The fifth volume in Brill’s Studies in Cultural Contexts of the Bible series, Strong’s monograph on the fables of Jesus is a work whose value cannot be overstated. Adding to an already rich series, Strong’s volume engages in a literary and historical examination that bridges the chasm between parable and fable scholarship and brings the latter to the attention of those engaged in New Testament studies.
Divided into two sections, book 1 situates the reader in the scholarship regarding the characteristics, uses, collections, and history of the ancient fable. In the second section, book 2, Strong applies these understandings in a comparative analysis of ancient fables and Lukan parables.
Strong begins with an introduction to the rich history of New Testament parable scholarship to which he introduces the problem that while research has abounded in fable scholarship, little has made its way into New Testament scholarship. Because of this, many believe that the parables of Jesus constituted a unique and unprecedented genre, only subsequently emulated by later rabbinic material. Strong maneuvers around this problem, however, by positing that we might better understand the genre more broadly as fable, a device employed by many teachers before Christ in the ancient world.
In biblical scholarship, Adolf Jülicher was one of the foremost scholars to make the connection between the parable and the fable, in his late nineteenth-century dual-volume work, Gleichnisreden Jesu. Drawing on this groundbreaking work, Strong lays out a brief history of parable scholarship revealing that the connection of parable to fable, though noted by a handful of New Testament scholars, is one that has been largely neglected since Jülicher..
In chapter 2, Strong turns his attention to the real work of acquainting the reader with fables and the fable genre by addressing some of the misconceptions that appear as one of the root causes of the divide between fable and parable scholarship. Strong employs the fable collections of Babrius and the Augustana and the teaching of Theon on fables to show that the boundaries of fable go far beyond the understanding of fable as fantastic, anthropomorphic tales, but fables include everyday, real-life scenarios, something that had previously been considered as the domain of parable. Thus, the distinction between the two begins to fade.
Strong next turns toward the tools with which one can engage the comparative study of fable and parable. In chapters 3 and 4, Strong provides the reader the chance to engage primary source material, first from the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, and then from sources contemporary to Jesus and the Gospels. With such ample attention paid to fables in the Hellenistic world, notably Aesop’s famous tales, one might be surprised that launching into the waters of primary source material sets sail not from Greece, but from the Semitic world. After beginning in Sumer, then including several examples from the Hebrew scriptures, Strong navigates the reader through the Hellenistic period and then ventures into the Roman era, arriving finally to the genre of fable at the time of Jesus and his contemporaries.
Closing in on New Testament authors, Strong here takes a chapter to address the use of fable in that period’s educational system and posits that due to its ubiquity and function in his own education, Luke used them in the construction of his own gospel account. Here we encounter one of the more vulnerable points of Strong’s argument: he assumes a Greco-Roman education for Luke in which he would have been exposed to such education in writing, grammar, and rhetoric. Yet we know very little about Luke’s background and training.[1] Strong finishes chapter 5 on a high note, however, presenting an important examination of the definition of fable, both from ancient and modern sources.
The discussion then draws ever closer to the parables of Jesus as Strong brings the world of rabbinic fable into the study. Addressing the misconception—and false dichotomy—that “Jews tell parables, Greeks tell fables” (p. 29), Strong points out that many ancient Greco-Roman sources considered the fable itself to be of Semitic origin. Far from being a first-century invention, fable, parable, or mashal (which by rabbinic times was synonymous with both) was a recognized and frequently employed form of Jewish wisdom literature, thus Jesus and later rabbinic writings were operating firmly within a well-established genre. The reader is given multiple examples of rabbinic fable, including contributions from such illustrious teachers as Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva. Using these examples, Strong explores the marks of Jewish fable and how they may be discerned within the rabbinic corpus.
With this groundwork firmly established, Strong concludes book 1 with a comparative analysis and synthesis of fable and parable. Strong takes some significant space in chapter 7 to discuss the meaning of parable within the ancient sources, exposing the difficulty of finding a distinction between fable and parable. Strong charts how the Synoptic gospels follow the Septuagint use of παραβολή as encompassing a wide array of literary devices and literature, and then wades through various ancient rhetoricians and grammarians deriving a definition of parable from their usage of the term. The term “parable” is shown to have been used to describe a variety of linguistic and literary devices and cannot be confined to a singular definition but has been “applied to the fable genre most of all” (p. 224).
Having set, as the title of book 1 says, “A New Foundation for the Study of Parables” for the reader, book 2 is a focused examination of the parables of Jesus as presented in the Gospel of Luke. In the first chapter of book 2, Strong begins by presenting a short history of parable-fable research preceding Jülicher, illustrating that both Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century and Gottlob Christian Storr in the eighteenth had already connected Jesus’s parables with ancient fable. Edward Greswell and Richard Trench followed, ultimately leading to Jülicher’s work. Following this, Strong spends a moment comparing material in the gospels of Thomas and Luke with elements within the Aesop fables, displaying similarities between the three.
In chapter 9, Strong turns the reader’s attention to the fable teller in antiquity. Comparing Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants (Lk 20:9–19) with fables present in The Life of Aesop, Strong suggest that Luke is casting Jesus in the role of fable teller. Strong also displays how this characterization of Jesus serves multiple audiences as the fable teller can emulate both slave and sophist, both poor man and prophet, both outcast and exalted, drawing further appeal for the widespread audience Luke seems to be addressing.
Continuing with the marks of the fable in its delivery and function, in chapter 10 Strong speaks of the form of parable and how they were received. He leans on Niklas Holzberg and Morten Nøjgaard to demonstrate how the recognized elements that mark the fable are present in Luke’s parables. This includes such features as linguistic markers, direct speech, soliloquy, and structure (chapter 10), characterization, theme, plot (chapter 11).
Chapters 12 and 13 deal with interpretation, applied especially to the parables of Luke. Strong returns to his definition of fable from chapter 5 wherein he introduced the genre-defining presence of a moral, either a promythium and epimythium, that is, a moral placed before (pro-) or at the end (epi-) of the story.
In chapter 14, the similarities of Luke’s parables to ancient fables are further reinforced by a discussion of the nature of the collection of fables, as compared with Luke’s own collection. Strong reinforces the widely accepted position among source critics that Luke was in possession of a collection of the fables of Jesus. Chapter 15 then evaluates the linguistic and literary features of fable to arrive at the conclusion that this collection existed for the purposes of early Christian catechesis, though the provenential particulars of such a collection remain a mystery. Strong closes his tome in chapter 16 with a look back at how the wealth of material brought forth has impacted our understanding of Luke’s parables, as well as a look forward toward what it might yet do for scholarship in other ancient literature as well as how it might inform fable scholarship itself moving forward.
Strong began this volume by lamenting the underuse of fable scholarship in the study of New Testament parables. The absence of the rubric of fable comes from, as Strong puts it, an “artificial disciplinary division.” Hopefully this work begins to bridge that gap, allowing both to benefit from the tremendous amount of scholarship that the other has to offer. By engaging the scholarship, history, methodology, and primary sources surrounding the genre of fable and bringing them into the skill set of New Testament scholars, Strong opens up a wider world of potential for comparative study by which the parable might be understood. It is time for the consideration of parables as fables to enter the discussion of parables in New Testament scholarship. Strong’s work is indeed a new foundation for the study of parables, and a necessary one that should find a welcome reception in New Testament scholarship.
Notes
[1] In his forthcoming work Luke Was not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Biblical Interpretation Series Vol. 218. Leiden: Brill, 2024), Joshua Paul Smith makes the strong case that Luke was of a Jewish background; if this is the case, Luke may not have experienced the same education that Strong has in mind. While this is not necessarily antithetical to Luke’s encounter of fable in education as Strong has adeptly argued, the assumptions of his training in a rhetorical school must be balanced.