How do you differentiate between a parable and a description?

How does this become affected by us being situated in history?

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Answers

One of the callers to a CBC (our national Public broadcasting radio channel) regarding some of the writings in the canonical Christian bible, left an exasperated message to the effect that people were debating "How high is up?" when they missed the fundamental point that the stories were all parables and illustrative of an alternative order of pattern - other than literal. That they were -all- metaphorical.

Were this taken as true, then the stories would be fingers pointing at the moon, in the Zen sense, and not to be confused with the moon.

The second question has to do at one level with the loss of context when a series of writings is taken to another point in history, and further, how our explanations are bound to examples that are familiar to us. "...easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle..." conveys one image, yet I've also heard it explained that a "needle" was a narrow gate in the city wall just wide enough to admit an unencumbered person. One example seems like a preposterous combination (why would one associate a sewing needle with a camel?) whereas the other would nicely fit the schema of an example (a city being a desirable place to enter (mapping onto heaven), the needle being a narrow passage, and the impossibility of fitting a camel through it -- all common descriptive tokens of someone used to travelling to walled cities.

Epilepsy used to be described as possession by an inimical spirit.

Now we view it as a disorder of the neurology of the body.

Our descriptions are bound to our understandings - so shouldn't we regard most of our explanations as allusive rather than definitive?

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Yes.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000

To me a parable is story-like an has a lesson to teach, using the common vernacular. As Tom points out... it's always relative to the audience of the time, and what they would "get" otherwise, the illustration holds no meaningful point.

Description? May or may not include a story... that teaches.

Diane

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000