Jesus, the Anthropologist: Patterns of Emplotment and Modes of Action in the Parables

Abstract

This article uses a typology of action framework to analyze a selection of the gospels’ parables. It does so by connecting these parables to A. G. Haudricourt and C. Ferret’s research on the “anthropology of action”. After summarizing Haudricourt’s and Ferret’s results, I relate modes of action to types of emplotment. I select four parables as the basis of my analysis, using J. P. Meier’s findings as a guide for selection. I discern in these four parables four modes of emplotment, which enables me to insert them into larger narrative networks found within the gospels. I locate the corpus of narratives determined this way in the context of Jesus’ time so as to better appreciate how the four modes of emplotment combine into a typology of action shaped by a specific social and cultural context. Within this typology of action, I put a spotlight on the way our corpus’ modes of emplotment make use of “discontinuous actions” (coined by Ferret). “Discontinuous actions” decisively initiate or correct a specified course of events. The stress on this dimension of action applies to the relationships occurring between humans and the natural world, within the social world, and between humans and the supranatural world, thus connecting one order of reality with another.

1. Introduction

There are several ways to look at the corpus constituted by the parables that the authors of the gospels attribute to Jesus.1 One can attempt to find within them testimonies about the topics and teachings that were at the core of the historical Jesus’ predication (Dodd 1935; Perrin 1967; Snodgrass 2008; Levine 2014), even though New Testament scholars nowadays navigate this line of inquiry with due caution. The unearthing of such content may focus on the message that Jesus was addressing directly to his contemporaries; it can also ground full-fledged Christological and theological developments (Käsermann 1969). It is also possible to find in the parables some indications about the putative narrator’s life events or, more likely, about the social context in which these events were taking place (Van Eck 2009, 2014). Alternatively, the parables can be seen as coming from and speaking of the interpretive memory and predication developed by the first Christian communities (Zimmermann 2018). Some authors have attempted to harmonize these perspectives. For instance, Jeremias (1963) investigated the figure of the historical Jesus along with the nascent Church’s narrative and doctrinal elaboration.

This article proceeds from yet another vantage point: while it relies on the findings accumulated by New Testament scholars, it primarily addresses itself to a different audience, one interested in finding in the gospels’ narratives a stratum of “local knowledge”, i.e., of practices and representations through which a community relates to its environment.2 Although our questions widely differ from the ones asked in his time by Edmund Leach (1969, 1983), we similarly endeavor to make the biblical corpus a locus of anthropological findings.

Specifically, our goal is to detect, in the storytelling found in (part of) the parabolic corpus, a body of wisdom about the array of possible actions, reactions, and interactions triggered by a specified context, as well as about the consequences that follow the choice of such or such course of action. Thus, intending to find in the parables a depository of emic knowledge, we will recapture the features of the latter by identifying some recurring patterns of these short narratives. We will attempt to connect such “emic knowledge” to the historical Jesus while leaving space for inserting the insights found in our corpus into a body of shared representations. Informed by concerns proper to the “anthropology of action”, i.e., by questions about “how people act” rather than about “why they act” (Ferret 2014), this contribution also hopes to demonstrate that the narrative springs proper to the gospels’ parabolic corpus are consciously applied to three different realms: relationships among humans, relationships between humans and the natural world, and relationships between humans and the supranatural.

In order to elucidate the typology of action that is proper to the parables, we need to progress through a number of intermediate stages:

(A)

In Section 2 “Action & Narratives”, we first summarize some results of the aforesaid “anthropology of action”. Then, we will relate the modes of action it identifies to specific modes of emplotment. In other words, we will consider patterns of “action” and of “narration” as a whole.

(B)

In Section 3. “What Parables Did Jesus Tell?”, we examine which parables may be related to the historical Jesus with a higher degree of probability than other narratives do. We thus isolate a core group of four parables.

(C)

In Section 4. “Beyond Historical Attestations: The Rhetoric of the Parables”, we take into account some of the criticisms addressed to the probability approach used for the above-mentioned selection of four parables. We then insert these four core parables into networks of similar stories (narrative networks). We are thus enabled to work at two levels: (a) on a restricted corpus (i.e., the four parables) that provides basic modes of emplotment; (b) on an enlarged corpus characterized (at least in the view of some scholars) by a lower degree of probability as to its direct attribution to Jesus, but whose narrative logic fits into the patterns exhibited by the restricted corpus.

(D)

In Section 5. “Galilee: The Social & Mental”, we locate our stories in the context of Jesus’ time. We thus describe and assess local variables that bear upon a person or a community’s election of a course of action in a specified context.

(E)

In Section 6. “From Storytelling to a Specific Typology of Action”, on the basis of the above steps, we establish the typology of action to be found in our corpus. Further, Section 7. “Conclusions” will assess the significance of such findings.

2. Action and Narration

2.1. Modes of Action: Towards a Typology

In a seminal article, A.G. Haudricourt introduced the concept of modes of action on the basis of a paradigmatic opposition:

“The cultivation of yams (Dioscorea alata L.), as practiced by the Melanesians of New Caledonia, seems to me to be a good example of what I will call negative indirect action. There is never, so to speak, any brutal contact in space or simultaneity in time with the domesticated being. A ridge of topsoil is carefully constructed, then the seed yams are placed in it. If one wants to obtain a giant tuber, it is necessary to have arranged a vacuum there which this one will fill […] The breeding of the sheep, such as it was practised in the Mediterranean area, seems to me on the contrary the model of the positive direct action. It requires a permanent contact with the domesticated being. The shepherd accompanies his flock night and day […]. His action is direct: contact by the hand or the stick, clods of earth thrown with the rod, the dog which bites the sheep to direct it. His action is positive: he chooses the itinerary that he imposes on the herd at each moment”.

(Haudricourt 1962, pp. 41–42)

There would thus be a predominance within each society (or culture? Or civilization? The vocabulary remains imprecise) of a certain type of action. This is observable in diverse domains: it pertains as much to humans’ treatment of nature (agriculture) as to humans’ treatment of others (government). Carole Ferret reinterpreted and, in part, corrected Haudricourt’s binary typology in the following way:

“The qualification of an action can only be relative each action being considered in relation to other alternative actions aiming at the same objective. Whatever the weight of the constraints, there are always several ways of doing things. What is significant is to know the choices made among several possible actions and to see whether, in these choices, a predilection or an aversion for certain types of action is manifest. […] Each society uses a whole range of types of action (direct and indirect, interventionist and passive, continuous and discontinuous, etc.), without it always being possible or desirable to deduce from this a general propensity for this or that mode of action. […] The lesson to be learned from Haudricourt is the proximity to the concrete. To know a little more about human beings, it is necessary to observe and describe their ways of acting as closely as possible”.

(Ferret 2012, p. 135)

The path followed by C. Ferret avoids the danger of making specific actions (tuber cultivation and sheep breeding, for instance) the paradigms of mentalities that would encompass all fields of human activity and thought. To draw from these paradigms a bipolar representation of the world (East and West, for example), as Haudricourt was tempted to do, is to expose oneself to being caught up in contradictions.3 For instance, China may well have developed a sophisticated theory of “nonaction” (wu wei),4 but it is hardly obvious that such theory really applied to the administration of collectives. After all, the first treatise of the Chinese encyclopedic work Guanzi (the final version of which dates from the first century A.C.) is entitled “Putting the people to pasture” (mu min), introducing the image of the shepherd where one would not expect it since the same work is also one of those which develops the theory of “non-action”. Conversely, in the Palestine of the Gospel times, as evoked by the parables, the image of the shepherd is counterbalanced by that of a farmer who knows perfectly well how to act by the mere fact of not intervening: “The Kingdom of God is like a man who has thrown grain into the ground: whether he sleeps or rises, night and day, the seed sprouts and grows, he does not know how” (Mk 4:26, 27). This parable resonates perfectly with that of Mencius (372–289 BC) mentioned by Haudricourt: the man who wants to help rice grow by pulling on the stems will only uproot it (see Note 4).

Carole Ferret has thus tried to enrich the typology of modes of action by diversifying the dimensions to be taken into account. The main categories she mobilizes can be summarized as follows (see Ferret 2014):

(a)

An action is passive, active, or interventionist. (Interventionism corresponds to the highest degree of activism, such as is the action of diverting the course of rivers; laissez-faire corresponds to the other extremity of the dimension here described.)

(b)

An action is endogenous (the agent acts by herself), exogenous (the agent makes a third player intervene on her behalf), or participative (the agent participates in a process that goes beyond her reach).

(c)

Direct action tends entirely toward its objective, while indirect action is oblique (a wheel transforms circular movement into linear movement).

(d)

An action is positive (it leads towards an objective), negative (it prevents the accomplishment of an alternative objective), or contrary (it runs counter to the intended objective).

(e)

The action can be “internal” (pruning the plants of a garden) or “external” (working the soil of the same garden so as to obtain a specified result over the plants).5

(f)

Finally, the continuous action works by repetition, the discontinuous action by the irreversibility of its consequences (Ferret 2012, p. 133).6

When weighing these characteristics, a reader familiar with the world of the gospels’ parables will immediately be struck by the number of actions evoked by the stories:: sowing the seed all around (Mk 4:3–8; Mt 13:3–8; Lk 8:4–8); letting darnel grow (Mt 13:24–30); mixing the yeast in the flour (Lk 13:21; Mt 13:33); making friends with tenants just before being fired by one’s master (Lk 16:5–7); killing the son of the vineyard’s owner (Mk 12:8; Mt 21:39; Lk 20:15); inviting guests to a supper (Mt 22:2–14; Lk 14:16–24); hiding money within a cloth (Lk 19:20) … And the same reader may tentatively attempt to locate these actions into the categories just sketched.

2.2. Enchainment of Actions as Narrative Plot

Once it is related to a mode of action, any isolated deed necessarily takes place within a plot. To put it otherwise: the chain of events that this deed provokes (or in which it is inserted) is akin to its emplotment. “Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is called explanation by emplotment. […] Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind”. (White 1973, p. 7) The field investigated by White (XIX^th century historical narratives) and the one constituted by our corpus are distinguishable by the fact that the scope of events considered in the parables is more restricted: there are several kinds of events, and actions are one type of events among others (the occurrence of a typhoon or the death of a character as a result of sickness correspond to other types of events). Actions (deeds, initiatives) understood as one specified type of meaningful event constitutes the privileged focus of wisdom narratives. For instance, the fact that the intervention of an agent provokes the destruction of the object of his solicitude, as shown by the story of the man “who helps rice grow” told by Mencius, constitutes both the plot and the meaning of the story.

Models of emplotment are directed by the observation of some foundational realities. In a society based on the cultivation of tubers, the fact that yam or taro clones are earnestly searched for in the fallow lands generates a style of storytelling in which the “uncultivated” (the ancestor, the foreigner—both figures characterized by the fact that they escape social constraints), once “cultivated” as a clone, becomes a source of wealth and life (Haudricourt 1964). Moreover, actions that are deeply embedded into a specified culture spontaneously suggest to the insider a specified mode of emplotment. In the case of the Yakut breeders of Siberia, a chain of discontinuous and inherently violent actions (massive but discriminating slaughter of foals, castration, formation of herds) leads, as if by itself, to a profitable optimization of horse management (Ferret 2012): the knowledge of their ultimate result filters the perception and understanding of the violent operations taking place.

More generally, actions will follow each other according to (a) a clearly perceived necessity, (b) subsequent choices that can break the spring of necessity, or yet, (c) a limited range of possibilities, a trade-off between free choice and necessity. The mechanism through which actions succeed in each other triggers a specific mode of emplotment.

3. What Parables Did Jesus Tell?

The narration of a sequence of actions conveys knowledge and wisdom about the proper way of interacting with one’s environment. A specified set of narrations corresponds to a specific body of wisdom. At this point, the question of determining who is the “author” of the body of wisdom constituted by the parables found in the gospels intervenes. The “author’ may be referred to as the historical Jesus, to the community he comes from, or yet to the one he fosters (the primitive Church). The response to this question is not absolutely decisive for our quest. Moreover, the three “agents’ just distinguished are not easily separated one from the other. Still, investigating the question of the “author” of our corpus constitutes an excellent introduction to its critical reading. Furthermore, it will help us to come up with a reduced and more structured textual set.

3.1. Assessing Plausibility

In a long-term endeavor, John P. Meier has critically evaluated the data likely to contribute to properly historical knowledge of Jesus (see notably Meier 2016).7 In this regard, and in order to weigh the plausibility of the data, which are by far the most numerous, those provided by the gospel corpus, Meier has highlighted five criteria:8 (1) the criterion of embarrassment (the narration of facts likely to hinder the apologetic task of the early Church, such as the passage of Jesus through the baptism administered by John the Baptist, makes their assertion more credible); (2) the criterion of discontinuity, and in particular of double discontinuity when the acts and words of Jesus that are reported refer neither to the Judaism of his time nor to the practices of the early Church (Jesus’ rejection of voluntary fasting); (3) the criterion of multiple independent attestations (Mark, Source Q9, Paul, John), especially when the attestation is based on different literary genres (narratives and speeches); (4) the criterion of coherence, when the statements and facts isolated by the preceding criteria are consistent with the historical database (concordance between the announcements of the Passion, the traditional representations of the fate of the prophets, and the execution of John the Baptist, Jesus’ mentor); (5) finally, the consistency of the facts and statements recounted with what is known of the final fate of Jesus. In addition to this coordinated system, there are second-tier clues that must be handled with caution, in particular, traces of Aramaic in the reported words or echoes of the historical context.

In the next section (and while avoiding directly engaging in exegetical controversies), we will assess the consequences to be drawn from the fact that recent scholarship has severely challenged the very notion of authenticity criteria. Dale Alison has pointed out the fact that the use of such criteria leads to an atomistic approach to the New Testament corpus. In contrast, collective memory (the agency of which is central in the production of the gospels) focuses on general outlines rather than on details (Alison 2010). Theories that recognize in the gospels a product of collective memory are prone to posit that the process through which early Christians remembered and understood Jesus makes the historical figure of the latter (including the distinction between what he may and may not have said) unattainable, (Keith 2016). For Keith, this implies that “memory theory” and traditional historical criticisms are two mutually exclusive approaches. While recognizing the strength of these arguments, one remains entitled to follow the more pragmatic line defended by Hägerland (2015), who suggests that we should “problematize” the authenticity criteria: the critical evaluation of textual data is but one step in the process of elaborating scholarly accounts that may offer an interpretative framework where to insert philological or yet historical findings with due hermeneutical attentiveness.

Let me thus conciliate the taking into account of the authenticity criteria with approaches of the gospels not grounded upon them. Starting with the former: in the view propounded by Meier, and in conformity with the overall design of his endeavor, authenticity criteria help to assess the plausibility of the direct attribution of the parables to the historical Jesus (the only aspect of Meier’s investigation that is of interest to us here) rather than imputing their writing to the literary creativity of the evangelist or to the purpose of the first ecclesial communities. The definition of the term “Parables” conditions the estimation of their number and, therefore, the extension of the corpus upon which to apply the criteria. Depending on the interpreter, the number of parables contained in the synoptic gospel10 oscillates between twenty-nine and sixty-five. A sapiential tale, a simple metaphor, a story with an enigma … where does the parable begin and end? Meier privileges a definition of the parable according to which the model pursued by Jesus is found in the short stories with allegorical significance, rather than in the wisdom literature and the proverbs that the latter contains, a definition I will adopt here.11

3.2. Applying Criteria

While the criterion of multiple attestations allows one to affirm that “Jesus taught in parables,” it is much more difficult to answer the question “but what parables did he tell?” To relate such or such parable directly to Jesus’ teaching mobilizes, first and foremost, the criterion of multiple attestations. However, the use of this specific criterion happens to be much more limited than originally foreseen, at least when, following Meier’s conclusions, one does not identify in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas an autonomous source, but one rather discerns in it a work based upon the earlier synoptic writings, which deprives it of any independent value of attestation.12 It then becomes necessary to make sure that a specified parable is present simultaneously in the Gospel of Mark and in Q (or, alternatively, in Mark and Matthew and/or Luke without recourse from the latter either to Mark or to Q, or again in Matthew and Luke according to two independent sources).13 As we shall see, the other criteria also play their part, as the criterion of multiple attestations would prove too rigorous a test: “Only the Mustard Seed, as a Mark-Q overlap, clearly enjoys multiple attestation”. (Meier 2016, p. 194)

Eventually, this work of elucidation leads to the isolation of four parables that can be directly referred to the historical Jesus: (1) the Mustard Seed (Mk 4:30–32; Mt 13:31–32; Lk 13:18–19); (2) the Homicidal Vinedressers (Mk 12:1–11; Mt 21:33–43; Lk 20:9–18); (3) the Great Supper (Mt 22:2–14; Lk 14:16–24); and (4) the parable known as one of the Talents (or Mines) (Mt 25:14–30; Lk 19:11–227). Thus, paying our due to the methodological cautiousness propounded by the school of historical criticism, we will recognize in these four parables the stratum that enjoys the highest degree of probability in terms of the quest for “authenticity”. An additional factor will encourage us to privilege this narrative kernel: each of these parables corresponds to a singular emplotment model (see Section 6). The mere mention of this second factor already points toward the next step in our inquiry: the nature of our investigation leads us to look for a middle way between approaches centered on the historical Jesus, on the one hand and, on the other hand, scholarship concerned with both memory theory and larger units than the ones isolated by Formgeschichte. As already indicated, I thus adopt for my own purpose the line of critical conciliation propounded by Hägerland (2015).

4. Beyond Historical Attestations: The Rhetoric of the Parables

With the need to explain why one finds such a large number of parables in the Gospels (while the genre is under-represented in the Hebrew Bible and non-existent in the rest of the New Testament) and why, in contrast, his inquiry isolates so restricted a corpus, Meier suggests the following: by narrating parables, Jesus would have shown his direct followers how to compose similarly memorable stories. Hence the proliferation of parables that would have been written between Jesus’ death and the end of the first century. Though grounded in rigorous, step-by-step reasoning, Meier’s approach has been submitted to at least three lines of criticism.

4.1. The Limits of Historical-Critical Methods

The first line of criticisms runs as follows: the minimalistic approach and results propounded by Meier are of little help when one focuses upon what should be the central question, i.e., the way the collective memory of Jesus as a parable teller has shaped a community through typifications and repetitions (Zimmermann 2018). The pursuit of textual material directly related to the historical Jesus finds its extreme limit in the study of the “authenticity” of the parables. Conversely, examining the shaping of the New Testament literary genres, among them the parables, as a way of remembering Jesus links together the teaching of the latter and the process of transmission. Transmission operates by defining and strengthening the forms (the genres) in which a specified content will be encapsulated. The stabilization of the genre goes together with the diversification of its usages: “Whoever has embraced or has been infused with the form of the parable will, in the process of remembering and re-telling, rightly carry out adaptations and assimilations. He or she will not simply recount a parable, but also retell and re-present it in new and different ways. […] Parables are thus not only historical sources or witnesses of redactional narrative work. They are mimetic texts that bring the remembering of Jesus to life”. (Zimmermann 2018, pp. 167–68) This change of focus relativizes the relevance of Meier’s inquiry without fully invalidating it.

We have noted that the second line of criticism attacks the validity of the authenticity criteria. Apart from the reasons already indicated, some authors also contend that taking the existence of Q as provided is problematic: a theory about the Gospels’ textual origins should not govern the reading of the text (Snodgrass 2017, p. 137; see also Campbell 2016). Moreover, parabolic and non-parabolic materials should be considered together in order to attain a fairer view of the former. Additionally, the distinctiveness of Jesus’ parables is striking to the extent that implying that some of the most characteristic stories would have been created through a process of imitation is extremely hazardous (Snodgrass 2017).

The third line of criticism links together a variety of approaches—“rhetorical criticism” (Kennedy 1984), narratology (Rhoads and Michie 1982; Anderson and Moore 1992), “rhetorical narratology” (which attempts to reconcile the two aforementioned lines of inquiry, see Dinkler 2016), or yet “Biblical [structural] rhetoric” (critical of the former approaches’ reliance on Greek-Roman rhetoric and poetic—see Meynet (2012); similar perspective already suggested in Bailey (1983)). These various schools all stress the following: rather than dividing the text into small, discrete units, one should approach the text as a whole so as to discern the structural features that govern its organization. For instance, in Biblical Rhetoric, various forms of ring composition as well as mechanisms such as juxtaposition and deuterosis play a central role in structuring the material, and the unearthing of such forms helps the reader to better apprehend what the text aims at showing (Meynet 2012).

As an example, the attention provided to the textual organization immediately reveals an intriguing feature of one of the four parables that Meier directly attributes to Jesus: in Matthew and Luke, the parable of the Mustard Seed (Mt 13, 30–32; Lk 13, 18–19) is immediately followed by the verse: “The kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour till it was leavened all through”. (Mt 13:33—ibid. in Lk 13:21, separated in the second instance by the mention” “Again he said, ‘What shall I compare the kingdom of God with?’”) This shows that these two parables are actually one, articulated and united by the parallelism established between “a man” and “a woman”. Even without multiple attestations, there is every reason to consider that the redactor/compiler of Q did not invent the parable of the Yeast. Rather, the original storytelling was most probably based on a man/woman symmetry (cf. Meynet 2011, pp. 584–87). The reading of other passages would reveal similar textual solidarities, which makes the fact of isolating a specified parable from its context a questionable operation.

4.2. Networks of Stories

Though these three lines of criticism differ in inspiration, it seems to me that one way of drawing profit from their crisscrossing leads one to articulate less a rebuttal than a corrective of Meier’s approach—a corrective that lets intact one of its main results while considerably enriching our material. The idea runs as follows: as we already know, Meier identifies four parables exhibiting a more probable direct connection to the storytelling conducted by the historical Jesus—the Mustard Seed; the Homicidal Winegrowers; the Great Supper; and the Talents. I propose to see these stories as being networked with other narratives in ways indicated both by their immediate content and by narrative/rhetorical analysis. In other words, I discern in these stories four matrix plots susceptible to receiving a number of variants and addenda. These variants remain close to the original storytelling. At times, as we have seen with the Mustard Seed and the Yeast parables, one may even assert that two networked stories constitute one and the same narrative. Put otherwise, the stories that we are able to connect with the four “matrix stories’ could as well belong to Jesus’ original storytelling as constitute a variant drawn by recorders/editors.

Even though this standpoint enriches our corpus, it still leads us to concentrate on a restricted number of storylines. We do not include, for instance, the parable of the Good Samaritan in our corpus: “The parable of the Good Samaritan is a pure creation of Luke the evangelist”. (Meier 2016, p. 51) For sure, it can be argued that, contrary to Meier’s assertion, this story is to be directly related to Jesus’ parabolic corpus (see Snodgrass 2017), though evidence in this regard is elusive. Still, even if one adopts this position, the “Good Samaritan” does not easily connect with our four matrix stories and probably constitutes a narrative category by itself. In any case, the combination of Meier’s approach with others more sensitive to the memorial, literary, and structural dimensions helps one to determine at least some of the models of emplotment that govern Jesus’ storytelling. This does not imply that other emplotment models could not be found if the corpus were to be enlarged. As we will see, the material harvested this way is already rich enough. In Section 6 of this article, we will thus gather additional stories around our four main narratives, and, more importantly, we will discern in each of these sets a specific emplotment model.

5. Galilee: The Social and the Mental

Before organizing our typology further around the four matrix plots identified, we need to fulfill an additional task. Presenting the context in which Jesus delivers parables (continued and/or edited by his immediate successors) will help us to better grasp the social and cultural anchorage of the actions and narrative sequences found in the parables.

5.1. Scarcity and Reciprocity

Studies of Galilee and Judea in the period covered by the Gospels have benefited greatly from the approaches developed by social and cultural anthropology (Malina 1986, [1981] 1993, 2002; Hanson and Oakman 1998; Fiensy 2007; Oakman 2008; Neyrey and Steward 2008). By the beginning of the first century AD and in the period immediately preceding it, peasant society in Palestine was marked by a clear-cut opposition between landowners and those (the vast majority) to whom the landowners conceded land, tools, and seeds in exchange for a specified portion of the harvest, to which benefits in kind were sometimes added (Carney 1973, pp. 100–3; Hopkins 2002, p. 204). The total could amount to half the product of the harvest or even more. There were also (in much smaller proportions) taxes to be paid to the Roman power (tributum soli and tributum capitis) and to the Herodian power. Additionally, offerings required by the authorities of the Temple in Jerusalem were to be made (Applebaum 1977; Sawicki 2000; Van Eck 2014).14 (In contrast, since 6 A.D., the priestly aristocracy controlled the territory of Judea under the supervision of a Roman Prefect.) The landowner had his steward directly exploit part of his estates. A portion of the land probably belonged to a numerically small class of “middle peasants,” although the nature and existence of this class remain debated (Oakman 2008). In any case, this class of middle peasants probably shrank further during the reigns of Herod the Great (r. 37—4 BC) and Herod Antipas (r. 4 BC–39 AD) because of debts incurred when harvests failed, the usurious rate of borrowing forcing small or middle peasant owners to surrender their land to pay off their arrears (Applebaum 1977; Goodman 1987; Oakman 2008, 2012).

The contract, written or not, was leaving much to chance: the pressure exerted on the tenant farmers by drought, illness, or a sudden increase in the amount of taxes to be paid was met (or not) by the free intervention of the landlord, who, if he was willing to release the tenant farmer from part of his obligations, would then “give/forgive]/consent/grant a favor”—all the nuances summed up by the verb charizomai. Such an attitude, in turn, brings honor and status to the owner, transforming an essentially mercantile relationship into a patron–client one (Landé 1977, p. xxi). When the landlord was “granting favor”, the relationship between the haves and the haves-not was entering into the realm of generalized reciprocity (Malina [1981] 1993, pp. 90–116). Generalized reciprocity constituted a specific mode of exchange: as for material goods, fame and honor were in limited supply (see Jn 3:30), and someone’s increase in honor was someone else’s increase in shame (Neyrey 1998). In any case, transiting from a mercantile to a patron–client type of relationship was by no means an automatic process. Around the time of Jesus, the changes in the patrimonial structure often made such transitioning unlikely: as a corollary of the establishment of a colonial system, large estates were controlled by mostly absentee landlords (members of the Herodian family rather than the Jewish aristocracy). Stewards (oikonomoi) and middlemen were substituting for landlords15, and they resorted to violence to collect rent (Mk 12:9). Tax collectors were personally responsible for obtaining a predetermined product (Mt 18:23–34).

5.2. Skills and Professional Culture

The Palestinian villagers of the first century AD were mostly “generalists” whose skills extended beyond cultivating the fields. The agricultural cycle was freeing up time for building houses or silos (Lk 6:48–49; Lk 14:28–29). The peasant could also rent out his services by the day. Workers in excess were employed in the large estates. The organization of work and the relations within the community were heavily affected by climatic, financial, and political hazards, their impact redoubled by the narrow margin between subsistence and famine and, as a result, the strong tension that marked the lean periods.

The culture of the group of fishermen working around Lake Tiberias (also called the Sea of Galilee) should probably be distinguished from the culture of the peasants (Hanson 1997). Yet, there were common features between them: similar to the farmers, fishermen also suffered from the level and multiplicity of taxes imposed on them by the state. There were also differences in status among them, between boat owners and workers (Mk 1:20 et al.). However, fishermen were united by a specific professional culture and consciousness. For example, the nets required a great deal of attention: not only did the fishermen and their workers make them, but after each fishing expedition, the nets had to be mended, washed, dried, and folded (Mark 1:19). Jesus’ proclamation found its first, perhaps even its main, audience in the villages and towns of the fishermen of Galilee. His preaching from a boat (the water carrying his voice farther to the shore by an amplification effect), his crossings of the lake, and the incidents marking the visits to the villages around the shores ended up constituting the privileged setting of the stories peddled by the first groups of disciples.

Contextualizing the parables (obviously, the above constitutes only an extremely rough summary of the work already completed to that effect) greatly increases their depth and expressiveness. For their auditors, the fact of experiencing a heavy tax burden and weak grain product at the same time was amplifying the dramatic tension of narratives having to do with sowing, growth, and harvest, and well-publicized conflicts centering on land appropriation were making the parables of the Homicidal Vinedressers particularly vivid (Kloppenborg 2006). In Luke 16:1–13, the charizomai that the owner could mobilize is adroitly appropriated by the so-called “unjust” steward. In the same line, the symbolic and economic importance provided to the exercise of charizomai (with the honor/shame connotation attached to such exercise) increases the stakes attached to the fact of accepting or rejecting the invitation sent by the rich man (or the King) of the Great Supper parable (Mt 22:2–14; Lk 14:16–24). Put otherwise, the parables were unveiling the full intensity of situations and options that were deeply embedded into the experience of their listeners.

6. From Storytelling to a Specific Typology of Action

Let us now characterize the mode of emplotment proper to each of the four narrative networks already identified before approaching them as an interconnected whole.

6.1. The Mustard Seed Storyline [Mk, Mt, Lk] and Related Parables; The Unlimited Potential of Discontinuous Actions

From one version to the other of the Mustard Seed story, the same structure can be identified:

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A comparison between the Kingdom of God and everyday realities is introduced.

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A mustard seed (reported as the smallest of all the seeds in two of the versions) is sown in the soil, a field, and a garden.

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This grain grows until it becomes “the largest vegetable plant” (two versions) which can be compared to a tree (two versions).

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The result of the growth is that the birds lodge on the branches or in the shade of the shrub produced.

As already noted, the Yeast parable (Lk 13:21; Mt 13:33) not only belongs to the same narrative network but is most probably part of the original parable. Fecundity, after all, comes from the association of feminine and masculine components. Apart from the fact that the man sows a seed in the soil while the woman hides yeast in the flour resonates as a discreet evocation of the reproductive process. Additionally, the three measures of flour (which correspond to 45 L, enough for a very great number of guests) refer to Gn.18:6: Sara prepares bread for three guests with three measures of flour, and the hospitality shown by Abraham and his wife will result in Sara conceiving a son (Meynet 2011, p. 587). Fecundity finds its highest expression in human birth.

The basic sowing/growing/harvesting narrative model connects the Mustard and Yeast parables to the ones of the Sower (Mk 4:3–9) and of the Growing Seed (Mk 4:26–29—not retained in Meier’s corpus as it fails the test of the multiple attestation criterion) into the same network. The Growing Seed parable illustrates the well-known topic of the “passive action” that brings fruit by itself, attributed preferentially by Haudricourt to East Asian societies in contrast to the “active intervention” he thought typical of the Mediterranean world. The connection extends to the parable of the Darnel sown among the wheat (Mt 13:24–30). Though this parable does not explicitly stress the abundance of the harvest, it insists on the necessity not to intervene after the initial action has been performed. The gathering of these stories as a whole brings to light two characteristics:

(1)

They all highlight an initial action—sowing or mixing yeast in the flour—which is discontinuous in nature: no subsequent action is required, and the consequences of the initiative turn out to be inescapable. In the case of the Mustard Seed story, the impression of inescapability is reinforced by choice of the species: Pliny writes of wild mustard that “it is extremely difficult to rid the soil of it when once sown there, the seed when it falls germinating immediately”. (Natural History, XIX-54 (Pliny the Elder 1856, p. 197)).

(2)

Maybe with the exception of the Darnel parable (although the final mention of the granaries where the wheat is gathered still introduces the theme of plentifulness), all stories emphasize the contrast between the minuteness of the initial action and of its object, on the one hand, and bountiful results, on the other hand. (In the case of the parable of the Sower, such consequence happens only in one of the cases being discussed, but, then, the harvest is described as being especially plentiful). An initial commitment is fraught with consequences that go beyond predictions—in this case, happy and fruitful consequences.

6.2. The Homicidal Vinedressers [Mk, Mt, Lk] and the Fig Tree: A Reverse Image of the Growth Process

The long developments of the parable of the Homicidal Vinedressers contrast with the brevity of the Mustard Seed story. This prolixity stems from a marked embarrassment on the part of the narrators. In fact, it is less the argument of multiple attestations (doubtful here) than the “criterion of embarrassment” that leads to Meier’s conclusion that the story is original (see below). Beyond the differences noted from one version to another, the skeleton of the story reveals the latent difficulty the narrators had to meet with:

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An introduction sees an owner planting a vineyard and entrusting it to tenants.

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The owner sends servants to claim the product of the vineyard. With variations from one version to another, the servants are rejected, beaten, or even put to death.

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The owner sends his son, believing that he will be respected.

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So as to monopolize the inheritance, the tenants kill the son, and they leave his corpse outside the vineyard without burial.

It is in the exchange that, in all versions, follows the story proper and concludes the parable that the difficulty comes to light: if the original version ended, according to all the textual clues, with the murder of the son, the (embarrassed) conclusion added to it is twofold: (a) an exchange with the interlocutors, who recognize that punishment will come and that the vineyard will be transferred to others; (b) the intervention of Jesus who, on a scriptural basis, makes the rejected son the cornerstone of the future vineyard. The discomfort with the original conclusion experienced by the early community most likely led to the rewriting of the end against a background of triumph and resurrection. Such observation further emphasizes the fact that this parable is a tragic mirror image of the parable of the mustard seed: the initial commitment of the owner meets with counter-actions that trigger death and destruction rather than a fecundity. The son that the parable of the Yeast discreetly evokes through the reference to Gn.18 is here put to death. Conclusion: once it has been set into motion, a process of destruction unfolds to its end, exactly as is the case, but in reverse, with a genuine growth process.

Whatever the exegetical difficulties raised by Meier, the fact that this story knows three versions with differences in accent (though the conclusion reached just now is valid for the three) already makes the parable part of a narrative network formed by its inner variants. The explicit reference to Is.5 also connects the story with the limited corpus of the Old Testament parables and, what is more, with its most representative specimen. Additionally, Mathew’s and Mark’s versions of the story insert into the same textual ensemble the story of the fig tree that withers after it is cursed by Jesus for not bearing figs (the fig tree story becomes a parable in Lk 13:6–9). This enigmatic story announces the parable that soon follows and the logic it describes; the fact of not bearing fruit (or of withholding the fruit one brings) leads to death. This narrative network is a mirror image of the one initiated by the Mustard Seed story.

6.3. The Great Supper [Mt, Lk] and Related Stories: From Reciprocity to Gratuitousness

With no equivalent in Mark, the versions of the parable preserved in Matthew and Luke can be considered independent of each other, at least on the basis of their extended lexical differences. Their comparison is further complicated by the autonomous developments that Matthew embeds in the central story (historically triggered by the destruction of Jerusalem), but the common structure is clear:

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A man (perhaps a king) provides a great banquet (possibly a wedding feast for his son).

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He sends one or more slaves to summon guests. These guests seem to have a certain social status and possess riches.

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The same guests, pretexting their business, refuse to come (whereas things were undoubtedly already settled, which suggests an existing network of relationships between the different actors), thus causing a serious affront to the host.

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Consequently, the latter sends his slaves to gather people of much more modest conditions, and the room of the banquet is eventually filled to capacity.

In Luke, the parable is preceded by a saying of Jesus that both describes the logic of gift and counter gift observable in most traditional societies and beyond (Mauss [1925] 2016) and challenges it to its core, at least when it comes to its effect on social relationships: “When you give a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relations or rich neighbors, in case they invite you back and so repay you. No; when you have a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; then you will be blessed, for they have no means to repay you and so you will be repaid when the upright rise again”. (Lk 14:12–14) As to Matthew, he inserts the parable between the one of the Homicidal Vinedressers (the two stories may be seen as a pair) and Jesus’ answer to the question of whether it is permissible to pay taxes to Caesar: “Pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar—and God what belongs to God”. (Mt 22:21) For both Matthew and Luke, questions raised by the exchange of gifts, free or forced, trigger a narrative thread that extends to other stories, notably the ones of the Unjust (or rather of the Astute) Steward (Lk 16:1–8) and of the Workers in the Vineyard (Mt 20:1–16). “Have I no right to do what I like with my own?” (Mt 20:15)

The Great Supper parable describes the double transgression that affects the principle of reciprocal obligation inscribed into the social fabric. The guests refuse to enter into the dynamic of reciprocity triggered by invitation to a feast. The host of the banquet also defies the logic of gift and counter-gift, this time by inviting people unable to reciprocate (hence the link with the saying recorded in Lk 14:12–14).

Somehow, the Great Supper storyline addresses the tension existing between the two preceding modes of emplotment, i.e., the ineluctability inherent to the processes of both growth and destruction. Once the dynamic of reciprocity that the invitations had launched has been reverted into its contrary by the guests’ rebuff (which reduplicates the attitude of the Vinedressers—in Mt 22:6, the guests even proceed to kill the King’s envoys), there is indeed a destructive drive irremediably launched: the one governing the relationship between the host and the original guests, the host’s honor having been converted into shame. However, and most importantly, a new dynamic of growth is launched by the fact of liberating the gifting (the invitation to the banquet) from the necessity of offering and receiving a counter-gift. Through such reversal, and as in the Mustard Seed storyline, the fruition reaches its fullest, “the wedding hall [being] filled with guests”. (Mt 22:10; see also Lk 14:23). A discontinuous action that counters a process of social disintegration renews the impetus of life. Here, a question may be raised; is the action truly discontinuous? Contrary to the Mustard Seed storyline, the course of events is marked by effort and repetition: the servants will need to painstakingly gather the new guests. Still, and even if the host’s initiative requires a series of direct, positive actions entrusted to the servants, the action changes the extent and nature of the network of social relationships irremediably. It is discontinuous in so far as it constitutes both a breakdown and a breakthrough.

6.4. The Talents (or Mines) [Mt; Lk] and Related Stories: Growth as a Result of Risk-taking

When assessing the status of the Talents (or Mines16) parable, Meier mobilizes the same criterion as for the Great Supper: the lexical gap between the two versions goes far beyond what the differences in writing style would imply, which suggests that Matthew and Luke received the story from different sources. This time, it is not Matthew but Luke who inserts a second narrative into the story.17 If we disregard this insertion, we obtain the following primitive narrative:18

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A (noble) man goes on a journey and summons his slaves (three or ten).

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He entrusts each one with a different amount of money, with the same instruction: to make it grow.

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On his return, he settles the accounts with them.

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The first servants happen to have secured exceptional returns, in absolute amount (Matthew) or in relative gain (Luke). The master congratulates them, and he entrusts them with accrued responsibilities.

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A long, intense exchange follows. The remaining servant had buried his capital rather than make it bear fruit, afraid as he was (he explains) of the harshness of his greedy master. He returns the initial sum. The master severely blames him, and he transfers the deposit to the most deserving of the servants.

The conclusion, though common to Matthew and Luke, seems not to be primitive but rather to borrow from a proverb that was then in common use but may not be entirely appropriate to the story (“anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he has”), though the judgment on the adequacy of the proverb to the story may differ. Whether the recalcitrant slave received a more severe punishment in the early version remains a matter of debate. Three connected features stand at the center of the parable: the discretionary power of the master; the resulting duty of obedience for the servant, including the risks that such obedience may entail; the reward, unpromised and yet certain, that awaits the one who shoulders such a duty and such a risk.

The narrative network into which to insert the story first leads us towards the Judgment of Solomon (1R 3:16–28): similar to the King when deciding between two claimants, the master judges the unproductive servant “out of [his] own mouth” (Lk 19:22). The observation is not trivial: the judgment that takes place at the end of the story is primarily a mere factual assessment. Different decisions naturally produce different results: “Your one pound has brought in ten [or five]”, say the servants who took a risk (Lk 19:16–18) (note the passive form of the sentence). Fruitfulness has a logic of its own, independent of the efforts that have been spent. The fact is confirmed by the master when he speaks to the last servant: “Then why did you not put my money in the bank? On my return I could have drawn it out with interest”. (Lk 19:23) This last observation connects our parable with … the Mustard Seed emplotment model since, in both cases, an initial “sowing” potentially brings in abundant results. The association between risk-taking and plentifulness is particularly underlined by both the Sower and the Talents parables. “Sowing” contrasts with “burying”: the unproductive servant in Matthew hides the money in the ground (Mt 25:25); in Luke, he wraps it up in a cloth (Lk 19:20). The “corrective” action of the master makes even more obvious the results attached to the two logics put into parallel; what has not yet fructified will be entrusted to a risk-taker, who will not spare the resources at his disposal, and, as was the case in the parable of the Great Supper (“not one of those who were invited shall have a taste of my banquet” Lk 14:24), the one who has not entered into the logic of gifting, sowing and risk-taking will find himself totally dispossessed (“anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he has” Mt 25:29). In Matthew, this parable is immediately followed by the narrative of the Last Judgement, centered upon the ultimate fruitfulness of all gifts, however small they may look. In contrast, not performing the deeds that are within one’s reach, and avoiding engaging in risk-taking, amounts to engineering one’s destruction. The transition between the parable of the Mines and one of the Last Judgement is ensured by a sentence proper to Matthew: “As for this good-for-nothing servant, throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth”. (Mt 25:30).

6.5. Unearthing a Meta-Narrative Matrix

When taken as a whole, our four narrative matrixes combine into a kind of meta-matrix, which can be described as follows: the Mustard Seed and the Homicidal Vinedressers parables (as well as the stories that can be associated with them) are straightforward narratives, which, as already noted, mirror each other. In both cases, the stress is on a discontinuous action whose consequences are inescapable: the sowing of a seed results in bountifulness; the killing of the envoys leads to the murder of the son of the owner, and, from there, to ultimate destruction. The Great Supper and the Talents narrative matrixes complicate the previous storyline by the insertion of a counter-action. In the Great Supper narrative, the destructive logic initiated by the refusal of the hosts to attend the banquet (a refusal similar, as underlined by Mt. 22:6, to the action taken by the homicidal vinedressers) is reversed by the decisive counter-action of the master who suddenly directs invitations towards people unable to reciprocate. The Talents storyline speaks of a process of growth initiated by the deposit that a master entrusts to his servants. This process is hampered by a counter-action: the servant puts the “seed money” into a cloth. The fact that the master eventually transfers the seed money to another servant certainly corresponds to a new counter-action, but, without doubt, the accent of the story lies upon the first counter-action—the lazy (or fearful) servant’s death-inducing (lack of) initiative.

The imbrication between our four storylines can thus be formalized as follows (Figure 1):

6.6. Initiating and Re-Initiating

Beyond the question of their authorship, and as their traditional reading rightly emphasize, the parables speak of the coming of the “Kingdom” (basileia): its inevitability as well as its active presence in almost imperceptible realities (the Mustard Seed); the opposition encountered by an envoy inscribed into the chain of prophets put to death (the Vinedressers); the transfer of the promises of the Kingdom from a restricted community to another that will be, in its principle, unlimited (the Great Supper); the commitment, to risk-taking that true obedience leads the listener to enter into (the Talents). Such spiritual teaching bases itself upon the reading of natural and social phenomena that offer the audience a glimpse at ultimate realities.

In each of the four narrative networks (and also in the meta-narrative they together design), the themes of inevitability and decision are subtly linked. In the first story, the inevitability of the final result (the plant becomes home for the birds) seems to be that of the natural process itself. However, the contextualization of the parable reveals that this process also applies to social realities: as we have seen, the narrative is hardly separable from those of the Sower, of the Growing Seed, of the Leaven, and of the Darnel. In all cases, allowing for growth is by itself a decision; growth is the result of both an inevitability and a choice. Note that when a man takes a mustard seed and sows it “in his field” (Mt 13:31) rather than “in a garden” (Lk 13:19), the product of the seed can be likened to a parasitic plant, as is the darnel mentioned by Matthew immediately before the Mustard Seed story (birdies are grain robbers that parasitize the crop once they gather in the shade of the shrub), and yet the agent of the parable lets the plant grow. Similarly, the description of the act of sowing “in all directions”, as does the Sower of the story, associates the growth of the seed with a peculiar type of behavior. In sharp contrast, the inevitability becomes that of destruction in the parable of the Vinedressers: the decision not to “return the fruit” leads naturally to the one of “appropriating the inheritance” and then murdering the son.

In the parable of the Talents, the enterprising servants combine the “letting grow” and the “giving back” into one and the same process. In return, they are provided “much” (Mt 25:21) or (in the way Luke specifies their reward) the command of a city for every mine they have earned (Lk 19:17). Originally, the process of exchange and growth was inseparable from the dynamism of life itself. The parable of the Mustard Seed vividly illustrates such propensity. However, life dynamism can be hindered by the refusal of some of the members of a specified community to engage in the conduct that sustains this process of growth and exchange. The parable of the Great Supper exemplifies such refusal. The first guests were chosen because they were part of a presumably high-level patron–client network (a fact induced from the elevated, perhaps royal, status of the inviter)—a network they choose to break with various justifications: purchase of land or of five pairs of oxen, or yet marriage (Lk 14:18–20). Such an interruption of the exchange, which greatly weakens the social capital of the inviter, breaks the multiplication of the benefits that could be expected in the course of time. However, at this point, a new note is heard: the “growth” will turn out to be that of the number of guests who, in the end, fill the room—similar to the birds come to “inhabit” (kataskēnoō) the great vegetable plant that springs up from the ground. Guests and birds do so without having to offer any counterpart. The “network” meal is transformed into a communal meal (on the contrast between these two types of meals in the Roman Empire and in an even wider area, cf. Jones 2007, pp. 225–26). An unexpected decision re-launches the process of growth through a mechanism that transmutes reciprocity into gratuitousness.

We can then summarize the “modes of action” that these four texts allow us to identify once we cross-reference the lessons or suggestions that each one contains:

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The lessons to be drawn from natural realities lead the wise observer to provide precedence to growth factors over any other consideration and to similarly prioritize processes conducive to growth in the social and supranatural realms.

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The process of unimpaired growth is nurtured by a logic of uninterrupted exchange.

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Exchange is activated by two mechanisms: obligation (contractual, statutory, or moral); and risk-taking.

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Interrupting the exchange induces a reverse dynamic, that of destruction unless it can be restarted on the basis of an initiative (a discontinuous counter-action, often characterized by risk-taking) that will change the very nature of the relationships at stake.

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In the end, our narratives illustrate the workings of the logic of reciprocity and risk-taking in society. They also exemplify the crises that the breaking-down of such logic produces, and they suggest to transmute reciprocity into gratuitousness so as to transcend the “inescapable” character attached to both the triggering of social mechanisms and the consequences of their dysfunctions.

Such results are certainly not trivial. Coming back to the typology of action sketched by Carole Ferret (2012, 2014), we observe the emphasis put over discontinuous actions (with the character of inevitability that goes with them) over continuous workings. We also observe the prominence provided to passive action (letting the grain grow, letting the servants or the vinedressers operate) over an active intervention (as would be the fact of discarding the darnel). When an active intervention takes place, it is both corrective and discontinuous. Furthermore, since the actions gathered within our corpus are all inserted into a nexus of social interactions or else into natural processes, they are on the whole “participative” rather than strictly “endogenous” or “exogenous”. Therefore, the discontinuous, passive and participative dimensions of action are the ones privileged by parabolic emplotment, and the introduction of counter-actions that are preferentially active and discontinuous (at least when they are life-inducing19) complements the emplotment models developed by our corpus.

7. Conclusions

Jesus, the anthropologist? Though the expression is obviously far-fetched, it has the merit to point out the following: (1) Not only are a few stories attributable directly to the historical Jesus, at least on a probability slider but also are there related narratives that depend upon the modes of emplotment found in the former. (2) These stories unfold social mechanisms at work in a specified social and cultural environment. Unveiling the (sometimes unintended) consequences of certain courses of action, they are part of a trove of “local knowledge”. (3) The description of these mechanisms sketches a global apprehension of social exchange; on a first level, the narrator of the parables analyzes social mechanisms as a “given”; on a second level, he directs pointed criticisms toward them.

As discussed in Sections Three and Four of the present article, our selection of representative narratives is probably incomplete: the modes of action evoked by the four storylines identified differ significantly from those suggested by the figure of the shepherd, found in Lk 15:3–7 (the Lost Sheep) or in Chapter 10 of John’s gospel. Still, these four narratives remarkably confirm Haudricourt’s observation according to which “modes of action” correlate quite logically the treatment of nature with the one of the Other: processes of growth in the cultivated fields and in social relationships (including in the fiduciary world) seem to obey similar laws, At the same time, the correction made by C. Ferret to Haudricourt’s approach is validated: each society resorts to a range of modes of action, and we should not be in a hurry to identify a “propensity” towards such or such way of proceeding that a specified society would supposedly exhibit.

Sure enough, the historical Jesus is not an impassive observer of social mechanisms. In our corpus, judgments of fact and of value are hardly separable. Moreover, narratives loaded with social content also resonate with spiritual teaching. The term “spiritual” must be specified: the coming of the Kingdom cannot be separated from the coming of the justice (dikaiosúnē) that it calls for. All things considered, the understanding of realities that are properly spiritual seems to postulate the deciphering of social workings. The way our societies operate and the reasons that explain the flowering and withering of our communities may well constitute one of the enigmas that have remained “hidden since the foundation of the world” (Mt 13:35).