How to Read the Bible as Literature: . . . and Get More Out of It

by Leland Ryken

  The Narrative World of the Gospels

  Each of the Gospels creates its own narrative “world,” and one of the best general approaches to the Gospels as stories is to allow them to build a total, self-contained picture in our imaginations. Someone has rightly said that in every story

  there is presented to us a special world with its own space and time, its own ideological system, and its own standards of behavior. In relation to that world, we assume (at least in our first perceptions of it) the position of an alien spectator. . . . Gradually we enter into it, becoming more familiar with its standards, accustoming ourselves to it, until we begin to perceive this world as if from within.6

  In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, we enter a Jewish world where Old Testament prophecies and religious practices are a constant force, where Jesus is repeatedly portrayed in terms of royalty, and where the teaching of Jesus is presented in very orderly fashion. When we read the Gospel of Luke, we are in quite a different world, a cosmopolitan world in which people on the social and religious fringes—women, outsiders, the poor, people in shady professions—are important because they are the ones who receive Goďs grace.

  SUMMARY

  The Gospels, taken as literary wholes, are first of all stories. As readers we can best organize our total impressions of them around such narrative concerns as the characterization of the central hero, the general (but not strict) chronological arrangement of incidents in the life of Jesus, the presence of unifying plot conflicts (they mainly involve Jesus and groups of characters such as the disciples and Pharisees), a linear or progressive movement of the action to the climactic death and resurrection of Jesus (if we count chapters, the four Gospels devote anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-eight percent of the total story to the Passion and Resurrection), and the distinctive narrative “world” that unifies each Gospel.

  Individual Stories in Gospels

  If narrative provides a literary framework for a Gospel as a whole, it is an equally good device for dealing with individual narrative units within the Gospels. These brief stories will yield their meanings best if we ask the usual narrative questions: where? who? what happens? At the level of action, these brief stories (unlike a Gospel as a whole) follow the Aristotelian principle of one event leading by a cause-effect link to the next event. These stories are tightly constructed, with one detail producing the next in a marvelously coherent fashion. Most of them have a central conflict moving to resolution, and many of them progress toward a climactic epiphany (moment of revelation, insight, understanding). The story of Jesus’ meeting with the woman at the well (John 4:1–42) is a classic case of how a Gospel story moves from one event to the next in a seamless progression from an initial situation to a final resolution or epiphany.7

  Individual Gospel Stories as Small Dramas

  Because the Gospels contain so much dialogue and encounter, it is also a helpful procedure for many of the longer episodes to lay out the story into separate dramatic scenes, as though it were a play, focusing on each segment and also noting the sequence or positioning of scenes as we move through the episode from beginning to end. Many of these stories are, in fact, dramas in miniature. As a variation on this model, we can approach some of the episodes as though we were watching the event on television. There are distant (overview) shots, close-ups, shifting of focus from one speaker to another, scenes of the crowd, and so forth.

  Genres Within the Gospels

  Another thing we can do with individual units within the Gospels is to identify the precise subtype to which a given unit belongs. The Gospels are made up of several general types of material. Many of them can be further subdivided (see chart on following page). There are, for example, six specific types of pronouncement stories: correction stories, objection stories, commendation stories, quest stories, test stories, and inquiry stories.8

  How Knowing the Genre Helps a Reader

  What does such a taxonomy of genres achieve? It tells us what to look for in a given Gospel passage. It usually provides the best descriptive framework for organizing a given unit. And sometimes the correct interpretation of a unit depends on identifying the precise genre of the passage. It is important for the interpretation of a pronouncement story, for example, to know that story and saying correlate with each other as stimulus and response. Frequently some of the details in a story will seem irrelevant until we place the passage into the right literary family, when suddenly every detail falls into place.

  Nonnarrative Elements in Gospels

  The list of subtypes reveals that, although narrative is the overriding framework for the Gospels, much of the material falls into genres covered elsewhere in this book. The sayings and discourses of Jesus need to be approached with the tools appropriate to poetry, proverb, parable, satire, and apocalypse (visionary literature).

  SUMMARY

  The Gospels are stories about Jesus. To describe and interpret them, we need to apply all that we know about narrative as a literary form. Within that general category, there is much that is unique about these stories, including the range of specific literary types into which they can be divided.

  Further Reading

  The best overview of literary commentary on the Gospels is the excerpts collected under “Gospel as a Literary Form” and the four individual Gospels in The New Testament in Literary Criticism, ed. Leland Ryken (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984). David Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), is a model for approaching a Gospel as literary narrative. On a briefer scale, I conduct a sequential literary analysis of the Gospel of John in The Literature of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), pp. 276–91. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis does something similar with the Gospel of Mark in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974), pp. 296–329. John Drury’s Luke (New York: Macmillan, 1973) is an example of a commentary that shows great sensitivity to the narrative qualities of the Gospel.

  1W. S. Vorster, “Kerygma/History and the Gospel Genre,” New Testament Studies 19 (1983): 87–95.

  2Robert M. Fowler, “Using Literary Criticism on the Gospels,” Christian Century, 26 May 1982, 629.

  3Robert C. Tannehill, “The Disciples in Mark: The Function of a Narrative Role,” Journal of Religion 57 (1977): 387.

  4For this analogy between the visual arts and the traditional interpretations of the Jesus of the Gospels I am indebted to Robert A. Guelich, “The Gospels: Portraits of Jesus and His Ministry,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 24 (1982): 117–25.

  5Donald A. Hagner, “Interpreting the Gospels: The Landscape and the Quest,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 24 (1981): 34.

  6Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition, trans. V. Zavarin and S. Wittig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 137.

  7A good model for analyzing the narrative coherence of an individual Gospel episode is the essay by James L. Resseguie, “John 9: A Literary-Critical Analysis,” 295–303 in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives II, ed. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis (Nashville: Abingdon, 1982).

  8For elaboration, see Robert C. Tannehill, “Introduction: The Pronouncement Story and Its Types,” Semeia 20 (1981): 1–13.

  Chapter Eight

  Parables

  The Parables as Stories

  MY DISCUSSION OF THE PARABLES OF JESUS will focus on the ones that tell a story. Some of Jesus’ brief parables are not stories but similes or analogies. To understand them we need to apply what I said about metaphor and simile in the chapter on poetry. But the longer parables are stories composed of setting, characters about whose destinies we care, and plots that move through conflict to resolution. Recent biblical scholarship has made so much of the parallels between parable and metaphor that we are in danger of missing the story element in the parables. This I take to be a great error. Furthermore, the parables, intended to be simple (though profound at the same time), have been buried under such a w
eight of scholarly controversy and esoteric terminology that they have ceased to communicate with power.

  Masterpieces of Popular Storytelling

  There is no doubt that the parables of Jesus lend themselves to almost indefinite reflection and application, but why do they capture the listener’s attention in the first place? They are folk literature, originally oral. Indeed, they are the very touchstone of popular storytelling through the ages.

  Realism and Vividness

  Virtually the first thing we notice about the parables is their everyday realism and concrete vividness. “It is ‘things’ that make stories go well,” writes P. C. Sands of the parables; here “everything. . .is concrete and vigorous. Everything is described in solid terms.”1 The parables take us right into the familiar world of planting and harvesting, traveling through the countryside, baking bread, tending sheep, or responding to an invitation. The parables thus obey the literary principle of verisimilitude (“lifelikeness”), and a perusal of commentaries always uncovers new evidence of how thoroughly rooted in real life the parables are.2 There is no fantasy in the parables of Jesus—no talking animals or imaginary monsters, only people such as we meet during the course of a day. The parables reveal “an amazing power of observation.”3

  The Parables as “Secular” Stories

  This minute realism is an important part of the meaning of Jesus’ parables. On the surface, these stories are totally “secular.” There are few overtly religious activities in the parables. If we approached them without their surrounding context and pretended that they were anonymous, we could not guess that they were intended for a religious purpose. An important by-product of this realism is that it undermines the “two-world” thinking in which the spiritual and earthly spheres are rigidly divided. We are given to understand that it is in everyday experience that spiritual decisions are made and that God’s grace does its work.

  Simplicity of Action

  Combined with the delightful fidelity to actual life is the extreme simplicity of action. We can call this the principle of single action. The parables of Jesus have simple plots that focus on one main event: sowing and harvesting a crop, taking a journey and returning, hiring workers to labor in the vineyard, inviting guests to a banquet.

  Simple Plot Conflicts

  These simple situations gain vigor from equally uncomplicated plot conflicts. The seeds that the sower plants struggle against the destructiveness of their natural environment. The conflict between the poisonous tares and the wheat has as its background a feud between the farmer and his neighbor. The elder and younger brothers contend for their father’s favor. As we read through the parables we listen to character clashes and watch robbers beat up lone travelers. There is enough plot conflict to seize an audience’s attention, but probably none of the parables can be said to have a unifying plot conflict that persists all the way through the story.

  Suspense

  The rule of suspense operates effectively in the parables. The opening situation is invariably one that arouses curiosity about its outcome. The act of sowing is a risk about whose outcome we wonder. When the younger son leaves his parental home with his share of the inheritance in his pocket, we wonder how the action will turn out. When people who work different numbers of hours get equal payment, we are curious about how the workers will respond. Often the parables turn upon a test that arouses our curiosity (e.g., the entrusted wealth in the parable of the talents or the wounded man on the highway in the parable of the good Samaritan).

  Heightened Foils or Contrasts

  Like other popular storytellers, Jesus used obvious and heightened foils (contrasts) in his parables. The rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisee and publican, the generous employer and the selfish workers, the wise and foolish virgins are obvious examples. Sometimes a pair of characters is contrasted to a single character, as with the two faithful stewards and the lone slothful servant, or the two passersby and the compassionate Samaritan.

  The Functions of Contrasts

  Why the heightened contrasts? Because folk stories deal with simple contrasts, because the very brevity of the parable precludes subtle shades of good and evil, and because the oral nature of the genre requires simple, heightened patterns. But the strategy also fits well with the purpose of Jesus to elicit a response from his hearers. Parables are an invitation and even a trap to move a listener or reader to take sides for or against the characters in a story. By confronting the audience with an obvious contrast, a parable by Jesus “tends to polarize the hearers. . . .The lines along which polarization takes place must be signaled by an unambiguous code in the narrative; like highway markers along the interstate, they must be legible at a glance. So we have pairs like Levite, priest/ Samaritan, laborers hired fìrst/last, invited/uninvited, etc.”4

  Repetition

  The parables make conspicuous use of the principle of repetition, which produces unity and emphasis. The owner of the vineyard goes out to the marketplace five times to hire laborers. We twice hear the prodigal’s speech, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son,” and the father twice explains that the prodigal “was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”

  Threefold Repetition

  Especially noteworthy is the folktale pattern of threefold repetition, often combined with the rule of end stress (the crucial element comes at the end). Thus we get three types of soil that yield no harvest and three degrees of good harvest, three people who refuse the invitation to the banquet, three stewards to whom wealth is entrusted and three corresponding interviews when the master returns, and three passersby.

  The Rule of End Stress

  The rule of end stress is pervasive in the parables, leading some interpreters to claim that the last element in a parable is the most important. In the parable of the sower, the fertile soil with its abundant harvest comes last. The lesson of the parable of the workers in the vineyard turns upon those hired last. Similarly, it is the last steward who is judged harshly, the last traveler who is generous, and the last invited group who enjoy the banquet.

  Universal Character Types

  The characters in the parables are anonymous. Only one of them (Lazarus) is named. The result is that they become universal character types. Paradoxically, these nameless characters assume a quality of vivid familiarity, like the characters of Chaucer and Dickens. Someone has aptly commented that “nowhere else in the world’s literature has such immortality been conferred on anonymity"5

  Archetypes

  The surface appeal of these stories also depends on the presence of powerful archetypes. Archetypes are recurrent images and motifs that keep appearing in literature and life and that touch us powerfully, both consciously and unconsciously. The parables are filled with archetypal situations. Jesus told parables about master and servant (employer and employee), for example, that tap our ambivalent feelings toward employers—feelings of fear, dependence, security, insecurity, gratitude, and resentment over injustice.

  Archetypes Touch Us Where We Live

  So also with the motif of lost and found that figures in several parables. All that we experienced the last time we misplaced something of crucial importance enters our experience of these parables—the panic that accompanied the discovery that we had lost it, the self-laceration and sense of worthlessness that accompanied our search for it, the relief and regained self-esteem that accompanied finding it.

  The Psychological Dimension of Archetypes

  Or consider the parable of the prodigal son. The prodigal is an archetypal character that represents an impulse that lies within each of us. It is the impulse away from the domestic and secure and morally governed toward the distant, the adventurous, the rebellious, the indulgence of forbidden appetites (including the sexual), the abandonment to unrestraint. The elder brother in the same parable represents something that is equally a part of our psychic and moral make-up: the voice of duty, restraint, self-control, self-righteousness. It
is no accident that the prodigal is the younger son (a figure of youth with its thirst for experience and abandonment to appetite) and the other the elder son (representing a middle-aged mentality, judgmental and self-righteous). Furthermore, the parable describes a family situation, replete with sibling rivalry and parent-child relationships.

  The Appeal of Archetypes

  In sum, there is an abundance of human psychology and archetypal (universal) human experience in the parables. Even when the theological or moral point of the parable does not directly hinge on them, these archetypes do help to account for the powerful grip the parables have on our attention and emotions. As Amos Wilder has stated,

  Human nature has always responded to stories about quests and adventures, ups and downs, rags to riches, lost and found, reversals and surprises . . . , good and bad son or daughter, . . . masters and servants, the wise and the foolish, rewards and penalties, success and failure.”6