Parables and Plain Speech in the Fourth Gospel and the Apocryphon of James
Early Christians used a rhetorical distinction between Jesus' "plain speech" and his speech in "parables" in order to mark social boundaries. Both the Fourth Gospel and the Apocryphon of James record a saying in which Jesus promises that his speaking in parables will give wa...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press
1999
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| In: |
Journal of early Christian studies
Year: 1999, Volume: 7, Issue: 2, Pages: 187-218 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | Early Christians used a rhetorical distinction between Jesus' "plain speech" and his speech in "parables" in order to mark social boundaries. Both the Fourth Gospel and the Apocryphon of James record a saying in which Jesus promises that his speaking in parables will give way to plain speech. In the Gospel of John, this distinction marks the separation of the Johannine sect, for whom all of Jesus' speech is plain, from the wider Jewish community, for whom his speech is in parables, at a time when the nascent Christians are turning Jesus' oral speech into a written text. The Ap. Jas., written after a wide variety of Jesus literature had begun to circulate, differentiates between discrete units of Jesus' speech: some sayings are plain, others in parables. Analogously, it distinguishes two kinds of Christians: the majority, who remain at the level of plain speech, and an educated elite, a "textual community," which deciphers the meaning of Jesus' parables. The career of a dominical saying illustrates the transition in early Christian history from Jewish sect to diverse movement, from an oral to a written culture. |
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| ISSN: | 1086-3184 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of early Christian studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/earl.1999.0046 |