How Not to Read
the Bible
April 15, 2025
I am a retired, ordained Christian pastor. I came to
ordained ministry later in life than most of my clergy colleagues did. I served
only two churches and was active in ministry for around sixteen years. During
that time, and in different situations since then, I have led or participated
in groups of Christians doing Bible study. Now, Bible study is, at least in
theory, a good thing. It is necessary for the truly Christian life. After all,
the only sources we have for the foundational stories of our faith are in the
Bible and nowhere else. Over the course of my work with people on the Bible,
and in my writing about the Bible, various things have become clear to me. One
of is that the stories in the Bible are, essentially without exception, barebones
stories. They tells us what they need to tell us in order to make the point or
the points they are trying to communicate. For the most part, they don’t tell
us things we don’t need to know in order to get the point(s) of the story. And
that truth about Bible stories drives people nuts. It drives lay people nuts.
It even drives a lot of ordained clergy people nuts. It drives them so nuts
that they are forever focusing on what’s not in the story rather than on what’s
in it. I’ll give you two examples, both of them from the Gospel of Luke.
Luke contains what is perhaps the most famous, or at least
the second most famous, of all of Jesus’ parables. It is the story of the prodigal
son. You’ll find it at Luke 15:11-32. It is quite long for a parable, but it’s
still a parable. I’ll recap it briefly. A man has two sons. The younger of them
asks his father for the share of his father’s estate that he would receive as
the father’s heir. The father gives it to him. The son takes the money and
runs. He goes to some unspecified place far away. There he squanders all of his
money “in dissolute living.” He falls on very hard times, so he decides to
return to this father and ask his father to treat him like one of the father’s
hired hands, He prepares a little speech of confession that he plans to give
his father. As he comes home, his father sees him from far away. When the two
meet, the son starts to give his little speech of confession to his father. His
father doesn’t even let him finish it. Instead he tells a servant to give the
son a robe, a ring, and sandals and to prepare a feast, for “this son of mine was dead and is
alive again; he was lost and is found!” Luke 15:24. It’s enough to make you
want to start singing “Amazing Grace.” There’s more to the parable, but this is
enough to make the point I want to make; so in the manner of a good parable, I
won’t give you more.
Then there is the story of the “Last Supper.” You’ll find Luke’s
version of it at Luke 22:7-23. In this story, it is the time of the Passover, a
sacred day in Judaism. Jesus tells Peter and John to go prepare the Passover
meal for Jesus and his friends. They ask where they’re supposed to do it. Jesus
tells them that when they enter the city, Jerusalem of course, they will meet a
man carrying water. They are to follow him to a house. They are then to tell
the owner of the house that “the teacher,” clearly Jesus, asks where he may eat
his Passover meal. He will show you a room, Jesus says. That’s where you are to
prepare the Passover meal. The story of the Last Supper continues of course,
but I needn’t give you more of it here.
Now we have to ask: What is a parable? A parable is a story
that never happened but always happens. It is told to make a point. In the
Bible it’s usually a theological point. A parable is not a novel. It isn’t any
kind of extended literary work. Jesus’ parables are without exception short.
They tell us what they need to tell us in order to make their point. They don’t
waste our time with other unnecessary details. We see the two stories I just
outlined, one of which is explicitly a parable and the other of which we should
consider to be a parable, doing precisely that.[1]
The parable of the prodigal son says the son squandered his money in “dissolute
living.” It doesn’t tell us what “dissolute living” is. The prodigal’s older
brother thinks its consorting with prostitutes, though we don’t see how could
possibly know that that’s what his brother has done. See Luke 15:30.
Time and time again, when I have discussed this parable with
church folk, people get all hung up on what the prodigal’s “dissolute living”
actually was. Was it consorting with prostitutes? Was it drinking all of his
money away? Was it spending the money on frivolous or even harmful other
things? Was it carelessly lending money to people who he should have known
would never pay it back? Luke’s parable just doesn’t tell us what this “dissolute
living” was in any detail. All it gives us is that the prodigal has somehow
lost all of his money is some “dissolute” way. We, of course, need to
understand what “dissolute” means if we’re going to understand this parable. Online
dictionaries define it as “lax in morals” or as something other people don’t
approve of. Consorting with prostitutes may well be “dissolute,” but so can a
lot of other things be.
What we need to understand here is that the parable doesn’t
tell us more about what the prodigal did with his money because it doesn’t
have to in order to make its point! The details of what the prodigal did to
lose his money just don’t matter in the parable saying what it wants to say. All
we need to know is that the prodigal has lost his money in one or more disreputable
ways. So why, when studying this parable, get hung up on the unprovided details
of what the prodigal actually did with his money? What he actually did with his
money doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he’s lost it in some
dishonorable way. How not to read this parable? Read it for what’s not in it
and for what doesn’t matter for the parable’s point. That, sadly, is what far
too many people do.
Then there’s Luke story of the setup for the Last Supper.
This story doesn’t tell us how Jesus knew what his disciples would encounter
when they entered the city. It doesn’t tell us why a man would be carrying
water when, in the culture of this time and place, that was woman’s work.
(True, the parable doesn’t say it was woman’s work, but it is always proper and
even necessary to read Bible stories in their original context.) It tells us
nothing about the owner of the house. Was he a follower of Jesus or wasn’t he?
It tells us nothing about the house other than that it had a large upper room. Did
it look like the house of a wealthy owner, or was it a poor, humble dwelling? It
says “they” prepared the Passover meal. Who are they? Peter and John? Probably,
but preparing the Passover meal was also woman’s work, and the story doesn’t
tell us why the men Peter and John would have done it. This story just has a
lot of holes in it.
[1]
John Dominic Crossan suggests that we treat the whole Bible as a parable, which
is at least an interesting suggestion.
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