Table Of Content

The Power of Parable How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus John Dominic Crossan Dedication To dear friends Myra Wells and Drew Gribble Epigraph Those images that yet Fresh images beget. W. B. Yeats, Byzantium CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Prologue: Story and Metaphor Part I Parables Told by Jesus 1 Riddle Parables 2 Example Parables 3 Challenge Parables: Part I 4 Challenge Parables: Part II 5 Challenge Parables: Part III 6 The Kingdom of God Interlude The Lure of Parabolic History Part II Parables Told about Jesus 7 A Hymn for the Nameless 8 Rhetorical Violence 9 Rome as the New Jerusalem 10 The Visionary Dream of God Epilogue: History and Parable Scripture Index About the Author Other Books by John Dominic Crossan Credits Copyright About the Publisher PROLOGUE Story and Metaphor IN THE SUMMER OF 1960 I was a monk and a priest in the Servite monastery high on the Janiculum hill in Rome and halfway through two years of postdoctoral research at the downtown Pontifical Biblical Institute. Rome was preparing for the Olympic Games in late August and so, apart from its standard heat, the city promised too much construction and too many people. (Even the pope abandons the Vatican in August for cool Castel Gandolfo among the Castelli Romani in the nearby Alban Hills—a sure if minor proof of his infallibility.) That August I was grateful to receive an “obedience”—the monastic equivalent of a soldier’s “orders”—to leave Rome for Lisbon, meet an American group there, and chaplain them around the major Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites in western Europe. These included Fatima and Lourdes for the Virgin Mary, Lisieux for St. Thérèse, Monaco for Grace Kelly, and Castel Gandolfo for John XXIII. And then it happened. As our group traveled slowly by bus from Rome to Paris for its homeward flight, we stopped at Oberammergau in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps to attend its Passion play, a five-to six-hour dramatization of Jesus’s final week on earth. It is performed by the villagers every decade on the decade in gratitude for deliverance from bubonic plague in 1634. It was not performed, of course, in 1940, but it returned in 1950 with both Chancellor Adenauer and General Eisenhower in attendance. In other words, what we saw in 1960 was the unchanged play that Hitler saw before his election in 1930 and again after it in 1934, for its special three hundredth anniversary. But that early September day in 1960 I had not yet read Hitler’s enthusiastic comment about it: It is vital that the Passion Play be continued at Oberammergau; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed as in this presentation of what happened in the times of the Romans. There one sees in Pontius Pilate a Roman racially and intellectually so superior, that he stands out like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry. That obscene review came in July 1942, about the time the German armies were beginning their fateful push toward Stalingrad. But, if I did not know of Hitler’s commentary, I certainly knew the sequence of what happened in Christianity’s Holy Week from both monastic liturgy and biblical study. What I did not expect was that a story I knew so well as written text was so profoundly unconvincing as enacted drama. The play started early in the morning with Palm Sunday, and the huge stage was filled with a crowd shouting approval and acclamation for Jesus as he entered Jerusalem. But by late afternoon the play had progressed to Good Friday, and that same huge crowd was now shouting condemnation and demanding crucifixion. But nothing in the play explained how the crowd had changed its mind so completely. I wondered if that infamous scene in which the crowd claims responsibility for Jesus’s death by shouting, “His blood be upon us and upon our children,” was fact or fiction. It did not seem convincing as history. What was the reason for the crowd’s change of attitude from acceptance to rejection? Could this story function more as parable than history? This insight led to others. If it were parable, that is, a fictional story invented for moral or theological purposes, then there were not only parables by Jesus— like that of the Good Samaritan—but parables about Jesus—like that of the lethal crowd in this Passion play. And, further, there were not only parables of light, but parables of darkness. The factual history of Jesus’s crucifixion had become parable—parabolic history or historical parable, if you wish, which I’ll return to in more detail later—and from it, in the terror of time, theological anti- Judaism would spawn racial anti-Semitism. In June 1967, I returned from a two-year sabbatical at the French School of Archaeology just north of the Damascus Gate of Old Jerusalem. I left—the technical term is “fled”—just before Old Jerusalem passed from Jordan to Israel in the Six-Day War. During the next two years, before I left monastery and priesthood for DePaul University in 1969, I was teaching at two seminaries in the Chicago area. One of my courses was on the parables by Jesus and the other was on the resurrection stories about Jesus. With these courses I was back to exploring—as before at Oberammergau— the interface of parable and history. I had observed that the parabolic stories by Jesus seemed remarkably similar to the resurrection stories about Jesus. Were the latter intended as parables just as much as the former? Had we been reading