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Authenticity of the parabolic frame
This is one of the very few parables which are printed in red
in the Five Gospels of the Jesus Seminar in America and so its
authenticity is not questioned. 112 Much of the scholarship on this
parable, instead, has focussed on the question of form, i.e., whether
it is an example story or a comparative mashal. 113 While it
certainly will help the task of interpretation if the form could be
determined, we have also to bear in mind the following. First, such
classification of forms is ours, and not that of first century Jews.
Secondly, Birger Gerhardsson warns us, after many years of study
on the parables, that the extant parables were formulated without
deliberate categorisation. 114 In other words, forms did not seem to
be the main consideration for the progenitor, those transmitting the
traditions or the Gospel writer. Consequently, to use our
reconstructed forms as the dominant consideration in arriving at the
meaning of the parable will amount to making a big anachronistic
mistake.
As it was mentioned earlier, it is the frame of the parable of
the Good Samaritan that has drawn much scepticism. The usual
arguments used to support the assertion that this frame is Lukan are
the following. First, Luke tends to generalise the parables and this
parable has been generalised into an example story and so, its
original context has been lost. Secondly, the subject matter of the
frame sounds suspiciously like the discussion of Jesus and another
112 See R. Funk et al., The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of
Jesus, New York: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 323-4. The Jesus Seminar uses the
following colour codes to indicate the degree of reliability: red = virtually
certain; pink = probably reliable; grey = unreliable; black = largely fictive (see,
The Five Gospels, pp. 36-7).
113 E.g. J.D. Crossan, ‗Parable and Example in the Teaching of Jesus‘, Semeia 1
(1974), pp. 63-104; and B. Witherington III, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of
Wisdom, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994, pp. 192-3.
114 B. Gerhardsson, ‗If we do not cut the parables out of their frames‘, NTS 37
(1991), pp. 323-4.