The Parables and Their Reception: Towards a New Paradigm for Interpreting the Parables

The Parables and Their Reception explores the reception history of Jesus’ parables. This volume brings together several scholars from a 2022 conference in Oslo and looks beyond Jesus and the gospels and towards the parables’ afterlives. The research history shows that studies of the parables have contributed significantly to our understanding of their literary and historical context. However, the aim of studying the reception history of the parables is not to identify their historical kernel and see how the layers of sediments on top of them have changed their original meaning. The purpose rather is to understand how these stories attributed to Jesus have been shaped by politics, history, and theology. The parables are sometime referred to as the “greatest stories ever told” but this volume shows that the reception of the parables is more complicated. The parables are always in a process of generating new meanings because their context and the communities that interpret them shape their meaning. The innovation of this volume is to give case examples of these new, for better or worse, meanings. By doing so it points towards new ways of studying the parables of Jesus and explore its impact in history.