Thread by @Delafina777

So in reading Christian commentary on the parables, and its wild and ugly claims about first-century Jews and Judaism, I often find myself wondering how they got there.

And I think I've discerned the process.

Short thread:

It goes a little something like this:

A) Christians receive traditional interpretations of what the parables "mean." E.g. the prodigal son means you should forgive people, the good Samaritan means you should help people in need. These meanings are, generally, banal.

B) Rather than reading the parables as *stories,* Christians read them as fables with a moral. They read them through the lens of that moral instead of approaching them without a predetermined interpretation.

C) Christians also believe that the parables must contain revolutionary, radical truths.

D) They somehow have to resolve the idea that the stories are radical with the fact that their received interpretations are obvious/banal/the same thing plenty of other people have said.

E) Since (what they believe are) the morals of these stories don't sound radical to US, they project that radicalness backward onto the parable's original context and audience.

That is, it must have been radical/shocking at the time, to the people who first heard it.

F) Now they have to resolve the dilemma of how something that sounds so banal and obvious to us could have been radical and shocking and scandalous(!) to the original listeners.

Most of them aren't going to say "Jesus's Jewish listeners were incredibly malicious and/or incredibly stupid," at least out loud. So they move to:

G) Projecting that onto Jewish *culture*, Jewish law, "religious law," etc.

So then they need to make up norms/customs/attitudes that would make the parable "shocking." If they can find a source that maybe seems to say something that HINTS in that direction, they'll claim it says a lot more than it does and that it was normative.

(E.g. Ben Sira saying you can tell things about a man from how he walks ends up meaning "the villagers would have stoned the father for running to greet his long-lost son" and of course that running to greet your long-lost son would be S H O C K I N G to the listeners.)

It's why they love throwing "ritual purity" in there so much. The father wouldn't embrace his son because he was ritually impure! (If the father was out doing farm stuff and wasn't going to the Temple any time soon, most likely, so was he.)

The kohen and the Levite passed by the dying man on the side of the road because they were afraid he would make them ritually impure! (The story is very clear they were headed AWAY from Jerusalem, and thus the Temple, so no.)

The Pharisee in the Temple has contempt for the tax collector and doesn't want to stand next to him because he's ritually impure! (No, if the tax collector is in the Temple, he is in a state of ritual purity.)

An anthropologist friend of mine told me that when anthropologists/archaeologists are confronted with an object from a culture and they don't know what it's for, the default category is "ritual object."

Did you dig up a weird-shaped ax that doesn't seem well-designed for either being a weapon OR chopping things?

Ritual object.

Find a statue with some odd characteristics?

Ritual object.

"Ritual purity" is to Christian understanding of Jewish customs like "ritual object" is to anthropologists.

Anything that doesn't make sense, put down to "ritual purity."

So, anyway, the process goes like this:

parables must be shocking > they're not shocking to me > they must have been shocking to Jews > make up supposed Jewish customs/laws/attitudes that would have made normal behavior "shocking"