The Parables of Jesus: Complete List and Guide (1 of 26)

Before anything else on this page.

Two authors will change how you read the New Testament, and if you take one thing away from this site, take this.

Kenneth Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes (IVP Academic). Forty years teaching in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus, written for readers whose picture of the Gospels was assembled entirely out of Western furniture.

N. T. Wright, the New Testament for Everyone series (SPCK). Matthew in two parts, Mark, Luke, and John in two parts. Short chapters, his own translation of the whole text, no Greek required, and a working scholar explaining what the passage is doing rather than what a sermon needs it to say.

Start with Luke for Everyone, which is where the series began and where Wright is at his best.

Stop reading this and go and get them. Read a chapter of Wright alongside whatever passage you are in this week. Read Bailey straight through once and then keep him beside you.

Everything below is downstream of those two. I would rather you spent the next hour with Bailey than with me.

Now, the thing that governs how this series reads the parables. The index of all twenty-six posts is further down if that is what you came for.

Most teaching on the parables treats them as containers. Find the point, remove it, discard the story.

Bailey argues that gets the mechanism backwards, and the argument reorganises how the whole collection should be read.

Was Jesus a Theologian?

Yes, and the oddness of the question has a history behind it.

Christians think of Jesus as Son of God, as saviour, as a moral example, and as a good storyteller for simple people. Serious theologian is not usually on the list.

It was on the list in the second century. Galen of Pergamum, the most famous physician of his age and the first pagan writer to say anything positive about Christians, described them as drawing their faith from parables, and said their pursuit of justice reached a level not inferior to genuine philosophers. An outsider looking in around AD 140 saw parables functioning as a source of doctrine.^[1]

Something happened between that and the medieval Latin proverb Bailey quotes for the opposite position: theologia parabolica non est theologia argumentativa. Parabolic theology is not argumentative theology, and so it does not count.

Bailey’s claim is that he was one, and that he worked in a different mode from the one the West recognises. In the Western tradition theology is built from ideas held together by logic, and the more capable the theologian the more abstract the work becomes and the harder it is for an ordinary person to follow.

Jesus created meaning as a dramatist and a poet rather than as a philosopher. Metaphor, simile, parable and dramatic action, rather than argument and inference.

That is not a simpler method. It is a different one.

Why Did Jesus Teach in Metaphors?

Because for him the image is the argument rather than an aid to it.

Bailey’s examples are ordinary and clarifying. Scripture says the believer is born of God, which is female language for the relationship. Jesus addressed God as Father, which is male language. God is spirit and beyond both, and the two images together carry something no definition delivers.

The point is that a metaphor communicates in a way rational argument cannot, and that the two are not competitors. Pictures trump abstract reasoning without replacing it, and theology needs both.

What Is the Difference Between a Parable and an Illustration?

An illustration serves an idea. A parable does not.

Bailey quotes T. W. Manson’s description of illustrations as the sugar-coating on the theological pill, which is exactly how most preaching uses stories. The idea is the medicine, the story makes it swallowable, and once it is down the story has done its job.

A metaphor is not an illustration of an idea. It is a mode of theological discourse in its own right, and it does more than explain meaning. It creates meaning.

A parable, on that account, is an extended metaphor, which makes it something other than a delivery system.

Is a Parable Just a Story With a Moral?

No, and the difference changes what a reader is supposed to do with the story.

Bailey’s alternative to the container model is the image the whole chapter turns on. A parable is a house in which the reader is invited to take up residence.

He sets it against the obvious competing picture. When a shell is fired, the casing is all that remains, and the casing exists only to drive the shell toward the target. Once the idea is on its way, the parable can be discarded.^[2]

If the house image is right, the reader is not extracting anything. They are being asked to move in and look at the world through those windows, which means the story keeps working after the point has been understood.

That is testable against experience. Anyone who has known the prodigal son for decades can report whether it stopped operating once they grasped that it is about forgiveness.

How Many Points Does a Parable Make?

Four answers are in print, and the disagreement is the most useful thing in the field, because whichever one you hold determines what you are allowed to see.

Adolf Julicher set the terms in the 1880s. Reacting against fifteen centuries in which every detail of every parable had been decoded into doctrine, he ruled that a parable makes one point and that allegory has no place in it. The rule did its work. It also became a straitjacket, and most popular teaching still runs on it a hundred and forty years later without knowing where it came from.^[3]

Craig Blomberg allows one point per main character, which usually gives three. The father, the younger son, the elder brother.

Bailey argues for what he calls a theological cluster. Ask which single point you would pick for the prodigal son and the question falls apart: the fatherhood of God, the nature of sin, self-righteousness that rejects other people, the shape of repentance, joy in a community, finding the lost. All of them are present, all of them are in creative relationship, and the cluster is bounded by what the original audience could have understood. That boundary is the whole safeguard.

Klyne Snodgrass goes furthest. Julicher’s limits do not work, a parable may have more than one climax and more than one point of comparison, and it makes as many points as it wishes.

This series takes Bailey’s position, with Snodgrass’s correction that the number is not fixed in advance, and with the audience limit doing the work Julicher’s rule was invented to do.

Is a Parable an Allegory?

Partly, and the honest answer is more useful than either of the tidy ones.

Snodgrass puts it as directly as anyone has. Jesus does not need to be saved from allegory. Parables are allegorical, some more so than others, and the allegorical features of a parable do not give anyone license to allegorize it.

Identifying who a character stands for is not the same act as decoding every prop in the story. Jeremias, Stein, Bailey and Via all say that in the prodigal son the elder brother stands for the scribes and Pharisees, the younger for tax collectors and sinners, and the father for God, and all four then deny that they are allegorising. Snodgrass notes the tension without accusing any of them of hiding anything, and the line they are drawing is real. You can say whose house this is without cataloguing the furniture.

Nathan’s parable to David is the control case, because there the correspondences are exact and they still do not line up. The rich man is David, the poor man is Uriah, the ewe lamb is Bathsheba. Uriah is the one who dies. If the tightest allegory in Scripture will not map cleanly, a story about a farmer and some seed is not going to.

Snodgrass’s working rule follows from that. The more an interpretation depends on what is not explicit in the parable, the more likely it is to be wrong.

How Many Parables Did Jesus Tell?

Nobody agrees, and the disagreement is not sloppiness. It is a definition problem sitting in the vocabulary.

The Greek word parabolē translates the Hebrew mashal, and mashal is a wide net. It covers proverbs, riddles, taunts, allegories, bywords and extended comparisons. A one-line saying about salt losing its taste is a mashal. So is a story about a father with two sons that runs twenty-two verses.

Draw the line at developed narratives with a plot and characters and you get somewhere around thirty. Klyne Snodgrass treats them in thirty-one chapters. Include the short comparisons, the this-is-like-that sayings, and the one-line images, and the count runs past sixty.

You can watch the problem happen in print. Open the parables chart in the ESV Study Bible and then the one in the NLT Study Bible and they disagree on the total and on which stories belong in it. Two conservative study Bibles, same decade, different lists.

Neither number is wrong. They are answers to different questions.

This series works through the narrative parables, the ones with a story in them, which is where the interpretive work is hardest and where the popular readings have done the most damage. Twenty-six posts covering twenty-eight parables, since three of them handle a matched pair.

Which Parables Are Missing From This List?

About twenty, and they are missing for reasons worth stating rather than hiding.

Some are very short and carry a single comparison, so a full post would be padding. The lamp on a stand, treasures new and old, the budding fig tree.

Some are already covered inside other posts because that is where they belong. New wine and old wineskins sits in Lord of the Sabbath. The strong man sits in Beelzebul and who counts as family. Salt and light sit in the sermon on the mount.

And some are genuinely outstanding. Ten of them have a full chapter waiting in a book already on my shelf, which is why they are queued rather than abandoned, and roughly the order I intend to take them.

• The Friend at Midnight, Luke 11:5-8. Seven posts in this series already lean on it.
• The Two Sons, Matt 21:28-32, the parable Jesus tells the chief priests immediately before the Tenants.
• The Camel and the Needle, Luke 18:18-30.
• The Barren Fig Tree, Luke 13:6-9.
• The Tower Builder and the King Going to War, Luke 14:28-32, a pair about counting the cost.
• The Faithful and Wicked Servant, Matt 24:45-51.
• The Unprofitable Servants, Luke 17:7-10.
• The Growing Seed, Mark 4:26-29, the only parable unique to Mark.
• The Net, Matt 13:47-50.
• The Fox, the Funeral and the Furrow, Luke 9:57-62.

Still outstanding beyond those ten: the Vine and the Branches in John 15, the Children in the Marketplace, the Return of the Unclean Spirit, and the Doorkeeper.

That is the honest state of it. The series is not finished and the gaps are known rather than accidental.

What Are All the Parables of Jesus?

The narrative ones are here, in the order the series runs.

• How the parables work, the method this series uses
• The Talents, Matt 25:14-30
• The Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Luke 18:9-14
• The Wedding Feast, Matt 22:1-14
• The Unjust Steward, Luke 16:1-13
• The Rich Fool, Luke 12:13-21
• The Great Banquet, Luke 14:15-24
• Lazarus and the Rich Man, Luke 16:19-31
• The Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37
• The Two Builders, Matt 7:24-27
• The Persistent Widow, Luke 18:1-8
• The Watching Servants, Luke 12:35-40
• The Workers in the Vineyard, Matt 20:1-16
• The Tenants, Matt 21:33-46
• The Pounds, Luke 19:11-27
• The Ten Bridesmaids, Matt 25:1-13
• The Two Debtors, Luke 7:36-50
• The Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, Luke 15:1-10
• The Prodigal Son, Luke 15:11-32
• The Sheep and the Goats, Matt 25:31-46
• The Unforgiving Servant, Matt 18:21-35
• The Good Shepherd, John 10:1-18
• The Sower, Matt 13:1-23
• The Mustard Seed and the Yeast, Matt 13:31-33
• The Treasure and the Pearl, Matt 13:44-46
• The Weeds, Matt 13:24-43

How Should You Read a Parable?

Standing at the back of the crowd, and Bailey states it as a discipline.

Every interpreter arrives carrying a language, a culture, a history, an economy and a politics. Nobody reads from a hundred thousand miles above the world, as Lesslie Newbigin put it. The Gospel writers handed these stories over inside first-century settings, and stripping those settings away does not produce a neutral reading. It substitutes our own.

So the task is to stand at the back of the audience around Jesus and listen to what he is saying to them. Only that discipline discovers what he is saying to any later age, including ours.

The order is not optional. First hearers first, application second, and the application comes out smaller and more accurate for it.

How Do People Misread the Parables?

By finding what they brought, and Bailey names the failures rather than warning about them abstractly.

A missionary reported a Pacific island culture that prized the clever deceiver so highly that its people read the passion narrative with Judas as the hero and Jesus as the dupe. That reading is internally consistent. It is also wrong, and saying why it is wrong requires an appeal to something outside the reader’s own culture.

Closer to home, Western interpreters have found Marxism in the parables, and Freudianism, and Existentialism, in each case with the confidence of someone who has found what was there rather than what he brought.

Bailey’s test is one a book reviewer already accepts. A fair-minded reviewer extends any modern author the courtesy of reading him against his own life and his own stated intent, and refuses to praise a book for saying something the author never meant. Extend the same courtesy to Jesus.

There is a matching hazard on the technical side. Once a reader learns to spot inverted structure in a Semitic text, the pattern starts appearing everywhere, including where it is not. Around the turn of the twentieth century E. W. Bullinger pushed the method so hard in The Companion Bible that he discredited it for a generation, and T. W. Manson had to restart the work cautiously decades later. Where this series lays out a chiasm, that history is the reason it does so with the text on the page rather than as an assertion.

What Is Kenneth Bailey’s Method?

Take the nativity, since it is the clearest case and most people already think they know it. Luke says there was no room in the kataluma, which means guest room. He knows the word for a commercial inn, because he uses a completely different one in the Good Samaritan. The only other place he uses kataluma is the upper room at the Last Supper, a guest room in a private house. The full case for the missing stable is worked out separately.

Then add the culture. Joseph is a descendant of David returning to David’s own town, and in that world stating your genealogy opens doors. Turning him away would have shamed the entire village, and no village lets a woman give birth in the street.

So the picture is an ordinary house with the guest room already full from the census, and the birth happening in the family room where the animals came in at night and the mangers were cut into the floor.

No innkeeper. No slammed door. The point was never loneliness. It is lowliness.

The other half of the book is structure. His reading of the call of Peter in Luke 5 lays out seven scenes in a chiasm, with the miraculous catch sitting at the centre rather than at the end, which is how Semitic storytelling puts weight on something. Once you have seen it you start finding it everywhere, including in half the parables in this series.

Is Kenneth Bailey Reliable?

Mostly, though his method has been challenged in print on two separate fronts, and both exchanges are worth knowing about.

The first challenge is about oral tradition. Bailey reads modern Middle Eastern village practice back onto the first century, and built a model of oral transmission on it that he called informal controlled oral tradition. N. T. Wright and James Dunn both leaned on it.

Theodore Weeden published a detailed critique in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus in 2009, arguing the evidence is anecdotal and that the model does not hold. Dunn replied in the same issue, defending it and arguing Weeden had misunderstood how oral tradition works.

Craig Keener took a middle position in 2017, granting that some of Weeden’s observations land while arguing the model still has a great deal to offer. Eric Eve reached something similar.

The second challenge is about the cultural readings themselves, and it comes from a friendly quarter. Klyne Snodgrass calls Bailey’s contribution insightful and lists him first in the further-reading section of a dozen chapters. He also says Bailey assumes a continuity between first-century Jewish Palestine and modern Middle Eastern peasants who have lived through centuries of Islamic rule, and that attitudes may have stayed the same but cannot be presupposed to have. His sharper charge is that the sociological approach becomes more intrigued with the culture than with the parable.

Bailey has an answer, and it is in the technical book rather than the popular one. What he calls Oriental exegesis runs on four sources, not one: contemporary peasant life, the ancient literature read in its own setting, the Oriental versions, and the Oriental commentators. Snodgrass’s objection lands on the first of those four and leaves the last two standing. When Bailey observes that Syriac and Arabic translators for a thousand years rendered a particular Greek conjunction as a contrast, that is documentary evidence about how native speakers of Semitic languages read the Greek, and no argument about Islamic-era village customs touches it.

The two men also agree on more than the dispute suggests. Snodgrass’s own first rule is that any interpretation which does not breathe the air of the first century cannot be correct, which is Bailey’s whole programme in a sentence.

None of that touches the lexical work. Kataluma means guest room whatever one concludes about village storytelling, and that argument stands on the Greek rather than on anything Bailey observed in a village.

So use him, and know which parts rest on the text, which rest on the versions, and which rest on the villages.

Do You Need to Be a Scholar to Understand the Parables?

No, and Bailey closes his introduction on this deliberately.

All of us come with limited resources. Every reader knows interpreters so far ahead of them as to be nearly out of sight, and knows others who have not had the opportunities they have had. That perspective is shared by the greatest scholar and the simplest believer alike.

His instruction is to do the best you can with what you have, and not to despair either at other people’s ignorance or at their achievements.

And the line worth keeping from the whole chapter: authentic simplicity is found on the other side of complexity. Not before it, and not instead of it.^[4]

Framing post for the series working through the parables. See the parable of the sower, which is the one Jesus explains and therefore the control case for the method. For where these stories fall in the ministry, see the Life of Jesus timeline.

Footnotes4

1. Galen's remark survives in an Arabic summary of a lost Greek work rather than in a Greek manuscript, which is worth stating because the transmission matters. What it establishes is what an educated outsider around AD 140 thought Christians were doing with their stories, not a direct quotation we can press for wording.
2. The shell casing image is the most useful diagnostic in this chapter. Anyone teaching a parable can ask whether their treatment leaves the story intact and inhabitable, or whether it leaves a spent casing on the ground with the idea already downrange. Most teaching does the second and does not notice.
3. Julicher's rule was a correction, and it is worth remembering what it was correcting. Fifteen centuries of interpretation had turned the Good Samaritan into an allegory in which the inn is the church, the two denarii are the two sacraments, and the oil and wine are baptism and communion. Against that, one point per parable was a discipline rather than a limitation. It became a limitation later, in the hands of people who had never seen the thing it was invented to stop.
4. That authentic simplicity lies on the far side of complexity rather than before it is worth defending, because it cuts against two opposite errors. One is the assumption that a plain reading needs no work. The other is the assumption that a story properly understood becomes complicated. Neither survives contact with the parables themselves.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 21. Supports the description of Jesus as a metaphorical rather than conceptual theologian, the Galen reference and the Latin proverb, the distinction between illustration and metaphor, the shell casing and house images, the theological cluster, the failure cases and the fair-minded-reviewer test, the instruction to stand at the back of the original audience, and the closing counsel about limited resources. Supplied in full.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), ISBN 9780830825684. The primary source for most of this series. In print.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, combined edition 1983), chapters 1 to 3. The four sources of what Bailey calls Oriental exegesis, and the Bullinger warning about literary structure. In print, and in Logos.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). The allegory statement, the Nathan's-parable control case, the rule about what is not explicit in a parable, the first-century-air rule, and the criticism of Bailey's continuity assumption. The thirty-one-chapter count is from the book's own table of contents. In print.

Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 2nd edition (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012). The one-point-per-main-character position. Cited here as summarised in Snodgrass rather than consulted directly.

Adolf Julicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (Freiburg, 1888-1899). The one-point rule. Cited here as summarised in Snodgrass and Blomberg. German, and not consulted directly.

N. T. Wright, the New Testament for Everyone commentary series (London: SPCK), publisher page for the Luke volume. Matthew for Everyone in two parts, Mark for Everyone, Luke for Everyone, and John for Everyone in two parts. The second source this series leans on most. In print.

Theodore J. Weeden Sr., "Kenneth Bailey's Theory of Oral Tradition: A Theory Contested by Its Evidence," Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 7 (2009), 3-43. The critique. Paywalled at the publisher; free through most university libraries.

James D. G. Dunn, "Kenneth Bailey's Theory of Oral Tradition: Critiquing Theodore Weeden's Critique," Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 7 (2009), 44-62. The reply, in the same issue. Paywalled at the publisher; free through most university libraries.

Craig S. Keener, "Weighing T. J. Weeden's Critique of Kenneth Bailey's Approach to Oral Tradition", Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 13 (2017), 41-78. The middle position. Free in full at the journal's own site.

T. W. Manson, on illustrations as the sugar-coating on the theological pill, cited in Bailey.

Lesslie Newbigin, on the interpreter not being a disembodied eye, cited in Bailey.

ESV Study Bible (Crossway, 2008) and NLT Study Bible (Tyndale, 2008), the parables charts in each. The disagreement between the two lists is the evidence for the counting problem. Both in print, and in Logos.

Where the sourcing stops: the claim that a parable continues to operate after its point is understood is Bailey's argument and mine, offered as a description of how these stories behave rather than as a demonstrated result. The account of Bullinger's effect on the study of literary structure is Bailey's assessment of his own field, not an independently verified history.