Parables To The Blind

A study and analysis of the more than 250 parables in Scripture.

You are lost in a forest and intrude upon an occult ritual. From that moment you plunge into a world of phantasms and apparitions, involuntary time travel and spirit possession. To survive you must master the occult by deciphering the mysterious poetry and paintings of William Blake.

Parables of Jesus examines Jewish customs during biblical times to reveal lessons on life, living, and walking with the Lord. You’ll encounter the figures that Jesus used in his stories: the unjust judge who neither feared God or man, the self-righteous Pharisee and the humble publican in the temple, the fickle children in the marketplace, the unforgiving servant, and others exhibiting traits as compassion, jealousy, and greed. Pastor Paul Saunders makes the point that Jesus was appalled with the hypocritical nature of Jewish religious leadership. They made a great show of righteousness, but their behavior was corrupt—and Jesus was not afraid to call it out. The parables are brilliant, relevant, pithy, and personally challenging. Jesus uses everyday activities, with which we are all familiar, to illustrate a deeper truth. Although numerous scholars have written about the parables of Jesus, this book takes a fresh approach, looking at them in context and exploring the relevance they have today.

Stories inAll Eyes and Blind are vivid, concrete, and thoroughly contemporary. What's more, they embody imagination at the service of community. For these stories, when read aloud and shared with others, evoke the telling of personal faith-stories. In the sharing of our stories, our lives, community forms. This is, after all, how we come to know one another in our uniqueness, our diversity and our commonality.

Few New Testament topics have been discussed as often and as intensely as Q, the hypothesized second major source alongside the gospel of Mark for the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and the parables. And yet, no monograph to date has been devoted to considering the parables in Q. In addition to filling this gap in New Testament scholarship, Dieter T. Roth addresses the need to move scholarship on both Q and the parables forward along methodological and interpretive lines. Roth considers Q not as a text behind Matthew and Luke that needs to be reconstructed but rather as an intertext between Matthew and Luke that offered plots, characters, and images in parables that were taken up by Matthew and Luke and utilized in their own respective texts. In addition, Roth draws on recent parables research in his examination of the 27 parables in Q (two spoken by John the Baptist, one by the Centurion, and 24 by Jesus) in order to consider their purpose and function in this early Christian text.

Like yeast, parables are explosive stories of Jesus that invade our lives and transform us into citizens of the kingdom of God. But they are also cryptic, and thats where this book is useful. More than an explanation or interpretation of each parable, this definitive work is primarily an exercise in hermeneutics. In it, readers are taken through a process of discovering which sayings of Jesus are parables, problematic questions related to counting and categorizing them, and Jesus rationale for speaking in parables. The work then analyzes four distinct ways that parables are structured and three levels at which they do their work in us. The final chapter presents parable-related hermeneutical guidelines, and the book ends with seven extensive Appendices and two Indexes. It is a must read for every biblical scholar!