Rightly Understanding God’s Word: Context of Genre: Narrative, by Craig S. Keener

When we told the parable of the prodigal son earlier, the father represented God, the younger brother was an analogy for sinners and the older one for scribes and Pharisees. But the pigs do not “represent” something in particular; they merely illustrate the severity of the prodigal son’s suffering and uncleanness. The prostitutes (Lk 15:30) do not represent false teaching or idolatry or anything else as if they are a standard symbol; they simply illustrate how immorally the son squandered his father’s earnings.

Let us look at the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:30-35. In this parable, a man goes “down” from Jerusalem toward Jericho, when he is overtaken by robbers who beat him and leave him nearly dead. A priest and Levite pass by him, but finally a Samaritan rescues him and takes him to an inn. Augustine, a profound thinker and church father from the coast of North Africa, decided that this was the gospel story: Adam went “down” because he fell into sin, was abused by the devil, was not helped by the law but was finally saved by Christ as a good Samaritan. One could preach this interpretation and actually expect conversions, because one would be preaching the gospel. But one could preach the gospel without attaching it to this particular parable, and in fact this is not what the parable means in its context in Luke.

In Luke 10:29, a lawyer asks Jesus who is his “neighbor” that the Bible commands him to love (cf. 10:25-28). Jesus responds that his neighbor might even turn out to be a Samaritan—that real love must cross racial, tribal, even religious lines. This was probably not the answer the lawyer wanted to hear. The answer remains offensive enough even to many people today to suggest why many people would not want the parable to mean this! But why would the man go “down” from Jerusalem to Jericho? Simply because Jericho is lower in elevation than Jerusalem. Further, the road to Jericho (like many roads) hosted many robbers; a man who traveled alone would make an easy target, especially at night. The priest and Levite who passed by on the other side of the road (10:31-32) probably did so to avoid contracting ritual impurity; many Jewish teachers felt that one would become unclean for a week if even one’s shadow touched a corpse, and one could not tell, unless one got close, if someone “half-dead” (10:30) were really dead or alive.

The point of the story is that some very religious people did not act very neighborly, but that a person from whom one would not expect it did so. Perhaps if we told the story today we would talk about a Sunday School teacher or minister who passed by on the other side, but a Muslim or someone from a hostile tribe rescued the person. Our hearers might react with hostility to such a comparison—but that is exactly the way Jesus’ hearers would have reacted to his. The lawyer’s “neighbor” might be a Samaritan. Ours might be someone we are tempted to dislike no less intensely, but Jesus commands us to love everyone.

 

Narratives and History

Following the influence of the Western Enlightenment, many western scholars grew skeptical of miracles and therefore skeptical of biblical accounts as history. Discovery after discovery from the ancient world has challenged this skepticism, new trends have begun to challenge old Enlightenment views, and today most scholars, whether Christian or not, focus more on the meaning of the text than its relation to history.

This being said, the early church did expect Christian leaders to be able to respond to objections raised against the faith (2 Tim 2:25-26; Tit 1:9), so we will briefly introduce some of these issues here. Because some of my scholarly work published so far is in Gospels, I can best illustrate the methods with respect to the Gospels (whose historical reliability I affirm).

If an honest skeptic had no evidence for or against the reliability of the Gospels, should that skeptic accept or doubt the Gospels? A growing consensus of scholars is arguing that the Gospels are ancient biographies, which means that at the very least they are substantially historically reliable. They fit all the characteristics of ancient biographies and not the characteristics of other genres; thus even a skeptic should regard them as at least generally reliable.

Some nineteenth-century scholars asking historical questions noted that some parts of the Bible overlapped, such as Kings and Chronicles or Mark and Matthew. Thus they developed a method called “source history,” trying to reconstruct what sources biblical writers of history used. Clearly, if they depended on earlier sources, they did not simply make things up from their imaginations. Many passages in the Bible mention their sources (Num 21:14; Josh 10:13; 2 Sam 1:18; 1 Kgs 14:19; 1 Chr 29:29; 2 Chr 27:7); 1 and 2 Chronicles cite a “Book of Kings” ten times (nine of them from 2 Chr 16 on). Although the Gospel writers write closer to the time of the events they describe, when many sources probably reported similar events, hence they do not need to name their sources, they do make it clear that many were available (Lk 1:1). Although there remains some debate, the majority scholarly view is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark and some other material they shared in common.

Tags: context, craig, featured, genre, gods, keener, narrative, rightly, understanding, word

Category: Biblical Studies, Spring 2005