Charles W. Hedrick,
Many Things in Parable: Jesus and his Modern Critics.
Westminster/John Knox Press, 2004.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Parables
scholar Charles Hedrick several times in this readable volume invokes
what is for him an important maxim regarding the parables, that in the
study of them, all too frequently, “theology trumps realism,” the result
being that what reads like no more than, e.g., a brief anecdote about
inept farmers is elevated to a vehicle of symbolic, theological truth.
He surveys the history of parable interpretation (a mighty handy feature
of the book) just to demonstrate that even some of his Jesus Seminar
colleagues are guilty of this “sin.” And yet I cannot help thinking
that, from first page to last, in Hedrick’s own case “literary theory
has trumped realism.”
The book seems to me to hop
back and forth from one foot to the other. The right foot comes down
(even stomps down) on the side of parables, like all texts, being
polyvalent, amenable to almost infinite meanings in the mind of the
interloping reader depending upon what he brings to it, and yet at the
same time self-contained “aesthetic objects” (as per the old New Critics
and Dan Otto Via) whose meaning lies only and stubbornly within
themselves. As if this hybrid “position” is not already a game of
Twister, the left foot comes down (at least as meaning occurs in my
readerly brain) on the notion that the parables of Jesus do have a
“real” meaning, and that is to describe everyday life in first-century
Palestine. No larger lessons, just stuff about what it was like to be a
farmer (especially a clueless one) or a vintner (especially one who
didn’t know his trade) or a father (especially one ripe for Doctor Phil)
or a shepherd (especially a damn stupid one) or a housewife (a
hopelessly silly one) or a rich farmer (an unbelievably incompetent
one), etc.
The right-footed Hedrick,
it seems to me, ought to be arguing, a la Roland Barthes and Stanley
Fish, that the parables are fields of signifiers which yield meaning
entirely and only as the reader plows them according to the pattern he
imposes onto the text. A la Jacques Derrida (a sainted name to me, not
some cuss word I am trying to defame Hedrick with), Hedrick ought to be
saying that the parables can mean anything precisely because they mean
nothing, have no primary “proper” meaning, in themselves. And sometimes
Hedrick does seem to be saying that, as when he scoffs at Amos Wilder’s
dictum that there remains and resides in the parables some “normative”
meaning traceable back to Jesus. But then why does he seem everywhere
else to deride any and all attempts to find theological, allegorical,
metaphysical meanings in the parables, as if all such were alien,
improper, and contrived? “The facts, ma’am, just the facts”?
I never thought I would be
taking the side of a fundamentalist apologist like Craig Blomberg (whom
I have publicly debated) against Charlie Hedrick (with whom I have
shared snide cracks around the table at the Jesus Seminar), but it seems
to me Blomberg is right in looking to the rabbinic parables as models
for interpreting gospel parables and their symbolic code (the king is
God, etc.). No matter that these particular Jewish parables cannot be
traced definitively back to the time of Jesus, as Hedrick points out.
Rather, it is simply a question of form criticism, that queen of the
sciences. What kind of a thing does a parable seem to be, compared with
the nearest available analogues? And one must throw in for comparison
Buddhist parables, too. Surely the verdict will be that the
interpreter’s predisposition ought to be in the direction of looking for
some larger meaning, of seeing parables as vehicles for such.
Hedrick, Bernard Brandon
Scott, and others take a perverse delight in spotlighting the features
of the parables that imply their characters were buffoons and idiots,
bad farmers, shepherds, etc. Hedrick cites some of these difficulties in
order to rule out the possibility that the storyteller was depicting God
as any of these losers, while Scott takes such features as ironies
pointing to Jesus’ supposed desire to debunk the religious expectations
of his audience. For what it may be worth, I take these details as, some
of them, demonstrating the old dictum of Jülicher, Dodd, and Jeremias,
that it is a mistake to dwell on every detail of a very brief story
which perforce takes shortcuts to get to the punch line. Are we supposed
to ask, “But what about the other ninety-nine sheep? Did he just leave
them to the wolves?” That sounds like the obtuseness of Jesus’
interlocutors in John’s gospel.
Other cases of parable
characters not knowing the elements of farming, building, etc., are
probably better taken as evidence their authors were simply not familiar
with what they were writing about. It would not be so much a case of a
Palestinian Jew inviting laughter from knowing Palestinian Jewish
audiences, as of Diaspora Jewish or Greeks authors making basic mistakes
that neither they nor their gospels’ readers were in a position to
detect till antiquarian researchers like Scott and Hedrick came along
many centuries later. It’s the same goof scholars make when they read
into a gospel story some background information of which the text
appears to be innocent; then the scholars conclude that Jesus was
“radically reversing” the norms of his day, and that this is really the
hitherto-unguessed point of the story. For example, was Jesus really
counting on his hearers being well aware that leaven was always a symbol
of evil, and thus secularizing the idea of the kingdom of God by
comparing it to leaven? Not likely. Was Jesus really courageously
overthrowing purity laws when he let the bleeding woman touch him? Or is
it just that the Greek evangelist didn’t know to factor in the purity
laws when he wrote the story?
And Hedrick is too quick to
throw out the opinion of the evangelists that parables conveyed larger
lessons, their own particular interpretations notwithstanding. The mere
fact that they all regarded the stories as symbolic and requiring
interpretation is at least important evidence as to how the parable
genre was understood by writers closer to Jesus than the Mishnaic
rabbis. It is Hedrick’s approach, by contrast, that seems to come to
earth in a rocket ship from some Marcionite Alien God. The parables, as
he sees them, are just as anachronistic as is Jesus himself for James
Breech (The Silence of Jesus), who shares the essence of
Hedrick’s reading of the parable of the Prodigal Son as that of the
Dysfunctional Family. Breech tells us that we are reading gratuitous
notions into the text when we posit that Jesus even believed in God or
the supernatural!
I am beginning to believe
that exegesis like that of Hedrick, Breech, Bernard Brandon Scott,
Robert Funk, and Kalyan Dey, all of whom make Jesus into a first-century
secularist and materialist throwing out all purity laws and telling
jokes instead of preaching repentance (and let’s not forget Leif Vaage’s
sketch of Jesus as a “party animal’”), are basically employing the old
fundamentalist practice of proof-texting the gospels in favor of their
own theological (or in this case, anti-theological) position. Is the
anxiety to have Jesus agree with one’s own views a pathetic holdover of
an incompletely repudiated fundamentalist past? Or is it a cynical
circumstantial ad hominem attack on the orthodox, trying to yank
their prayer rug out from underneath them? But look at me: here I am
trying to draw a larger generalization out of the bare facts. Sorry.