Loading…

Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel’s Story is unavailable, but you can change that!

Israel, the community to which Jesus belonged, took its name from their patriarch Jacob. His story of exile and return was their story as well. In the well-known tale of the prodigal son, Jesus reshaped the story in his own way and for his own purposes. In this work, Kenneth E. Bailey compares the Old Testament saga and the New Testament parable. He unpacks similarities freighted with...

For centuries, the Eastern and Western church allegorized the parables of the Bible. That is, it attached symbolic meanings to various people, things and actions in a story without reference to the original setting and in this manner extracted meaning applicable to any age.1 The difficulty with this method is that it created an interpretive style in which “anything goes.” For hundreds of years people found all manner of meaning in the parables that Nathan, Jesus or Paul could never have imagined.
Pages 51–52
Buy this book at Logos.com