The term parable, however, as employed in ordinary Chris- tian phraseology, is limited to those utterances of Christ which are marked by a complete figurative history or narrative. It is thus defined by Goebel (“ Parables of Jesus”). “A narrative moving within the sphere of physical or human life, not pro- fessing to describe an event which actually took place, but expressly imagined for the purpose of representing, in pictorial figure, a truth belonging to the sphere of religion, and therefore referring to the relation of man or mankind to God.”
In form the New Testament parables resemble the fuble. The distinction between them does not turn on the respective use of rational and irratiohal beings speaking and acting. There are fables where the actors are human. Nor does the fable always deal with the impossible, since there are fables in which an animal, for instance, does nothing contrary to its nature. The distinction lies in the religious character of the New Testament parable as contrasted with the secular character of the fable.
76 WORD STUDIES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. (Cx. XIII.
While the parable exhibits the relations of man to God, the fable teaches lessons of worldly policy or natural morality and utility. ‘The parable is predominantly symbolic; the fable, for the most part, typical, and therefore presents its teaching only in the form of example, for which reason it chooses ani- mals by preference, not as symbolic, but as typical figures ; never symbolic in the sense in which the parable mostly is, be- cause the higher invisible world, of which the parable sees and exhibits the symbol in the visible world of nature and man, lies far from it. Hence the parable can never work with fantastic figures like speaking animals, trees,” etc. (Goebel, condensed).
The parable differs from the allegory in that there is in the latter ‘an interpenetration of the thing signified and the thing signifying; the qualities and properties of the first being at- tributed to the last,” and the two being thus blended instead of being kept distinct and parallel. See, for example, the allegory of the Vine and the Branches (John xv.) where Christ at once | identifies himself with the figure: “JI am the true vine.” Thus the allegory, unlike the parable, carries its own interpretation with it.
Parable and proverb are often used interchangeably in the New Testament; the fundamental conception being, as we have seen, the same in both, the same Hebrew word represent- ing both, and both being enigmatical. They differ rather in ex- tent than in essence; the parable being a proverb expanded and carried into detail, and being necessarily figurative, which the proverb is not ; though the range of the proverb is wider, since the parable expands only one particular case of a proverb. (See Trench, ‘‘ Notes on the Parables,” Introd.)
3. A sower (0 omeipwv). Rev., the sower. Generic, as rep- resenting a class.
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To sow (70d ometpew). “ According to Jewish authorities, there was twofold sowing, as the seed was either cast by the hand or by means of cattle. In the latter case, a sack with holes was filled with corn and laid on the back of the animal, so that,
Cu. XUT)]. MATTHEW. uy
as it moved onward, the seed was thickly scattered” (Kder- sheim, “ Life and Times of Jesus ”).
4. By the wayside. Dean Stanley, approaching the plain of Gennesareth, says: “A slight recess in the hillside, close upon the plain, disclosed at once, in detail and with a conjunc- tion which I remember nowhere else in Palestine, every feature of the great parable. There was the undulating cornfield de- scending to the water’s edge. There was the trodden pathway running through the midst of it, with no fence or hedge to pre- vent the seed from falling here and there on either side of it or upon it; itself hard with the constant tramp of horse and mule and human feet. There was the ‘good’ rich soil which dis- tinguishes the whole of that plain and its neighborhood from the bare hills elsewhere descending into the lake, and which, where there is no interruption, produces one vast mass of corn. There was the rocky ground of the hillside protruding here and there through the cornfields, as elsewhere through the grassy slopes. There were the large bushes of thorn—the nabk, that kind of which tradition says that the crown of thorns was woven —springing up, like the fruit-trees of the more inland parts, in the very midst of the waving wheat” (“Sinai and Palestine ”).