For some time I’ve been working with the conviction that many, if not most, of Jesus’ parables are not what tradition, as I first learned it, has made of them. Jesus did not code heavenly meanings in earthy stories that his peasant listeners could relate to most easily. It was an entirely different kind of coding – of dangerous thoughts that poor subjects of an oppressive system would have loved to say openly but didn’t dare. Oppressed peoples are often... Read more
Many times in the Gospels and, presumably, many times in historical reality Jesus gets in trouble with authorities over Sabbath rules. Rather, perhaps, than getting in trouble like an inattentive schoolboy, Jesus seems to jump at any chance to stir things up. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis of this post. Jesus courts controversy over the Sabbath and subverts an oppressive social order in the process. This is the seventh post on William R. Herzog II’s Jesus, Justice and... Read more
In a section of Mark’s Gospel that my Bible calls “The Tradition of the Elders,” Jesus argues Sacred Scripture with some Scribes and Pharisees. To argue Scripture is to take a stand in a larger polemic about the nature of God. Often it also envisages divine support for one side or another on a hot-button political issue. Both of these factors animate to Jesus’ harsh criticism of the tradition of the elders. This is the sixth post on William R.... Read more
A rich man asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life. It would seem to be a time for Jesus to come up with some new rules. The laws that the man claims to have followed “since my youth” don’t satisfy. But Jesus didn’t need new laws to support his vision of the God he recognized as Father of the poor. Jesus didn’t replace the old Law, the Torah, with a new one or even upgrade the old Law. What Jesus... Read more
“Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.” (John 2:19) Could Jesus, once a village handyman, have meant that literally? What would the temple that he built in three days be like? This is the fourth post on William R. Herzog II’s Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God. Earlier posts in the series are: The Historical Jesus and the Transcendent God in the Work of William Herzog Context Group Continues the Long History of Witnessing to... Read more
The Healing of the Paralytic (Gospel of Mark 2:1-12) is Jesus’ challenge to the oppressive ways of the temple and its officials. This is the third in a series on William R. Herzog II’s Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God. It considers the first half of Chapter 6, “Something Greater than the Temple is Here.” (Pages 111-132) Previous posts in this series are: The Historical Jesus and the Transcendent God in the Work of William Herzog Context Groups Continues... Read more
A group of scholars called the Context Group has added to the number of people having their say about Jesus and the Bible. Since the 1990’s their special contribution has been to take seriously studies of Jesus’ social, economic, and political environment. (At Patheos’ Messy Inspirations “Fellow Dying Inmate” often refers to context group scholars; e.g. here and here.) William R. Herzog II says the contest group’s work is one of many stages in the search for a usable Jesus of history, a search that... Read more
William T. Herzog’s book Parables as Subversive Speech uses historical-critical methods to unveil a “historical Jesus” behind the texts of the Gospels. He analyzes the parables as Jesus probably spoke them in the political, economic, and religious context of his world. That work lent plausibility to his beginning hypothesis, which described Jesus as “pedagogue of the poor.” In concluding a series of posts on that book (here), I referred to a common criticism. Herzog strengthens our perception of a Jesus... Read more
In Parables as Subversive Speech William Herzog takes us back to the time and place in which Jesus lived for a fresh reading of nine of Jesus’ parables. (See numbers 3-11 in the list below.) We find Jesus in the midst of the economic, political, and religious forces that oppressed Palestine’s poor people. In parables Jesus draws word pictures of the ways that oppression works and encourages creative thinking in response. Jesus’ parables, in this view, are not so much... Read more
“… and they all lived happily, for a while, after.” That’s how Jesus could have ended the Parable of the Dishonest Steward. A rich man gets a bad report – just a rumor, perhaps – about one of his estate managers and fires him. The employee makes a last-ditch effort to save himself from a life on the streets. He offers his soon-to-be-former clients some substantial debt relief. The master sees how happy his debtors now are and takes a... Read more
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