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Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus As Pedagogue of the Oppressed | 
 enlarge | Author: William R. Herzog
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 371362
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 312
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0664253555
Dewey Decimal Number: 226.806
EAN: 9780664253554
ASIN: 0664253555
Publication Date: June 1994
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Product Description
This work shows that the focus of the parables was to show the gory details of how oppression served the interests of the ruling class.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Jesus aka "Paulo Freire" January 18, 2000
Loren Rosson III (New Hampshire, USA)
34 out of 41 found this review helpful
Herzog tells us that Jesus' parables were originally "earthy stories with heavy meanings" as opposed to "earthly stories with heavenly meanings", not so much about the kingdom of God per se, even if they hinted at implications about his coming reign on earth. Much like the 20th-century Paulo Freire, Jesus was teaching people that life under exploitation and oppression wasn't inevitable; and the parables explored how the Jewish peasantry might respond to distressing situations in order to break violence and poverty.
The stories did this by depicting everyday life (to which peasants had long since resigned themselves) only to introduce shocking departures from it. For instance, an elite goes to the marketplace to exploit groups of day-laborers, but one of the day-laborers challenges him (Mt.20:1-15). Lazarus, a destitute man, ends up in Abraham's bosom, while a rich man burns in Hades, destined for an even worse place (Lk.16:19-31). A retainer buries his master's money instead of investing it to make more, and then he blows the whistle on the tyrant (Mt.25:14-28/Lk.19:12-24). A widow is treated unjustly in court, but she relentlessly and publicly refuses to accept the judge's verdict (Lk.18:2-5). A messianic king forgives a colossal debt, but this messiah turns out to be not such a benign sweetie-pie after all (Mt.18:23-34). Like Friere, Jesus empowered people by allowing them to understand the world on their own terms for a change. And just as Freire was arrested and exiled, the Galilean was arrested and crucified.
Talk about thinking outside the box. If Herzog is right, most commentators have been clueless for ages. The masters and landowners in these stories aren't ciphers for God. Just the opposite: they're exactly as portrayed. This book (and its sequel, "Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God") provides an especially insightful window onto the historical Jesus, whose concerns were forever with those at the bottom of the social heap.
 A manifesto of Academic Marxists for Jesus? April 2, 2000
John S. Ryan (Silver Lake, OH)
22 out of 68 found this review helpful
We might guess from Herzog's subtitle that his reading of Jesus is going to be indebted to Paulo Freire, the Marxist who wrote _The Pedagogy of the Oppressed_. And sure enough, in the opening chapter we are treated to a very forced and altogether unenlightening comparison of Jesus's "pedagogy" in Galilee and Freire's in Brazil. (Indeed, Herzog spends less time explaining the similarities than he does telling us why the differences don't really matter.)
Herzog sticks pretty close to Freire throughout this work, and it shows. His language is Academic Marxspeak nearly to the point of unintelligibility: we have lots of stuff about codifications, elites, exploitation, oppression, social scripts, class structure, and plenty else.
What we wind up with, more or less, is what Herzog imported from Freire to begin with: an understanding[?] of "Jesus the parabler" as a "pedagogue of the oppressed," engaged in such activities as decoding, problematizing, and recodifying, all for the purpose of "generating conversations that enhanced [his] hearers' ability to decode their oppressive reality" and "challenge the boundaries of their closed world" with what Herzog calls "limit acts."
Unsurprisingly, Herzog leans heavily on Richard Horsley's _Jesus and the Spiral of Violence_ (another academic-Marxist reading of Jesus), and the back cover of his book features endorsements from both Walter Wink and Robert McAfee Brown (of "liberation theology" fame). And nobody else.
What any of this has to do with the historical Jesus is more than I, at least, can fathom. Marx's "class-struggle" sociological analysis belongs in the dustbin of history, and today largely provides window dressing for self-impressed academics writing mostly for one another. If Jesus _were_ a Marxist liberation theologian, he'd have been wrong anyway; the opposite of "imperialism" ain't "Marxism."
But I frankly doubt that he was any such thing. Herzog's readings of Jesus's parables are forced and artificial, invariably based on the sort of deconstruction beloved of text-based academics but having little to do with the actual practice of the publicly-spoken parable; nor, really, does Herzog manage to make his puppet-Jesus say or do anything specific enough to count as a program of "liberation." Mostly he seems to go around getting people to adopt Freire's view that reality isn't fixed, apparently much to the consternation of the powerful elite, who want the oppressed peasants to think it _is_.
I don't think so, Tim. While I'm not a Christian myself, I do think Christianity deserves better than this. And anybody who knows _anything_ about Christian theology is going to find almost nothing recognizable in Herzog's Marxist Messiah.
Back to the drawing board.
diferent and challenging March 28, 2001
A. Hogan (Brooklyn, NY USA)
20 out of 26 found this review helpful
William Herzog has taken the parables of Jesus and has certainly put a different twist on them. As some other reviewers have noted, Jesus was put to death for what he SAID and did, so the stories he told must have been more then aphorisms. To reduce Jesus to a fire brand revolutionary is useless, though not as useless as making Him an american, and reading these parables as middle class people in the 21st century. They are certainly both timeless and of their time,and their time was in a far away backwater occupied by a viscious,brutal efficeint machine called Rome.I also, cannot agree on everything that professor Herzog puts forth. However, I know enough to realize that Jesus was more then aware of what was going on around Him,and that his stories would have great signifigance for the motley group that listened to Him.If not, then the parables are mere fables, Aesop for the age,with cute morals. I think that the message of Jesus is so challenging and difficult that we have added all the historical accretion we can find to soften its impact. I do not think, even remotely, that this is a defining portrait of Jesus,or even the only viable view of his parables. What I do think is that it is time to look, really look at the message of Jesus, not just outside of time, but in its time. And for that,for stimulating and causing me to re-think some of my tenents, I am grateful for this book.
Refreshing August 23, 2003
The Rev. Dr. Daniel J. G. G. Block (Medford, Wisconsin United States)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
Professor Herzog's work is not the socialist denial of the Gospel that it has been accused of being. Neither is it an overly difficult text, as some reviewers have claimed.Instead, it is a thoughtful, scholarly, re-examination of the parables, which raises the possibility of alternate readings, more appropriate to the first century a.d., rural, Palestinian context in which the parables were first proclaimed. Professor Herzog's work is challenging. It refuses to accept as sacrosanct any of the old verities that many of us were taught years ago in seminary. In a modified form of redaction criticism, Professor Herzog closely examines each parable in its canonical form, and then seeks to work back to the most plausible words of Jesus, consistent with Biblical archeology and the sociology of religion. The results are new possibilities for proclamation. This is not a book for the casual reader, or those who wish to maintain long-held beliefs at any cost. However, for educated seekers of truth this book is a gem.
 Controversial, but a great approach to the parables November 15, 2004
Brion Brooks (Grand Rapids, Michigan)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I was introduced to William Herzog's book while taking a seminary course on the New Testament Parables. The professor included Herzog to provide some "angularity" to the more traditional approaches of other scholars and commentaries we were reading. And that it did.
Herzog is an acquired taste. For those with a more conservative bent, his liberation theology with Marxist ideology may be off-putting at first. In my opinion, his premise that Jesus' audience would have understood the parables through a Marxist lens limits the value of his interpretations. I think the work of the Context Group (Bruce Malina, et al) simply don't support that theory. But I do give him credit for being up front about his agenda.
Having said that, I still think the book is definitely worth buying. In particular, I very much appreciated his discussion of the work of Paulo Friere. This section of the book is dense, but worth the effort.
Herzog develops the premise that the parables were not designed to `teach' in the traditional sense, but to help the listeners break free of their perceptual limitations and see the world as a different reality. In this way, he compares Jesus' use of parables with Friere's work in `liberating' the self-defeating mindsets of illiterate peasants.
I found this approach to be very helpful in my own studies of the parables. Herzog's steadfastly refuses to too-quickly `spiritualize' the parables. Instead, he focuses first on the emotional or even visceral responses of the audiences to whom the parables were directed. By intently looking for the emotional reactions first, he helps to show the impact of the parables beyond simple `sermon illustrations.'
While I can't always agree with Herzog's conclusion regarding what that reaction would have been, the approach gives new insights into parable interpretation.
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