Painfully Clear the Parables of Jesus

by Andrew Parker

Jesus' stories should be understood as healings, not teachings. Conservatives, for whom the parables are allegorical, and liberals, who view them as creative works of art, make the mistake of treating the parable as a form that conceals even as it reveals. They fail to appreciate that Jesus intended to be painfully clear, since most of his stories were meant for people with sick attitudes and were designed to make them aware of their condition. If the parables, as they appear in the Gospels, seem mysterious, it is because first-century writers were ill equipped to report them adequately, not because they were intrinsically enigmatic. A compelling new methodology of interpretation is advanced, and applied with striking effect to twelve parables.

143 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Andrew Parker is a zoologist who has worked on Biomimetics. He worked at the Natural History Museum in London, and from 1990 to 1999 he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow and is a Research Associate of the Australian Museum and University of Sydney and from 1999 until 2005 he worked at the University of Oxford. As of 2018 Parker is a Visiting Research Fellow at Green Templeton College where he is head of a Research Team into photonic structures and eyes.