As a direct result of the Jesus Seminar and their insistence that the parables are a lens through which a different vision of Jesus can be seen, I began to read books that helped me to understand that "different vision." This is what I found. He bears little resemblance to the portrayal by the evangelicals of one who is for what we are for, against what we are against, goes where we go and stays away from people and places we stay away from, goes to a "seeker friendly" church when and where we go, blesses our business and makes us prosperous, flies our flag, waves our banners, fights our wars and cites our orthodox dogma. Despite the face that he did none of these things while he was here, some believe that he would do all of these things now.

Open to new light and insight I glimpsed "a subversive story teller" with a unique gift for framing a counter-world with aphorisms, pithy sayings and parables, a counter-world he called Empire of God and scholars call his "alternative social vision." It is a counter-world of unfailing justice, full inclusion, authentic freedom, incredible love, astounding forgiveness, sheer grace and unending peace..

Another major reason why I see Jesus in this fashion is the result of reading this book by William R. Herzog entitled "Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus As Pedagogue of the Oppressed." This was a powerful contribution to a revolution in my thinking. He demonstrates that the focus of the parables of Jesus was not "on a vision of the glory of the reign of God but on the gory details of how oppression kept the ruling powers in control." "His work," someone said, is to show parables as "not just earthly stories with heavenly meanings but earthy stories with heavy meanings."

I don't think a review could possibly convey the radical change in one's understanding of Jesus and his ministry this perspective entails unless it conveys that these parables must be seen politically if they are to be understood in all their potency. When you see them as "subversive speech" that calls into question the Empire of Rome and sets the Empire of God up as an alternative social reality then you are beginning to see why the Romans could only challenge that "subversive story teller" by getting rid of him! That's what the cross is about. I warn you that some of your cherished dogmas may be called into question by this book. And that's precisely why you should read it!

Herzog's book is excellent. He is able to offer insights into the cultural setting and how it influences the interpretation of a parable. It is a must read for understanding parables.

Herzog has reconsidered Jesus' sayings in the light of the modern recognition that He was first and foremost a Jew and thought in terms of the Judaic tradition. Some of the results are startling. You probably remember the parable of the 3 servants entrusted with money during their boss's absence. Who was the hero of that story? You'll be surprised.
That is just one example of the insights Herzog has in store for you. Easy reading? No. There is a lot of detailedn scholarship here. Rewarding insights? You betcha!

I was introduced to William Herzog's book while taking a seminary course on the New Testament Parables. The professor included Herzog to provide some "angularity" to the more traditional approaches of other scholars and commentaries we were reading. And that it did.

Herzog is an acquired taste. For those with a more conservative bent, his liberation theology with Marxist ideology may be off-putting at first. In my opinion, his premise that Jesus' audience would have understood the parables through a Marxist lens limits the value of his interpretations. I think the work of the Context Group (Bruce Malina, et al) simply don't support that theory. But I do give him credit for being up front about his agenda.

Having said that, I still think the book is definitely worth buying. In particular, I very much appreciated his discussion of the work of Paulo Friere. This section of the book is dense, but worth the effort.

Herzog develops the premise that the parables were not designed to `teach' in the traditional sense, but to help the listeners break free of their perceptual limitations and see the world as a different reality. In this way, he compares Jesus' use of parables with Friere's work in `liberating' the self-defeating mindsets of illiterate peasants.

I found this approach to be very helpful in my own studies of the parables. Herzog's steadfastly refuses to too-quickly `spiritualize' the parables. Instead, he focuses first on the emotional or even visceral responses of the audiences to whom the parables were directed. By intently looking for the emotional reactions first, he helps to show the impact of the parables beyond simple `sermon illustrations.'

While I can't always agree with Herzog's conclusion regarding what that reaction would have been, the approach gives new insights into parable interpretation.

Professor Herzog's work is not the socialist denial of the Gospel that it has been accused of being. Neither is it an overly difficult text, as some reviewers have claimed.

Instead, it is a thoughtful, scholarly, re-examination of the parables, which raises the possibility of alternate readings, more appropriate to the first century a.d., rural, Palestinian context in which the parables were first proclaimed. Professor Herzog's work is challenging. It refuses to accept as sacrosanct any of the old verities that many of us were taught years ago in seminary.

In a modified form of redaction criticism, Professor Herzog closely examines each parable in its canonical form, and then seeks to work back to the most plausible words of Jesus, consistent with Biblical archeology and the sociology of religion. The results are new possibilities for proclamation.

This is not a book for the casual reader, or those who wish to maintain long-held beliefs at any cost. However, for educated seekers of truth this book is a gem.

William Herzog has taken the parables of Jesus and has certainly put a different twist on them. As some other reviewers have noted, Jesus was put to death for what he SAID and did, so the stories he told must have been more then aphorisms. To reduce Jesus to a fire brand revolutionary is useless, though not as useless as making Him an american, and reading these parables as middle class people in the 21st century. They are certainly both timeless and of their time,and their time was in a far away backwater occupied by a viscious,brutal efficeint machine called Rome.I also, cannot agree on everything that professor Herzog puts forth. However, I know enough to realize that Jesus was more then aware of what was going on around Him,and that his stories would have great signifigance for the motley group that listened to Him.If not, then the parables are mere fables, Aesop for the age,with cute morals. I think that the message of Jesus is so challenging and difficult that we have added all the historical accretion we can find to soften its impact. I do not think, even remotely, that this is a defining portrait of Jesus,or even the only viable view of his parables. What I do think is that it is time to look, really look at the message of Jesus, not just outside of time, but in its time. And for that,for stimulating and causing me to re-think some of my tenents, I am grateful for this book.

Think about it. Jesus was in conflict with the authorities because, most of all, of what he was teaching. The parables, therefore, must have been more than nice, allegorical stories. The author positions them within their background, especially the economic one, and indeed presents them as subversive. The book is clear, though I can understand why some people can be upset by this way of reading the parables. But, again, those stories must have meant something to those people.....

We might guess from Herzog's subtitle that his reading of Jesus is going to be indebted to Paulo Freire, the Marxist who wrote _The Pedagogy of the Oppressed_. And sure enough, in the opening chapter we are treated to a very forced and altogether unenlightening comparison of Jesus's "pedagogy" in Galilee and Freire's in Brazil. (Indeed, Herzog spends less time explaining the similarities than he does telling us why the differences don't really matter.)

Herzog sticks pretty close to Freire throughout this work, and it shows. His language is Academic Marxspeak nearly to the point of unintelligibility: we have lots of stuff about codifications, elites, exploitation, oppression, social scripts, class structure, and plenty else.

What we wind up with, more or less, is what Herzog imported from Freire to begin with: an understanding[?] of "Jesus the parabler" as a "pedagogue of the oppressed," engaged in such activities as decoding, problematizing, and recodifying, all for the purpose of "generating conversations that enhanced [his] hearers' ability to decode their oppressive reality" and "challenge the boundaries of their closed world" with what Herzog calls "limit acts."

Unsurprisingly, Herzog leans heavily on Richard Horsley's _Jesus and the Spiral of Violence_ (another academic-Marxist reading of Jesus), and the back cover of his book features endorsements from both Walter Wink and Robert McAfee Brown (of "liberation theology" fame). And nobody else.

What any of this has to do with the historical Jesus is more than I, at least, can fathom. Marx's "class-struggle" sociological analysis belongs in the dustbin of history, and today largely provides window dressing for self-impressed academics writing mostly for one another. If Jesus _were_ a Marxist liberation theologian, he'd have been wrong anyway; the opposite of "imperialism" ain't "Marxism."

But I frankly doubt that he was any such thing. Herzog's readings of Jesus's parables are forced and artificial, invariably based on the sort of deconstruction beloved of text-based academics but having little to do with the actual practice of the publicly-spoken parable; nor, really, does Herzog manage to make his puppet-Jesus say or do anything specific enough to count as a program of "liberation." Mostly he seems to go around getting people to adopt Freire's view that reality isn't fixed, apparently much to the consternation of the powerful elite, who want the oppressed peasants to think it _is_.

I don't think so, Tim. While I'm not a Christian myself, I do think Christianity deserves better than this. And anybody who knows _anything_ about Christian theology is going to find almost nothing recognizable in Herzog's Marxist Messiah.

Back to the drawing board.