Scribes who had become disciples of Jesus

The scribes of the Hebrew Scriptures who had become disciples of Jesus chose to form the Christan Scriptures using one of the narrative traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures--The Literary form of the Parable. In doing so, they had a holy agenda. Why would the scribes have done such a thing, unless they were inspired to do so? Certainly this literary form must have been regarded as sacred by the Jewish scholars, and yet the scribes that were disciples of Jesus did not hesitate to use it.

Those scholars who were not disciples of Jesus must have been shocked and outraged. The intention of the New Testament writers was to present the teachings of Jesus as coming from God--with a status equal to the earlier Jewish Scriptures. The status of the gospels, for example, being Scripture had to have been immediate--it didn't take hundreds of years to come to this conclusion. This helps us understand an analogy used in John's gospel several times--the Hebrew Scriptures giving birth to the Christian Scriptures. Certainly the ancestry of Jesus shown in the gospels of Matthew and Luke are presenting the same theme to us--the 'old' narratives are giving birth to the "new" ones.

Go to The 150 Parables to learn more about the Literary form of the Parable.