Uploaded May 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
This week I continue to examine Mark Goodacre's arguments that Luke invented the Parable of the Minas himself and tried (ineptly) to make it look like a parable that Jesus really told. Does evidence of "editorial fatigue" support this claim? Not at all. Here I argue that the claims that there is something aesthetically wrong with the parable and that this is the sign of Luke's clumsy invention are dubious and subjective. Jesus would have been completely within his rights to start out by mentioning ten servants and then deciding to detail what happened to only three of them. And the claim of "bad math" in the parable is based, ironically, on a wooden literalism (of which more conservative interpreters are often falsely accused) such that Jesus and the servants couldn't refer to the servant whose mina had earned ten more as "having ten."
Here is Goodacre's influential article:
markgoodacre.org/Q/fatigue.htm
Thumbnail courtesy of freebibleimages.org
This week I continue to examine Mark Goodacre's arguments that Luke invented the Parable of the Minas himself and tried (ineptly) to make it look like a parable that Jesus really told. Does evidence of "editorial fatigue" support this claim? Not at all. Here I argue that the claims that there is something aesthetically wrong with the parable and that this is the sign of Luke's clumsy invention are dubious and subjective. Jesus would have been completely within his rights to start out by mentioning ten servants and then deciding to detail what happened to only three of them. And the claim of "bad math" in the parable is based, ironically, on a wooden literalism (of which more conservative interpreters are often falsely accused) such that Jesus and the servants couldn't refer to the servant whose mina had earned ten more as "having ten."
Here is Goodacre's influential article:
markgoodacre.org/Q/fatigue.htm
Thumbnail courtesy of freebibleimages.org
