The Parables after Jesus: Their Imaginative Receptions across Two Millennia by David B. Gowler (review)

In The Parables after Jesus, biblical scholar David B. Gowler ambitiously attempts to present the imaginative receptions of Jesus’ parables from the second century AD into the current millennium. Gowler covers—largely successfully—a wide sweep of imaginative receptions, including how Jesus’ parables have been depicted in media as varied as sermons, poetry, fiction, drama, visual art, and hymn and blues lyrics. Golwer’s book offers in chronological order more than 50 entries that focus on the work of particular authors or artists. Throughout his coverage, Gowler emphasizes depictions of parables that emphasize the need for compassion and justice, taking pains to represent voices who represent traditionally marginalized groups. In this review, I will focus on those entries most germane to readers of Christianity and Literature.

Chapter 1, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in Antiquity (to ca. 550 CE),” discusses several prominent church fathers. Gowler emphasizes their tendency to read Jesus’ parables allegorically, although he notes that some—including Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and sometimes Augustine—used allegory more elaborately, detailing that various characters, animals, and inanimate objects each signified deeper spiritual truths; while others—including Irenaeus, Tertullian, and John Chrysostom—were more restrained in their approach. Nonetheless, Gowler observes that all these fathers employed allegory to mine the hidden spiritual riches of the parables. Chapter 1 also discusses Macrina the Younger, the older sister of Gregory of Nyssa, who describes, in his On the Soul and the Resurrection, his conversation with Macrina on her deathbed. Gowler states that Gregory’s treatise “functions as a Christian Phaedrus,” with Gregory’s student role paralleling Plato’s and with Macrina resembling “Socrates on his deathbed arguing for the immortality of the soul” (44). Within the treatise, Macrina employs allegorical readings of the parable of the wheat and weeds and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

Chapter 2, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in the Middle Ages (ca. 550–1500 CE),” discusses both the continuation of allegorical interpretations within the homilies of Pope Gregory the Great and of the visionary Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen, and the more cautious approach of Thomas Aquinas, who himself uses allegorical interpretations but argues that such interpretations must spring from the “literal” sense of the Scripture. Chapter 2 also introduces Gowler’s first analyses of literature per se, discussing the Confessio Amantis (“The Lover’s Confession”) of Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower. This lengthy poem, an allegory based on the sacrament of confession, addresses the seven deadly sins, with book 6 using the parable of the rich man and Lazarus to illustrate gluttony. In Gower’s poem, the “Confessor,” Genius, condemns the rich man’s attachment to “delicacy” (103). Genius adds to Luke’s account of the parable, narrating that Lazarus directly asks for food and receives nothing from the self-focused rich man who has a “fulle panche” and “deigneth noght to speke a word” to Lazaras (qtd. on 104). In the end, Lazarus is rewarded for his “gret penance” whereas the rich man “is deservedly punished with everlasting pain in hell for his sin of sating his bodily lusts” (105). Antonia Pulci’s late fifteenth-century play on the prodigal son also engages the seven deadly sins, and after the prodigal leaves home, these sins—led by Pride—become his new companions, with Avarice and Gluttony playing prominent roles. In Pulci’s drama, the repentant prodigal and his resentful older brother are reconciled, and audience members are urged to be reconciled with Christ and each other.

Chapter 3, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” highlights Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s rejections of elaborate allegorical parable interpretation but also discusses the Jesuit biblical exegete John Maldonatus, who used the parable of the sower, the parable of the net, and the parable of the laborers in the vineyard to combat the “errors” of Luther and Calvin...