Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #391550 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 846 pages

Customer Reviews

Exhaustive and exhausting treatment of Jesus' parables
This book could easily be subtitled 'Everything you wanted to know about the parables but were afraid to ask - and then some'. Snodgrass thoroughly reviews the ancient background to parables and proposes a complex classification that is more subtle than the allegory/non-allegory debate. His stance is conservative but not fundamentalist, and interacts with a broad range of scholarly perspectives.

He then proceeds to exegete every text he considers to be a parable in the Gospels. To take one example, he takes twenty-four pages to cover the Parable of the Talents/Minas, and just two or three of those are a direct exegesis of Matthew's version that is usable in sermon preparation.

So it may not be the book you are looking for if you want quick inspirational thoughts for a sermon, but if you are willing to be stretched I believe this is capable of becoming the new standard text in English on the parables.

And then some...
Incredibly comprehensive, covering all Jesus' parables, with plenty of insight and depth.

It deals with each parable in turn, from its wording and meaning, how it fits together, what may be original, what it may have been based on, to eventually its meaning.

It's this last area that misses the 5th star for me, as a preacher I could have done with some more thought to application. There are other commentaries for this of course.

I read about this on theologian Scot McKnight's blog and have not been disappointed.