This Sunday, we are going to be starting a new series together. We are going to be looking at some of Jesus’s parables in Luke, but in doing so we are going to realize that they are not the “warm fuzzy” things that some of us may have been taught, but rather “cold prickly” things (to use the emotional-awareness language taught by my second grade teacher Mrs. Armstrong).
But in our dealings with the parables, we are going to come up against some of our assumptions about the bible itself: what it is, how it came to be the bible, why and how it is inspired, why and how it is authoritative, and so on. And it is this that I want to take a minute to reflect on today — perhaps “priming the pump” for what is to come.
In the opening verses of Luke’s gospel, the editor is very clear about what they are doing. Many others have started writing down “orderly accounts” of the oral traditions about Jesus: eyewitness accounts and stories that are told (verses 1-2). And the editor so decided to do the same on behalf of “Theophilus” with the express purpose that “Theophilus” may have a firm grasp of the words in which you have been instructed” (verses 3-4 NRSV).
Let me be clear about a couple things. First, I am not aware of any biblical scholar who seriously believes that “Theophilus” is an individual. The word — or “name” as it is generally rendered — translates to “friend of God,” and the Gospel of Luke has a dominant theme of Jesus embracing and welcoming everyone. In fact, the frequent accusation that Jesus is a “friend of sinners/etc.” uses the same word philos. It is thus not an “orderly account” that has been prepared for a specific person but for all who would be “friends of [the Son of] God.”
Second, I am saying “editor” rather than “author” because that is quite clearly how the writer sees themself: they are compiling written and oral testimonies to which they have access into a single “orderly account.” That is not the work of an author but an editor.
Third — and building on the second — this means that the editor has made decisions about what material should go where, and has at times added bits or shaped other parts in order to make all these puzzle pieces “fit” into something approximating an “orderly account.”
Fourth, in the ancient world, the standards of historicity were not the same as our own. More often than not, the highest value was placed on preserving the source even if it did not quite make sense or agree with other sources you were incorporating. In our present day, we would attempt to use various methodologies to determine which source was most accurate and just use that, but that was not their way. This means that Luke is most likely to shape how stories are understood by placing them in a particular context or by adding editorial remarks like “Jesus told this parable to explain _____.”
All these things together mean that, with the parables, we sometimes are able to see fairly clearly all these things happening in the text because they don’t agree with each other. Jesus tells a parable that, on its own, poses certain challenges. But then in the oral tradition following Jesus, a moral was added that takes away some of the grit. But then Luke wants to use the story in a particular way, so he puts it in a context to try to make the parable mean something about eternal life or prayer or whatnot, which is pretty obviously not what Jesus was talking about and also not what the added moral was about. There are layers. It’s complicated.
But this shouldn’t discourage us. It tells us that people have been wrestling with Jesus far longer than we have, and even those early hearers struggled to accept the uncomfortable challenges he offers. It also, I believe, frees us from the mistaken notion that there is ONE RIGHT INTERPRETATION of any given parable or text. Learning more about how the bible came into being can be freeing in that way.
This fall, I’ve been invited to share and teach about the bible’s origins and shaping in the Sunday morning small group that meets at 9:00 AM. We are still working out a plan for when that will start, but I hope you will consider joining and wrestling and learning along with us. This was my primary area of research in academia, and it remains one of my favorite topics to teach because it really gets to the heart of what we do about the bible — and the bible is close to our heart as Baptists.
Remember, we’re all in this together,
Pastor Micheal