Parables of Jesus

A parable is a parabolē (Greek G3850) — literally "a placing beside," a comparison thrown down next to a truth so the truth can be seen. It is the Septuagint's word for the Hebrew māshāl (H4912), which stretches across proverb, riddle, byword, and taunt-song. So the form did not begin with Jesus. Nathan buried a parable inside a lawsuit and sprang it on David — "Thou art the man" (2 Sam 12:1–7). Jotham shouted the fable of the trees from Mount Gerizim (Judg 9:7–15). Ezekiel was told to "put forth a riddle, and speak a parable" of two eagles (Ezek 17:2–10). And Psalm 78:2 — "I will open my mouth in a parable" — is the very verse Matthew reads as fulfilled in Jesus' method (Matt 13:35).

What Jesus did was make the form central. Matthew 13:34 records that "without a parable spake he not unto them." One genre note kept honest: John's Gospel carries none of these narrative parables. John instead uses paroimia (G3942) for Jesus' figures — the door, the good shepherd, the true vine (John 10:6; 16:25). That is a datum about the four portraits, not an absence of teaching. All the story-parables live in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Jesus was asked point-blank why he taught this way, and his answer refuses to be simple. "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God," he told the disciples, "but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive" (Mark 4:11–12, quoting Isa 6:9–10). The same passage holds both a giving and a withholding.

Two readings sit inside those words, and the site presents both rather than adjudicating between them. The concealment reading takes the hina ("that") of Mark 4:12 as purposive: after Israel's leaders reject him, the parables function as judicial veiling, in the exact pattern of Isaiah's hardening commission — light to the receptive, a closed door to the resistant. The revelation reading points the other direction: parables are how "the common people heard him gladly" (Mark 12:37); they slip past defenses the way Nathan's did; and the veil is temporary and invitational — Mark 4:33 says he spoke "as they were able to hear it," and 4:9, "he that hath ears to hear, let him hear." The tension is not a scholar's invention. It is Scripture's own, left standing in a single paragraph.

There is no canonical list of the parables, and any honest catalog says so. Counts differ by definition: does the budding fig tree count? The salt of the earth? A one-line similitude like the leaven, or only full narrative stories? R. C. Trench's classic treatment expounds thirty (Notes on the Parables of Our Lord, 1841, public domain); modern catalogs run from thirty-five to sixty and beyond (Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 2008 — cited, not ingested). This page catalogs forty-three narrative parables and extended similitudes across seven clusters, every entry a bare Scripture reference you can check against the text itself.

A second question follows: how much of a parable is meant to signify? The patristic allegorical reading finds meaning in every detail — Augustine reads the Good Samaritan's inn as the church and the two pence as the two love-commands (Quaestiones Evangeliorum 2.19). The one-point school insists a parable makes a single point and that allegorizing the furniture is eisegesis (Jülicher, Dodd, Jeremias — cite-only). A modern middle allows one point per main character. The deciding evidence belongs to none of them by fiat: Jesus himself interprets the Sower and the Tares detail by detail (Matt 13:18–23, 36–43), and that recorded practice is the control-data every method must satisfy.