this, as much as anything, which set interpretations going in the wrong direction.

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[John Reece]

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The probability is that the parables could have been taken for allegorical mystification only in a non-Jewish environment. Among Jewish teachers the parable was a common and well-understood method of illustration, and the parables of Jesus are similar in form to Rabbinic parables. The question therefore, why He taught in parables, would not be likely to arise, still less to receive such a perplexing answer. In the Hellenistic world, on the other hand, the use of myths, allegorically interpreted, as vehicles of esoteric doctrine, was widespread, and something of the kind would be looked for from Christian teachers. It was this, as much as anything, which set interpretations going on wrong lines.

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[John Reece]

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What then are the parables, if they are not allegories? They are the natural expression of a mind that sees truth in concrete pictures rather than in abstractions. The contrast between the two ways of thinking may be illustrated from two passages in the Gospels. In Mk. xii. 33 a scribe is introduced, who expresses the sentiment: "To love one's neighbor as oneself is better than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." In Mt. v. 23 the same idea is expressed thus: "If you are offering your gift at the alter, and remember there and then that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go and get reconciled with your brother first of all; then come and offer your gift." This concrete, pictorial mode of expression is thoroughly characteristic of the sayings of Jesus. Thus instead of saying, "Beneficence should not be ostentatious," He says, "When you give alms, do not blow your trumpet"; instead of saying, "Wealth is a grave hindrance to true religion," He says, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." In such figurative expressions the germ of the parable is already present.

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[John Reece]

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At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought. Our common language is full of dead metaphors: a thought "strikes" us; young men "sow wild oats"; politicians "explore avenues." Such dead metaphors are often a sign of mental laziness and a substitute for exact thought. But a living metaphor is another thing. "Where the carcass is the vultures will gather"; "a town set on a mountain cannot be hidden"; "make yourselves purses that will not wear out"; "if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch."

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