Date of Award
Spring 2003
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Theology
First Advisor
Kurz, William
Second Advisor
Hills, Julian
Third Advisor
Stockhausen, Carol
Abstract
My interest in the critical study of the parables of Jesus began a number of years ago when in a used bookstore I happened upon Joachim Jeremias's Rediscovering the Parables, the abridgement of his more famous book on the subject. That book and its arguments fascinated me, and it led me to his larger book and then to other major works on the subject. It was especially the "rediscovery" aspect of these studies that piqued my interest. The explicit goal of most of the parable scholarship with which I was becoming acquainted was to recover by means of disciplined historical reconstruction the message of Jesus in its original historical context. For some this also included a kind of re-experiencing of that event by means of sympathetic imagination in witch the parables are heard as they would have been by Jesus' original hearers. I found-- and continue to find-- that sort of thing very interesting. This is what attracted me to the parables of Jesus...