Abstract
Imagine a book that takes the familiar stories of Jesus and reads them with an immediacy and attentiveness that makes them as fresh and startling to us as they were for those in the first century who hung on every word that Jesus spoke. Stephen Wright has written such a book. Jesus the Storyteller begins with the story of scholarship, a story that, although not as riveting as the stories Jesus spoke, helps to set the context of how, under the umbrella of parables, the stories of Jesus lost their narrative character in the nineteenth century and how there has been a slow movement towards interpreting them as stories once more in the twentieth century (with some significant exceptions!).
Wright then lays out the groundwork for his own reading: he emphasizes how the stories were first told orally and heard with a raw immediacy, then remembered and retold in community settings, as well as performed repeatedly in new and fresh ways not only by Jesus in different contexts, but also by his followers. Wright also highlights reception history and, most importantly, the narrative character of the stories.
This last category, narrative, most dramatically shapes the rest of Wright’s book. After a brief overview of how the stories of Jesus fit into the larger narrative of each Gospel writer, Wright takes us through the stories themselves, with careful attention to the setting, character, point of view and plot of each.
Once we realize that the setting of these stories is that of first-century Jews in Palestine, suffering economically and politically under Roman occupation, the stories about farmers sowing seed, noblemen and slaves, debt and forgiveness, tenants, landowners and labourers begin to have extremely relevant and sometimes tragic overtones.
Once we recognize that the characters in the stories (farmers, labourers, violent kings, absent landowners, slaves, Pharisees, toll-collectors, debtors, lenders, widows, judges and Samaritans) were all known and easily identifiable for Jesus’ listeners, we see that these stories would not have been heard as metaphors but rather as stories about situations and people that Jesus’ hearers were intimately involved with for good or ill.
Once we see that the narrator doesn’t always agree with the characters in the story (a wicked king, for instance), we realize that perhaps not every story is a metaphor for God.
And once we know how the plot works, we are free to recognize that these stories are not allegories for more spiritual truths, but that they invite the hearer into a new world where, in the midst of violence and oppression, the kingdom is present in unexpected and life-giving ways.
This accessible book deserves to be widely read and pondered, preferably with the Gospel accounts close at hand, in order that Wright’s illuminating reading might invite us, in turn, into the vivid and compelling stories that Jesus told.
Sylvia C. Keesmaat
Trinity College, University of Toronto