The father of modern research
on the parables. From 1888-1923 Jülicher
was professor of church history & NT at Marburg (Germany), where he influenced many bright younger scholars like
Rudolf Bultmann.
The central thesis of
Jülicher's masterpiece (The Parables of Jesus, 1886) was
that Jesus' parables had been misinterpreted by Christian writers from the
very beginning. As a Jewish teacher, Jesus frequently used the type of graphic
illustrations that rabbis called meshalim (pl. of
mashal: "it
is like") in order to explain something. This is evident from the way
some of the gospel parables, like the mustard
seed or buried
treasure, are introduced. The Greek gospel writers, however, confused Jesus' graphic oral
illustrations with the type of picture puzzles found in OT literature:
They understood by "parable" not
simply speech that is meant to make something clear by means of
comparison, but on the contrary speech that is obscure, that
requires interpretation...
According to the theory of the evangelists,
the "parables" are allegories,
and therefore figurative discourse that to some extent
requires translation, while in fact they are...something very different:
parables, fables, paradigmatic example stories, but always literal
discourse.
Jülicher's basic insight was
that parables needed to be taken at face value to be understood as Jesus meant
them. This broke with the long history of parable interpretation by Christian
preachers & scholars like Origen,
who allegorized these stories by seeking some higher meaning. Jülicher took
the fact that the synoptic gospels do not provide an interpretation of the
dozens of parables they record (except in three cases) as evidence that no
interpretation was originally needed. Interpretations were introduced only by
later Christians, who did not quite know what to do with Jesus' vivid
illustrations.
Yet, because misunderstanding
of Jesus' parables is already evident in synoptic gospels' portrayal of the
disciples' questions about parable, Jülicher pointed out that it cannot be
taken for granted that the gospel parables are verbatim transcripts of Jesus'
words:
The authenticity of the Gospel parables as we
have them cannot simply be assumed. Jesus did not utter them as we now read
them. They have been translated, transposed, and inwardly transformed. The
reports that two or three evangelists give of the same parable never fully
agree. Not only does the expression vary, but also the viewpoint, the
arrangement, the occasion, the interpretation, whether it is expressed by
means of the context or explicitly....
On the other hand, Jülicher
took the fact that the evangelists themselves considered Jesus' parables to be
puzzles, as evidence that they did not invent them. Though the exact wording
of parables might not be original, he argued:
almost without exception they have a genuine
nucleus that goes back to Jesus himself.
Therefore, Jülicher emphasized the
importance of parables as a window into the mind of Jesus:
The biographer of Jesus cannot overdo
immersing himself in and familiarizing himself with these parables. Here, as
scarcely anywhere else, he becomes acquainted with extensive, interrelated,
coherent lines of thought of his hero....
Thus, Jülicher anticipated two
preoccupations of 20th c. gospel scholarship:
- the analysis of gospel
sayings to recover a logical core characteristic of Jesus rather than the
gospel writers; &
- the use of parables &
other genuine Jesus sayings to reconstruct a portrait of the historical
Jesus that has not been distorted by the impressions imposed on him by
others.
[For further information &
fuller quotes, see W. G. Kümmel The NT: The History of the Investigation
of its Problems (English edition: NY/Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972) pp.
186-88].
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