Living Parables: Today’s Versions
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Living Parables: Today’s Versions presents parables in updated language and images. Biblical parables are culture-bound; they are embedded in images that were well-known to a Jewish culture. Jesus was a first-century, Jewish, Galilean peasant, and his concerns, speech, and idioms belong to that culture. His milieu is far removed from ours today. The images found in parables carried meaning that is lost on modern audiences.
A simple example will suffice. In the Jewish world of the first century, leaven was considered to be corrupt because people did not understand how bacteria worked. On the most important day of the year--Passover--bread had to be unleavened, uncorrupted. Today, no one thinks of yeast in that way. If we want bread dough to rise, we need to leaven it. Therefore, what image might Jesus use today that carries some of the same cultural connotations that yeast or leaven carried in his world? Might he speak about Ebola virus or radioactivity? Those images carry the same negativity that yeast or leaven bore in his world. This book contains parables found in the New Testament in a form that Jesus might tell today.
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These creatively refashioned stories provide fresh resources for teachers, pastors, public speakers, and authors who wish the parables to come alive again in modern contexts.
——Charles W. Hedrick, Missouri State University
Mark Boyer and Corbin Cole in their new book, Living Parables, set out to recapture the original dynamic of biblical parables. . . . These retellings of biblical parables creatively capture what the original hearers might have heard.
——Eugene Hensell, OSB, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology
Living Parables takes a different and intriguing take on the parables. The authors have created contemporary versions of Jesus’s parables following an equivalence pattern that does not stray from the original parables’ format. . . . Highly intriguing and engaging.
——Bernard Brandon Scott, Phillips Theological Seminary
- Title: Living Parables: Today’s Versions
- Authors: Mark G. Boyer, Corbin S. Cole
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2020
- Pages: 134
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- ISBNs: 9781725285811, 9781725285804, 1725285800, 9781725285798, 1725285797, 1725285819
- Resource ID: LLS:9781725285811
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-12-11T19:11:10Z
Mark G. Boyer—a well-known spiritual master—has been writing books on biblical, liturgical, and devotional spirituality for over thirty years. He has written sixty-three spirituality-based volumes that prompt the reader to recognize the divine in everyday life. This is his twenty-fourth Wipf & Stock title, and his second book with Corbin Cole.
Corbin S. Cole, a student in Missouri State University majoring in Religious Studies, has led worship services since the age of sixteen. He lives in Tarpon Springs, Florida, with his wife, two cats, and a baby boy named Asher. His passion is fostering spiritual growth through experience and music that focus on awareness of the self and the Divine. This is his second book with Mark Boyer.