The Power of Parable Quotes

“If an audience kept complete silence during a challenge parable from Jesus and if an audience filed past him afterward saying, 'Lovely parable, this morning, Rabbi,' Jesus would have failed utterly.”
― John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus

“When a metaphor gets big, it is called “tradition”; when it gets bigger, it is called “reality”;”
― John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus

“That is, by the way, an introductory definition of a parable: a story that never happened but always does—or at least should.”
― John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus

“But a participatory eschatology demanded a participatory pedagogy, a collaborative message demanded a collaborative medium. In other words, parables were the perfect—even necessary and inevitable—medium for that precise message.”
― John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus

“(Desmond Tutu: “God, without us, will not; as we, without God cannot.”)”
― John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus

“The Greek is importantly different: “Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”
― John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus

“I had observed that the parabolic stories by Jesus seemed remarkably similar to the resurrection stories about Jesus. Were the latter intended as parables just as much as the former? Had we been reading parable, presuming history, and misunderstanding both, at least since literalism deformed both pro-Christian and anti-Christian imagination in response to the Enlightenment? Think, for example, of the Jerusalem to Jericho road with its Good Samaritan and the Jerusalem to Emmaus road with its Incognito Jesus after the resurrection. Most everyone accepts the former (Luke 10:30–35) as a fictional story with a theological message, but what about the latter (Luke 24:13–33)? Is the latter story fact or fiction, history or parable? Many would say this latter story actually happened. But why is that so, when just a few chapters earlier a similar story is considered pure fiction, completely parable? We need to look at that question a little closer.”
― John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus