The Sunday morning adult ed group at Monroe Congregational UCC is reading the book The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. In that book Borg and Crossan call the birth stories in Matthew and Luke parables. I disagree that they are parables. What they are is myths, in the technical meaning of that term. Here are some thoughts on that issue that I've written for the Sunday morning group.
Some Thoughts on
Borg’s and Crossan’s Use of Parable
in
The First Christmas
Rev. Dr. Thomas C.
Sorenson, Co-Pastor
In their book The First Christmas Marcus Borg and John
Dominic Crossan say that the birth stories in Matthew and Luke are
“parables.” They want us to understand
them as parables. They quite correctly define the term parable and refer to the
sayings of Jesus in the Gospels that we have always called parables. A parable
is basically a story told to make a point, and it has other characteristics as
well as we’ll see. The two birth stories in the Gospels are clearly told to
make points, so Borg and Crossan teach us to understand them as parables. I
disagree. The birth stories aren’t parables, they’re myths. Let me explain.
Jesus taught mostly in parables.
At least, that is, in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) he taught
mostly in parables. We all know the most famous parables of course. There’s the
Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke. There
are parables about workers in the field, about unjust stewards, about a
shepherd looking for a lost sheep and a woman looking for a lost coin, and
many, many other parables as well. But just what is a parable? We can’t
evaluate the claim that the birth stories are parables without addressing that
question.
The first thing to notice about
the parables in the Gospels is that they are all stories that Jesus tells. The
Gospel writer doesn’t tell them. No character in the Gospel other than Jesus
tells them. In the Synoptic Gospels the parable is Jesus’ primary teaching
tool. It isn’t something that otherwise appears in the Gospels. That’s the
first characteristic of a Gospel parable. Jesus tells it.
Next, a parable is a story told
to make a point, as Borg and Crossan correctly say. Indeed. Jesus doesn’t tell
parables to entertain, although at least some of them are quite entertaining. Jesus
may have been a master storyteller, but telling stories wasn’t for him an end
in itself. His stories all have the purpose of revealing some truth to Jesus’
audience. It’s almost always a subversive, even revolutionary truth, but the
important point for our purposes is that Jesus’ parables always reveal some
truth. They invite Jesus’ listeners into some truth. They invite people to enter
into their story to discern the story’s truth for themselves. A parable is then
a story that Jesus tells to make some point.
The parables of Jesus are
stories that Jesus tells to make a point, but it seems to me that there is more
to them being parables than merely that they are stories told to make a point. For
one thing, the parables are all short. The longest of them is probably the
Prodigal Son, and it takes up a total of 21 verses, Luke 15:11-32. Many of them
are much shorter than that. The Parable of the Mustard Seed in Mark, for
example, is only 3 verses long. Mark 4:30-32. The famous Parable of the Sower,
the one about sown seed falling on different types of ground, is more complex
than the one about the mustard seed, but it is only 9 verses long. Mark 4:1-9. So
parables are short. They are precisely short
sayings or stories, not long narrative accounts.
Moreover, most of the parables
of Jesus are either clearly identified as parables (either at the beginning of
the parable or somewhere else in the text) or are clearly parables because of
their context or because of their content. Often the context is Jesus clearly
telling stories to a crowd of people. Thus at Mark 4:2, at the beginning of a
series of short stories that Jesus tells, we read “He began to teach them many
things in parables….” The stories that
follow don’t say again that they are parables, but at the end of the series of
stories Mark says “With many such parables he spoke the word them….” Mark 4:33. The Parable of the Good Samaritan
doesn’t call itself a parable, but it is perfectly clear in the text that Jesus
is telling a story he’s made up to make a point, not that he is telling his
audience about historical characters and events. Jesus tells the Parable of the
Good Samaritan as the answer to a question about who one’s neighbor is. Luke
10:25-30. It’s clear from the context that he’s telling a story not relating
supposed facts. The Parable of the Prodigal Son doesn’t use the word parable in
that parable itself, but it is the third in a series of three stories that
begins at Luke 15:1 with people grumbling about Jesus. The text then says “So
he told them this parable….” Luke 15:3. The
Parable of the Lost Sheep immediately follows; but it is clear that all three
stories that follow, including the Prodigal Son, are parables. In the Gospels,
then, a parable is a story (not a history) that Jesus tells, that he tells to
make a point, that is short, and that is clearly a parable from the text or its
context.
The birth stories in Matthew and
Luke fit only one of these four characteristics of a parable. They are indeed
stories told to make a point, or several points. They are not history, they are
stories. They do indeed have that characteristic in common with parables. To that
extent, but only to that extent, Borg and Crossan are correct in calling the stories
parables.
The birth stories fail, however,
to meet our other three characteristics of a parable. First of all, Jesus
doesn’t tell them. Of course other ancient preachers and teachers used the
parable as a device, but in the Gospels only Jesus does that; and he doesn’t do
it with the birth stories. As the stories are told, of course, Jesus appears in
them as a newborn infant who could hardly be the narrator of the story. I
suppose the Evangelists could have written the stories as Jesus speaking of the
circumstances of his birth after he had grown to an age when he could have done
that, but they didn’t. That Jesus doesn’t tell the stories is our first clue
that they aren’t parables.
Next, the birth stories aren’t
short, or at least by the standard of the Gospels they aren’t short. Matthew’s
birth story takes up two full chapters and consists of 48 verses. Luke’s
stories of Jesus’ birth and youth also take up two full chapters and consist of
132 verses. Thus, Matthew’s birth story has more than twice the number of
verses of the Prodigal Son, and Luke’s story has more than four times the
number of verses in that parable. The Gospels’ birth stories don’t fit the
characteristic of a parable that it be short. They are rather relatively long narratives.
That’s our second clue that they aren’t parables.
Finally, it does not appear from
the texts of the birth stories themselves or from their context that they are parables.
Matthew’s story begins with a long genealogy at Matthew 1:2. Its introductory
language at Matthew 1:1 just reads “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the
Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
When Matthew is done with his genealogy he just says “Now the birth of
Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.”
Matthew 1:18a. He doesn’t say “Now here’s a parable about Jesus’ birth,”
nor does he use any other language or context to suggest that what follows is a
parable. Luke’s stories of the birth of Jesus and of John the Baptist which, as
we have seen, he tightly intertwines, begins with what sounds like a factual
statement: “In the days of King Herod of
Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah….”
Luke 1:5a. When he gets to the Annunciation of the coming birth of Jesus
Luke continues in this factually sounding voice: “In the sixth month and angel Gabriel we sent
by God to a town in Galilee, called Nazareth.”
Luke 1:26. As in Matthew there is no indication in the text or its
context that what follows is supposed to be a parable.
So the stories of Jesus’ birth
in Matthew and Luke aren’t parables. It seems perfectly obvious to me that they
aren’t parables and that parable is not a particularly useful concept for
understanding them. Yes, it’s better than insisting on them as factual,
historical or biographical accounts. They aren’t parables, but they aren’t
factual accounts either. Parable is at least a non-literal category, and as
such it represents an improvement over the way people understand the stories as
history or biography. Still. the birth stories in Matthew and Luke aren’t
parables.
So if they aren’t parables, why
do Borg and Crossan call them parables?
I of course have never spoken with either of them about this issue, so I
can only speculate. We have what they say in their book in defense of calling
the stories parables, but if that defense isn’t convincing (which it isn’t) is
there something else going on in their calling the stories parables? I think that there is. I think Borg and Crossan
call the birth stories parables rather than calling them what they really are
because they know that a great many people react the way many of you do when
you hear a Bible story called what it really is. What these stories of Jesus’
birth really are is myths. They are myths in the technical meaning of that word
that I have tried so hard to teach you over the years. Well, some of you still
resist the term; so here goes one more attempt to explain it, this time in the
context of the birth stories of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.
As I’ve said so many times, I do
not mean by myth what our popular culture means by myth. Sadly, the word myth
has come to mean something that people think is factually true that isn’t
factually true. When people say “That’s a myth” they mean that while someone
might think it is true it isn’t true. I’ll say again. I’ll say ‘til I’m blue in
the face. I may well say with my dying breath:
That’s not what I mean by myth! That’s not what theologians mean by myth. It’s
not what serious students of human culture mean by myth. When I say that the
Gospels’ stories of Jesus’ birth are myths I do not mean that though many people
think that they are factually true they are actually not true. That’s not what I mean! Please get it. That’s not what I mean. Here,
once again, is what I do mean by calling these Bible stories myths.
In technical usage a myth is a
story about the gods or about God that has the function of conveying what the
story teller believes to be a truth about the gods or about God and that functions
further to connect the listener (and the teller) with the gods or with God. For
a fuller discussion of the meaning of the word myth (and of the closely related
word symbol, a myth being a story that functions as a symbol) please see either
Chapter 3 of my Liberating Christianity
or Chapter 3 of Tillich’s Dynamics of
Faith. A myth may be true, but it is never factually true. Because we are
all children of the Enlightenment we tend to be what Huston Smith called fact
fundamentalists. That means that we think that if something isn’t factually
true it isn’t true at all. Wrong! Myths convey truth, they just don’t necessarily
contain factual truth. They invite us into truth. They seek to draw us beyond
and out of ourselves into a truth to which they can point but which they can
never contain or fully define. Myths speak allegorical truth (indeed it would
be better to call the birth stories allegories than to call them parables, but
what they really are is myths). They speak what sound like facts, but the
elements of the story aren’t important as facts. Indeed, for the most part they
aren’t facts. A myth may contain facts. The Gospel stories of Jesus’
Crucifixion are myths that are firmly grounded upon a historical fact, a fact
of which they of course speak. The birth stories are grounded in the fact that a
man named Jesus of Nazareth was born. A myth may contain factually correct
statements, although it doesn’t have to. Even if the myth does contain
historical facts however the facts aren’t what matter in themselves. What
matters is the truth to which the myth, with its facts and non-facts alike,
points.
The stories of Jesus birth in
Matthew and Luke are myths in this sense. They are stories about God and about
Jesus, about God’s relationship to Jesus and Jesus’ relationship to God. They
are stories about who Jesus is for us. They point to his special, intimate relationship
with God, not as a fact but as something that the early Christians experienced and
that the birth stories invite us to experience. Matthew’s story points to the truth
of Jesus as a new Moses. Luke’s story points to the truth of Jesus as good news
for the poor. Both stories point to other truths as well.
They birth stories are myths. They
aren’t Christological essays. People like me may be given to writing
Christological essays. The Evangelists weren’t. They were given to telling
stories. They conveyed truth not the way we children of the Enlightenment do,
they told truth by telling stories. Because those stories communicate divine
truth to us they are myths. They are not parables, although they do have in
common with parables that they are non-literal conveyers of truth. They are
myths. That doesn’t mean they aren’t true. They are for us profoundly true, they
just aren’t factually true. It’s not my fault that Borg and Crossan are so
intent on gaining a mass popular audience and so afraid of a popular reaction
against the term for what these stories really are that they won’t call these
stories myths. That, I suspect is what’s going on in their use of the term parable
rather than the term myth. Yet myth is what these stories are. That doesn’t mean
they aren’t true, it means that they are not factually true but are true in much
more profound and powerful ways than mere facts can be true. So I will call them
myths. I hope that that’s what you will call them too.
