Joachim Jeremias was one Europes most highly influential New Testament scholars

in the mid-twentieth century. In the introduction to his book The Atonement, Martin Hengel
called him the most significant New Testament scholars of the last generation in Germany.1
Jeremias scholarly output was prolific. By the time of his death in 1979, Jeremias had
written over 250 scholarly articles and over 30 books. Among his most influential books was
Die Gleichnisse Jesu (The Parables of Jesus). After its initial publication in 1947, The
Parables of Jesus continued to be rewritten, revised, and expanded by Jeremias over the next
20 years. As it developed through its various editions this book became the most widely
read book on the parables, and today it is the essential starting point for parable research.2
The modern study of parables is so indebted to the work of Joachim Jeremias that Norman
Perrin could claim, when we talk of interpreting the parables of Jesus today we mean
interpreting the parables as Jeremias has reconstructed them, either personally or through his
influence on others who have followed the method he developed.3
Such a claim, while perhaps not entirely true, does highlight the significance of Jeremias to
the modern study of parables. Yet, even if his work does hold such a prominent place in
modern parable study, does this mean it is without error? Are the suppositions of Jeremias
and his predecessors (to whom his work is greatly indebted) correct? It is the purpose of this
essay to briefly examine and assess the work of Jeremias in The Parables of Jesus.

1Martin Hengel, The Atonement (London: SCM, 1981), 4.

2Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 92.
3Perrin, 101.

To enter a discussion on Jeremias work on the parables, one must first recognize that
it absorbs the work of two of Jeremias most important predecessors, Adolf Jlicher and C.
H. Dodd. Jlicher first published his work on the parables, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, in 1886.
He was concerned with both the historical and literary nature of the parables. On the
historical level, he stressed that a clear distinction needed to be made between the parables
of Jesus and the parables as they were presented to us by the evangelists.4 Part of Jlichers
critique on a historical level was the charge that [n]ot only did the evangelists (and their
sources) engage in descriptive supplementation and interpretive application, but in Mk 4:1013 (and pars.) they have intruded a completely alien theory about the intention of the
parabolic method.5 In other words, he charged the evangelists themselves (or their sources)
with introducing a method of allegorizing Mark 4:10-13 (the Parable of the Sower) which did
not exist in the original parable as given by Jesus. Jeremias adopted the same belief,
concerning the early church as a source of alteration in general and concerning Mark 4:10-13
specifically. We will address this charge in our assessment of Jeremias below.
Jlicher wrote his Die Gleichnisreden Jesu in an attempt to provide an understanding
of the parables (as Jesus told them) as vivid and understandable. For centuries the parables
of Jesus had been treated as elaborate allegories, in which each feature of the story referred to
something other than itself.6 Jlicher made a distinction between allegory and parable and
4James C. Little, Parable Research in the Twentieth Century: I. The Predecessors of J.
Jeremias, Expository Times 87 (September 1976): 357.
5Ibid.
6One example of this is Augustines interpretation of the Good Samaritan, in which the
traveler was Adam, Jerusalem was the heavenly city of peace (from which Adam fell), Jericho was the moon
(signifying humanitys mortality), the thieves are the devil and his angels (who strip the traveler of his
immortality, beat him by persuading him to sin, and leave him half dead in his sinful state). The priest and the
Levite were the ministry of the Old Testament, the Samaritan is the Lord, the innkeeper is the Apostle Paul, and
2

sought to demonstrate that the parables of Jesus were in fact the latter and not the former.
Jlicher believed that Jesus parables consisted of two parts: the matter (Sache) which is the
real concern of the parabolist, and the picture (Bild) with which it may be compared.7
Jeremias accepted much of Jlichers work, including: the contention that the parables were
not allegories and the contention that they were vivid, simple stories and pictures designed to
make a single point. Where Jeremias departed from Jlicher was over the nature of the
single point which the parables were designed to make. Jlicher believed that Jesus
teaching concerning the Kingdom of God was based on general moral principle. This view is
a reflection of his late nineteenth century German liberal worldview, rather than a strict
reading of the text itself, and Jeremias was right to reject it.
In the decades between Jlichers publication of his work on the parables and
Jeremias first publication of The Parables of Jesus, a significant shift in understanding of the
Kingdom of God took place. Thanks largely to the work of Johannes Weiss and Albert
Schweitzer, the Kingdom of God, as preached by Jesus, was seen as the imminent inbreaking
of Gods dramatic intervention in the world. The message of Jesus concerning the Kingdom
of God was framed in terms of apocalyptic expectation. While Weiss and Schweitzer
believed that Jesus viewed the Kingdom to be imminently coming, C. H. Dodd argued that
Jesus believed that the Kingdom had actually come in his ministry. According to Dodd,
Jesus eschatology was a realized eschatology. In 1935, Dodd wrote the first edition of his
Parables of the Kingdom, in which he argued that while Jesus employed the traditional

so on.

7Perrin, 93.

symbolism of apocalypse to indicate the other-wordly or absolute character of the kingdom

of God, he used the parables to enforce and illustrate the idea that the kingdom of God has
come upon men there and then.8 Dodds work not only introduced parables into the
discussion of Jesus message of the Kingdom, but it had the reverse effect as well,
introducing the concept of the eschatological Kingdom of God into the discussion of Jesus
parables. While Jeremias himself rejected Dodds view of realized eschatology and
accepted instead an eschatology in the process of being realized, he drew upon a number of
Dodds ideas.
Dodd argued that the parables needed to be interpreted in terms of the Sitz im Leben,
but the problem was that the setting in life of the parables was not that setting which was
provided by the situation of the early church. He thought that, in order to retrieve the
original setting of the parable as told by Jesus, one would sometimes have to remove it from
the life and thought of the early church. In this respect Jeremias follows Dodd
enthusiastically, relating parable after parable to hypothetical situations in the ministry of
Jesus, situations of Jesus confronted by eager hearers, by hostile opponents, by questioning
disciples, and so on.9
Having surveyed the groundwork laid by scholars like Jlicher and Dodd and having
noted Jeremias indebtedness to them for his work on the parables of Jesus, let us now look at
the work of Jeremias directly, noting his concerns, aims, and methods regarding the study of
the parables. Jeremias concerns are, on one level, historical. He desires to recover the
8Little, 360.
9Perrin, 98.

ipsissimi vox of the historical Jesus, and found, in the parable material, a firm source of
Jesus authentic teaching. He opens The Parables of Jesus by saying: The student of the
parable of Jesus, as they have been transmitted to us in the first three Gospels, may be
confident that he stands upon a particularly firm historical foundation.10 According to
Jeremias, we can be confident that the parables really reflect the teaching of Jesus because
they reflect the character of his good news, the eschatological nature of his preaching, the
intensity of his summons to repentance, and his conflict with Pharisaism. Yet, for Jeremias
(as we noted above in Jlicher), the parables are buried under layers of tradition. This is
evident in his qualification as they have been transmitted to us in the first three Gospels.
He charges that the parables had undergone a certain amount of reinterpretation already by
the first decades after Jesus death. These early years saw Jesus parables begin to be treated
as allegoriesa trend which continued for centuries after. This misunderstanding was
corrected by Adolf Jlicher, but Jeremias bemoans the fact that Jlicher stopped half-way.
He cleansed the parables from the thick layer of dust with which the allegorical interpretation
had covered them, but after achieving this preliminary task he did not move forward.11 For
Jeremias, the main task is still to be done: to attempt to recover the original meaning of the
parables.
The method by which this end will be achieved, according to Jeremias, was
articulated by C. H. Dodd. Dodd, as we already mentioned, sought to rediscover the Sitz im
Leben of the parables, as told by Jesus. Like Dodd, Jeremias seeks to place the parables in
10Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus. trans. S.H. Hooke, 2nd rev. ed. (New York:
Scribner, 1972), 11.

11Jeremias, 19.

the setting of the life of Jesus. If the historical situation of each parable can be recovered,
then one may discover what Jesus intended to say at a particular moment. Jeremias
approach, at least ideally, is one in which historical critical study of the parables is done first
and literary critical study of them is done second. John Sider frames the discussion in terms
of historical criticism (looking through the literature of the gospels to see Jesus) versus
literary criticism (looking at the literature of the gospels [or a specific piece of them, like
the parables] to find meaning in the text as we have it.)12 The problem with approaching the
parables in this order is that the literary analysis of them relies on a conjectural, reconstructed
version of them. For scholars like Jeremias, the latter approach of [f]ull scale literary
analysis is used not to interpret the gospel versions, but only to illuminate the conjectural
(and already interpretive) reconstructions.13
With this concern in mind, let us look at Jeremias method for determining how the
parables may have shifted from their original setting. He notes ten laws of transformation,
which he hopes to apply to the parables to purge them of non-original material.14 This
approach is not unique to Jeremias. Jlicher pointed out many of these same observations.
Other scholars have also attempted to rediscover the original context in the best available
12John Sider, Rediscovering the Parables: The Logic of the Jeremias Tradition, JBL 102
(March 1983): 61-62

13Ibid., 62.
14The ten laws are: an inevitable change in meaning brought about the translation of the
parables into Greek, representational material may be similarly translated, embellishment is noticeable at an
early date, parables which were originally addressed to opponents or to the crowd may have been applied by the
early church to the Christian community, a shift from the eschatological to the hortatory, the Church related the
parables to its own situation, the early church interpreted the parables allegorically, the early church made
collections of parables and sometimes fused parables together, and the early church provided the parables with a
setting which changed their meaning (Jeremias, 113-4).

match between the point of the parable and the recorded experience of Jesus But such
judgments are as subjective as the critics' views of Jesus' career, as their interpretation of
each parable.15 With specific regard to Jeremias, his criteria fall into serious question when
we realize that they offer no regularity of cause and effect. He does not believe, for
instance, that his examples of alteration in translation are typical of passages translated from
Aramaic into Greek; or that two or more parables in one place could not have been put
together by Jesus.16 He furthermore admits non-Palestinian modes of representation do not
always indicate editorial activity or lack of authenticity.17 In his attempt to rediscover the
actual setting and words of Jesus, Jeremias does not ascertain the parable by the law; he
illustrates the law by the parable. The laws summarize his manifold conclusions about
separate parables.18 The laws do not offer certainty (or even relative certainty) of prediction
and are of little help in determining the original setting of the parables.
Jeremias is further plagued by his own assumptions regarding allegory in the
parables. He sees allegory as inextricably tied to Hellenistic and Hellenistic Jewish methods
of obtaining esoteric knowledge. Because he is unable to separate the use of allegory from
his concept of it as always seeking esoteric knowledge as its goal, Jeremias rejects the
originality of the explanation given of the Parable of the Sower (Mk. 4:14-20 and pars.).19
15Sider, 68.
16Ibid., 70.
17Jeremias, 27.
18Sider, 71.
19Jeremias, 13.
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Additionally Jeremias is so blinded by his understanding of Jesus eschatology (influenced by

Schweitzer) that he cannot conceive of the parable having, as its original meaning, anything
resembling the churchs missionary outreach. He says we must reject the interpretation
which misses its eschatological point, shifts its emphasis from the eschatological to the
psychological and hortatory aspect, and turns it into a warning to the converted against a
failure to stand fast in time of persecution and against worldliness.20
A study of Jeremias treatment of the Parable of the Sower will be useful to illustrate
the error of his refusal to accept an allegorical interpretation as original to the parable. In his
treatment of Mark 4, Jeremias ignores the descriptions of the four types of soil and instead
focuses on the obstacles which the sower faces. He sees the parable as a contrast-parable.
On the one hand we have a description of the manifold frustrations to which the sowers
labour is liable...But now a miracle happens. From the dreary fallow land grows a field of
waving corn.21 The meaning of the parable is that God brings forth the triumphant end
which he promised. The problem here is that the structure and details of the parable does not
lend itself to this interpretation. There are specifically four kinds of soil, not one plot of
dreary fallow land which offers obstacles to growth. He ignores the details of the text,
because they would lead toward an interpretation of the parable Jeremias has rejected a
priori.
Let us now turn briefly to the idea of allegory in the parables and Jeremias use of the
Gospel of Thomas. As previously stated, Jeremias believes that the interpretation of parables
20Ibid., 150.
21Ibid.

in the gospels is a secondary addition to the text. He argues that originally the number of
parables where Jesus left the hearers to draw their own conclusions was greater, and the
Gospel of Thomas supports this because all but three of the parables end without an
interpretation.22 A number of points need to be made here. First, Jeremias himself admits
that the Gospel of Thomas (which he assumes to represent an earlier strand of the tradition)
includes, in some cases, an interpretation of the parable. Thus his argument is weakened
from the outset by examples that do not fit his reconstruction. Second, his argument is based
on the dubious assumption that Thomas represents an earlier strand of the tradition because
Jesus does not explain his parables. On the contrary, because parables were regarded as
especially mysterious by Gnostics, the gnostic author of Thomas would gladly suppress all
the explanations in the tradition, the teacher would expound Jesus' meaning to accredited
devotees only.23 Furthermore, there is evidence that Thomas represents a later tradition,
because it exhibits indication of tampering. In the Gospel of Thomas, the teaching is said to
be Jesus secret words and all the parables are addressed only to the inner-circle and never
to the crowd.24 In fact, the removal of interpretation from the parable in the Gospel of
Thomas actually speaks strongly to its existence, as esoteric knowledge purged from the text
so that the masses might not have access to it.

22Ibid., 105.
23Sider, 76.
24For the argument that the Gospel of Thomas as well as epistolary material represents a
later period in the tradition, see Richard Bauckham, Synoptic Parousia Parables and the Apocalypse, New
Testament Studies 23 (January 1977): 162-76.

Having observed some of the problematic elements of Jeremias approach to the

parables, we are now ready to make some concluding remarks. First, in spite of everything
negative that has been stated about Jeremias method of attempting to obtain the original
setting and form of Jesus parables, he is relatively optimistic about the amount of historical
Jesus material which is contained in the Gospels. His commitment to demonstrating the
Jewishness of Jesus in an era where the criterion of double dissimilarity rejected anything
Jewish as inauthentic to the historical Jesus is commendable. However, it is all the more
striking that he rejects the authenticity of material containing similarity with the early church,
while defending the Jewishness of Jesus against the attack of this criterion. One would think
that his rejection of the criterion of double dissimilarity as concerns Judaism would give him
cause to hesitate about applying it when it comes to the issue of the early Church.
How reliable are Jeremias's inferences about the original form of Jesus' parables?
Not as reliable as inferences based on more fully informed literary principles; and certainly
not as reliable a foundation for a literary history of the parable form as the gospel texts.25
Jeremias, like many other scholars, is guilty of simply glancing at the text before looking
through it. A fuller treatment of the text as we have it would be of more benefit than a
hypothetical text reconstructed on faulty literary and historical assumptions.

Word Count: 2951

25Jeremias, 83.

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Bibliography
Dodd, C. H. The Parables of the Kingdom. London: Nisbet, 1935.
Hengel, Martin. The Atonement. London: SCM, 1981.
Jeremias, Joachim. The Parables of Jesus. Translated by S.H. Hooke. 2nd rev. ed. New York:
Scribner, 1972.
Little, James C. Parable Research in the Twentieth Century, I: The Predecessors of J
Jeremias. Expository Times 87 (September 1976): 356-360.
Perrin, Norman. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976.
Sider, John W. Rediscovering the Parables: The Logic of the Jeremias Tradition. JBL 102
(March 1983): 61-83.

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