Hey, this is John at the Bible Project.

We are beginning the second half of a series on how to read the parables of Jesus.

In the first three episodes, we've talked about why Jesus told parables to teach about

the ethic of the Kingdom of God, to explain who he is and what he's doing in human history,

and finally to create a moment of crisis for the listeners.

In today's episode, we're going to start to get practical and talk about how to read

and discern what the parables are about.

Now, a common way to read a parable is called the allegorical approach.

So an allegorical approach to the parables essentially is looking at every single detail

in the parables and finding a symbolic correspondence, and it lifts the parable out of context and

puts it in a new context.

The skill to develop and reading the parables is how to identify the one, what are the actual

symbols that I'm supposed to think are the important ones, and how do I connect them

to what Jesus intended?

That's the million dollar question.

Now, parts of Jesus' parables are clearly symbolic.

In fact, Jesus even explains parts of his parables and assigns meaning to them.

The problem comes when we over-bake the parables and we assign meaning to every tiny little

detail because we often find things that weren't really there and we import our own ideas

into the parables.

So this begins a huge debate of like, okay, when Jesus told these parables how many symbols

did He pack into them?

...