Enemies for Your Sake: The Figure of the Jew in Paul and the Qur’an

[I delivered this paper at the conference “Figuring the Enemy” at St. Andrews University, June 6-8. Thank you to Scott Kirkland for the invitation!]

In this paper, I want to draw a comparison between the treatment of the figure of the Jew in the Pauline Epistles and the Qur’an, with the goal of illuminating the necessarily polemical nature of historical, revealed monotheism. I will begin by providing some background as to why such a juxtaposition has been only seldom attempted, explain how I came to see these two texts as related, and briefly suggest how the parallels might have come about. I will then develop a more detailed comparison and contrast, laying the groundwork for a conclusion in which I draw out some implications for our understanding of monotheism, in critical dialogue with Jan Assmann.

I.

Paul is conspicuously absent from the Qur’an. The sacred text of Islam mentions many figures from the New Testament, dwelling at great length on Jesus, Mary, Zechariah, and even mentioning that Jesus — alone among the Qur’anic prophets — had a special group of followers known as the “disciples.” All of those references, however, are solely to the Gospels, or to adjacent apocryphal literature, such as the Protoevangelium of James. Only the Gospel is mentioned alongside the Torah as an authentic earlier scripture in the Qur’an’s reckoning.

Yet even if Paul had been mentioned, the Qur’an also claims that the actual scriptural deposits held by contemporary Jews and Christians have been corrupted and that the Qur’an’s retelling of biblical stories are restoring the authentic originals. Hence there has historically been little curiosity among Islamic scholars about the Bible — why bother with the corrupt version when you have the real thing? Virtually the only extended engagement with Paul in the medieval Islamic tradition is ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s 10th-century Critique of Christian Origins, which portrays the Apostle as a scheming Jew who was instrumental in corrupting the original Gospel message. Along the way, he introduces many fanciful and sometimes offensive stories and evinces only a fragmentary knowledge of the epistles themselves.

Modern scholars of the Qur’an have largely left Paul aside as well. The motives, to the extent we can assign motives to this kind of lacuna, likely vary. On the one hand, scholars who are broadly sympathetic to Islam accept the basic traditional narrative that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad during his lifetime and assembled within the lifetime of his close companions. Most members of this group therefore usually attempt to square the circle between a secular perspective on the Prophet’s activities and the Islamic claim that he was an “unlettered prophet” — i.e., he didn’t directly study previous scriptural texts, but may have vaguely picked them up by osmosis. On the other hand, there are more hostile scholars who often advance far-fetched and, in my view, borderline conspiratorial narratives of a late origin of the Qur’an, which cuts the figure of Muhammad out of the picture. In place of any serious engagement with the Qur’an as a theological text with cohesive themes, they attempt to trace the lost Syriac text (or whatever) that lay at the basis of it.

Nevertheless, simply as a reader who is familiar with both texts, I cannot help but think there is an important connection to be made here. I first approached the Qur’an for the sake of my teaching, as my dean called upon me to fill in a gap in our course offerings after the faculty member who taught Eastern religions retired. As a scholar of Christianity, I figured that Islam would be the nearest reach. Hence I set to work reading the suras of the Qur’an in approximate chronological order — with no particular “angle” or agenda, and perhaps even a little irritated that this demand was interfering with my summer research plans.

When I got to Sura 2, The Cow (which comes early in the printed text but relatively late in the Prophet’s ministry), I was struck by the following passage: “They say, ‘Become Jews or Christians, and you will be rightly guided.’ Say [Prophet], ‘No, [ours is] the religion of Abraham, the upright, who did not worship any god besides God’” (2:135; using Haleem translation here and throughout; all brackets represent attempted clarifications by the translator). This sounded very similar to Paul’s attempts in Galatians and Romans to get back behind the Law of Moses by connecting his preaching to the more primordial figure of Abraham. When I got to Sura 3, The Family of Imran, the parallel had become unmistakable:

People of the Book, why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? … Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was upright and devoted to God, never an idolater, and the people who are closest to him are those who truly follow his ways, this Prophets, and [true] believers—God is close to [true] believers. (3:65-68)

How can one not think of the passages where Paul argues for the priority of Abraham’s pure faith over against the later covenant of Moses? In Galatians, he specifies that “the law, which came four hundred thirty years later, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God” (Galatians 3:17), and in Romans he points out that Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness “not after, but before he was circumcized” (4:10), so that he can be the ancestor of both uncircumcised and circumcised believers.

No one who had attended Ted Jennings’ seminar on Romans could possibly miss these parallels. Nevertheless, I did not find much affirmation of my intuitions in the scholarship. In my admittedly far from exhaustive study of literature on the Qur’an, I have found almost zero mention of any relationship between the Qur’an’s deployment of the figure of Abraham and the Apostle Paul’s. The one exception is the biography of the Prophet by Juan Cole, probably known to some in the audience as an anti-Iraq War blogger. Breaking with both trends of the scholarship I mentioned above, Cole both accepts the historicity of the Prophet Muhammad as the vehicle for the revelation of the Qur’an over a relatively short period of time but nevertheless avoids the kid-gloves approach to the notion of the “unlettered prophet.” For Cole, Muhammad was a successful merchant and hence would have been multi-lingual as a matter of course. Moreover, he was a spiritual seeker long before he started receiving the Qur’anic revelations, and so he would have eagerly devoured any theological or scriptural literature he could get his hands on.

Hence Cole is able to make connections to texts from Judaism, Christianity, and various heretical or non-mainstream sects of both, as well as many other religious and intellectual movements — including the letters of Paul. Indeed, he takes the connection further. In an unpublished SBL paper he generously shared with me, Cole suggests that Pauline studies might provide a useable paradigm for Qur’anic studies, and in fact his biography of the Prophet, which aims to use the Qur’an rather than the traditional biographical narratives as the primary source, is constructed on the model of a biography of Paul drawn from the internal timeline implied by the letters rather the account in Acts.

Although he is definitely an outlier in terms of reconstructing the Prophet’s literary borrowings, even Cole stops short of making any strong claim that Muhammad sat down and read the literal texts of Paul. I don’t want to make any strong claim, either. Instead, I want to suggest that it ultimately doesn’t matter. Even if Muhammad studied the texts of Paul, that does not, in itself, “explain” why those precise rhetorical moves appeared at such crucial moments in the Qur’an. As the man says, “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart.” Whether they are borrowed or independently discovered, the rhetorical and theological parallels are rooted in their shared rhetorical and theological situation as messengers who have arrived “too late” and must shore up their legitimacy in the face of a pre-existing monotheistic tradition (or range of traditions).

The situation is doubtless more complicated in Muhammad’s case given that the centuries that separate him from Paul saw the rise of Christianity, in all of its bewildering and mutually antagonistic forms. In a sense, though, Paul himself is already dealing with multiple versions of Christianity as well, as shown in his “so I says to the guy”-style account of his debate with Peter in Galatians or the delicate tightrope he walks with Apollos in 1 Corinthians. For both Paul and Muhammad, one would initially assume that the debate with Christians is the more salient one—in Paul’s case because he is primarily concerned with the requirements for Gentile believers to join the Christian movement and in Muhammad’s because orthodox Trinitarianism and Christology clearly violate the Qur’anic prohibition of “associating partners with God” — yet both focus much more on the original bearers of the monotheistic revelation: the Jews.

II.

At first glance, Paul and Muhammad’s respective position with regard to the Jews could not be more different. Most notably, Paul is himself a Jew of impeccable credentials: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5-6). As the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul has the role of bringing an essentially Jewish message to the previously excluded nations.  Muhammad, for his part, claims no Jewish descent, and the Qur’an proudly declares itself an Arabic revelation for Arabs. Paul is also preaching a message that he understands to be the culmination or fulfillment of the Jewish revelation, whereas—at least until the later years of Muhammad’s career — the Qur’an presents the Prophet’s message as merely the latest in a series of such messages to individual nations.

Despite those very important differences, however, both Paul and Muhammad are clearly rankled by the failure of the Jews to accept their respective messages—albeit not to the same degree. Whereas the Prophet recognizes that the Jews have a special relationship to God and to the Scriptural heritage, making their failure to acknowledge his prophetic message a clear challenge to his prophetic legitimacy, that is not as pressing an issue as the refusal of Paul’s fellow countrymen’s to accept their own ostensible messiah. The gap begins to close as Muhammad becomes a political leader in Medina, where some Jewish groups explicitly ally with him and thus become quasi-insiders, but even then, Muhammad’s ultimate goal is to establish an ecumenical community of monotheists: “The [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians—all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good—will have their rewards with their Lord. No fear for them, nor will they grieve” (2:62). (No one is quite sure who the Sabians are, but surely that only highlights the open-ended inclusiveness of the Qur’an’s vision!)

Once we take into account those key differences in their respective situation and degree of emotional investment in Jewish acceptance of their message, what’s remarkable is how similar their strategies are for negotiating their relationship with the Jewish monotheistic heritage. For the sake of imposing some order on two infamously disorganized bodies of literature, I will assess their approach to three interrelated issues in turn: the question of Jewish privilege, the place of the Jewish law, and the prospects of salvation for the Jews.

So first, Jewish privilege. As we have seen, both Paul and the Qur’an attempt to displace Jewish privilege by using Abraham to make an end-run around Moses. Both also deploy the primal scene of the Garden of Eden to emphasize the universality of their respective messages, though this move is much more prominent in Paul than in the Qur’an. This likely reflects the fact that the Prophet’s mission in the Qur’an is not initially envisioned as having the same universal scope as Christ’s. Indeed, the very fact that no prophet is fully definitive, that each is part of an open-ended series, seems to displace the privilege of previous prophets such as Moses or Jesus.

This strategy is especially evident in the earlier revelations, which intersperse the familiar biblical prophets with messengers to various ancient cities of Arabia — whose ruins would regularly be seen by traveling merchants — and radically downplay the fact that the biblical prophets are all part of the same family tree. For the Qur’an, a perennial monotheistic message has come down through many prophets at many places and times, and only very late in the Qur’anic revelation do we get any hint that Muhammad, as “seal of the prophets” (33:40), is anything other than one prophet among many.

Yet a form of particularism does return, precisely through the figure of Abraham. As we have seen, Paul turns Abraham into the father of those who believe in Christ and, in Galatians, reinterprets Christ as the singular “offspring” who will receive God’s promises to Abraham (3:16). Similarly, the Qur’an introduces a Muslim particularism into the Abraham story by stealthily replacing Isaac with Ishmael on Mount Moriah (37:99-111) and then has the father-son pair found the shrine at Mecca (2:125-129). Hence the “religion of Abraham” is both the perennial monotheism announced by all the prophets and the specific Mecca-centered rites preached by the Seal of the Prophets. In both cases, Jewish privilege is displaced and then reappropriated for the new movement.

This brings us to my second point, namely the role of the Jewish law as the most visible marker of Jewish particularism. Here the convergence between Paul and the Qur’an is most remarkable, given their very different starting points. For his part, Paul has two core concerns that bring him into collision with the Jewish law. Like all Jesus-followers, he must account for how the messiah’s shameful crucifixion and death as an outlaw fit into the economy of salvation, and in terms of his specific mission, he is deeply committed to the idea that Gentiles share in the messianic reality precisely as Gentiles—not as converts to Judaism. In Galatians, that leads him to identify the law as a curse (3:10-14) and a form of slavery (4:22-5:1) and to joke darkly that anyone who is interested in circumcision “would castrate themselves” (5:12). In the later epistle to the Romans, this view has softened: though the law is “holy and just and good” (7:12), its role is the fundamentally negative one of highlighting the omnipresence of sin. In both letters, then, Paul concludes that one is better off joining Christ outside the sphere of the law.

For the Qur’an, the conflict arises from a repeated concern that people should not simply make up prohibitions that God has not actually revealed. In the case of dietary restrictions, the Qur’an repeatedly states that God “has only forbidden you carrion, blood, pig’s meat, and animals over which any name other than God’s has been invoked” (2:173). This raises the question of whether the Torah’s much more restrictive dietary rules represent the kind of imposture that the Qur’an decries. Though the Qur’an is generally comfortable performing a line-item veto of individual laws or plot points from biblical stories, disqualifying the majority of Jewish practice as a fraud is apparently a bridge too far. It decides that the restrictions are real, but they apply only to the Jews, as a form of punishment: “For the wrongdoings done by the Jews, we forbade them certain good things that had been permitted to them before” (4:160). The Qur’an also suggests that the Sabbath may have a similar punitive origin, claiming that “The Sabbath was made obligatory only for those who differed about it” (16:124).

For both the radical messianist and the Seal of the Prophets, then, the Jewish law is reversed from a blessing to a curse, or at least from a privilege to a burden. This obviously complicates my third point of comparison, the ultimate fate of the Jewish people, which is also the place where their strategy most differs. The key passage here in Paul is the labyrinthine Romans 9-11. On the one hand, Paul is unequivocal that “gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). Jesus is and always remains the Jewish messiah, and his death and resurrection make possible the unexpected extension to all nations of God’s promises to the Jewish people. Even the fact that they have rejected the messiah and become “enemies for your sake” (11:28) only highlights the Jews’ special role in the economy of salvation—they had to step aside temporarily in order to make room for Gentiles to come in. Yet Jewish particularism is only redeemed through accepting Christian particularism, as their jealousy at seeing the Gentiles enjoy the benefit of God’s promises will lead them to relent and accept that Jesus is the messiah (11:11). Only in that sense can Paul say, “all Israel will be saved” (11:26).

By contrast, in the Qur’an, the standards for the salvation of a Jewish person are the same as for anyone else: believe in God and the last day, pray, and live a righteous life. The prophetic message provides no information about what happens if they don’t fulfill their special dietary obligations, though it does include an enigmatic story in which God tests the Jews’ faithfulness by sending them a fish that surfaced only on the Sabbath (7:163-167). They give into temptation, leading God to declare that “until the Day of Resurrection, He would send people against them to inflict terrible suffering on them” (7:167) — a dire punishment, to be sure, but one that only applies to the life of this world. One assumes, as with every commandment in the Qur’an, that the faithful Jew’s duty is to do their best to obey their extra commandments and not be too hard on themselves if some necessity or misunderstanding prevents them. The displacement of Jewish privilege thus leads to a situation where they have no particular advantage or disadvantage in salvation. Indeed, the Qur’an, in a distant echo of Paul’s rude comment from Galatians, can sometimes taunt Jews who believe that their special relationship to God means they are automatically saved that they should therefore wish for death (62:6).

Nevertheless, this live-and-let-live attitude does not exclude a bitter enmity, at least for a certain subset of Jews. The direct cause here is the fact that some Jewish groups explicitly submitted to Muhammad’s leadership through the so-called “Constitution of Medina,” then failed to fulfill their obligations. As Juan Cole is at pains to clarify, many verses that seem to vent fury at the Jews as a whole should instead be interpreted as applying only to specific groups who behave in the specific ways described. That contextualization is helpful, yet it does not dispel my impression that the Qur’an’s attitude toward the Jews is on something of a hair trigger—their presumed favor and cooperation is especially coveted, making their opposition all the more galling. The fact that Christians, who on the face of it violate the Qur’an’s radical monotheism, do not face the same love-hate dynamic only heightens this suspicion. That may simply be a result of a lower or less unified Christian population in the Hijaz — or it may reflect a sense that Christians, as another post-Jewish monotheistic movement, are more natural allies.

III.

Overall, then, both the Apostle Paul and the Prophet Muhammad arrive at very similar strategies for negotiating their relationship with the original bearers of the monotheistic message. Both tend to displace Jewish particularism and replace it with their new movement’s own particularism. Both reinterpret the Jewish law as a burden or punishment rather than a sign of God’s blessing. Thankfully, these negative moves do not lead either to exclude the Jews from salvation, but both nonetheless insist that any redemption they experience will conform to the standards of their new revelation—which was of course the true meaning of the old revelation all along. The specific theological paths they take to get there differ based on their respective historical contexts and emotional investment in the Jewish community, but the fact that such different starting points can lead to such similar results is, at the very least, unexpected—especially for two texts that the medieval and modern scholarly traditions have taken to be completely unrelated.

My contention is that this convergence ultimately stems from the very nature of historical, revealed monotheism. Here I am drawing on the work of Jan Assmann. In The Price of Monotheism, Assmann argues that revealed monotheistic traditions represent “secondary” religions. Whereas the “primary” traditions, retrospectively called polytheism, have an open-ended and inclusive quality — new gods can always be added to the pantheon, and the gods of other groups can be “translated” into their local equivalents—the secondary religions style themselves as the correction of the errors of paganism and have a built-in intolerance. This intolerance extends not only to the unwashed masses outside the monotheistic circle, but to the backsliders and compromisers within it, who fall short of the monotheistic demand encapsulated in a scriptural deposit. Living traditions will inevitably lapse into such “betrayals,” and they will just as inevitably be met with Reformation-like demands to “return” to the pure religion represented in scripture.

All of this seems to me to be basically right, and classroom use has showed me that students find Assmann’s concepts helpful for negotiating the differences between polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. Where Assmann seems to me to stumble is in his account of the relationships among the existing monotheistic traditions, which for him grows out of the tensions between universalism and particularism in the monotheistic idea. On the one hand, monotheism has universal implications—the God it reveals is the God of everyone. On the other hand, monotheism insists on particularity—the God is reveals is a particular named God who has participated in specific historical events, and all other gods are false and/or demonic. Judaism manages this tension in a straightforward way:

In Judaism, the universalism inherent to monotheism is deferred until a messianic end-time; in the world as we know it, the Jews are the guardians of a truth that concerns everyone, but that has been entrusted to them for the time being as to a kind of spiritual avant-garde. For Christians, of course, this end-time dawned some two thousand years ago, putting an end to the need for such distinctions. That is why Christian theology has blinded itself to the need for such distinctions. (17)

He then adds, almost as an afterthought, that Islam suffers from a similar blindness, which is why both traditions have at times embraced an intolerance and violence that seems to contradict their universal message.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t seem to provide much explanation for why so much of that intolerance and violence has been directed at a group that both traditions agree to be fellow worshippers of the one true God: namely, the Jews. Here the problem doesn’t seem to me that Christianity and Islam can’t admit that their universal message is rooted in particularism. It’s that they can’t admit that their new revelation is new. This is not merely bad faith or willful blindness, but a structural necessity of participating in the revealed monotheistic tradition. The one true God is not a vague philosophical principle of unity or a trans-historical ideal that may be reflected in many different ways — he is a particular, named deity who has reportedly done particular things at particular times and places. The claim to follow this God therefore requires maintaining some form of continuity with the existing deposit of revelation, even as the felt demand for a new approach demands some critical distance.

The ideal outcome from the perspective of a budding new prophet would of course be that the Jews accept the new “purified” version of monotheism en masse. Every new monotheistic movement seems to include a moment of delusional optimism that this will occur — even Martin Luther expected that Jews would rush to embrace the “real” Christianity that had been obscured for so many centuries. This blessed outcome somehow never occurs, leading to the kinds of mental gymnastics I have documented above.

The necessarily polemical nature of revealed monotheism is therefore directed precisely at the original bearers of the monotheistic demand. Their very faithfulness to the divine command is recast as a form of stubbornness or arrogance. Their entire history — here drawing on authentic threads in the Hebrew Bible — is interpreted as one of rebellion and disbelief. In the Qur’an, which proclaims to the Jews that God has “blessed you and favored you over other people” (2:47), the chosen nation is reduced to a perpetual object lesson for the believers. Even worse, the Christian tradition of typological exegesis that finds its beginning in the Pauline epistles reads the entire history of Israel as a series of unwitting anticipatory pantomimes of the life of Christ.

The Jews are wrong, yet necessary, indeed necessarily wrong. They become, in Paul’s words, “enemies for your sake,” constitutive enemies at the foundation of a new tradition that can structurally never understand itself to be new. And so the new revelation’s declaration that the Jews’ special favor with God, represented by the divine law that structures their lives and sets them apart from all nations, is actually a burden and a curse becomes a grim self-fulfilling prophecy. For the crime of bringing revealed monotheism into the world and sustaining its demand against all odds, the Jews are condemned to perpetual suspicion, exclusion, and persecution—precisely by their fellow monotheists. The dynamic may be more virulent (as in Christianity) or less (as in Islam), but it is nonetheless real and destructive.

I began this paper by considering the understandable reasons that scholars have ignored the possible connection between Paul and the Qur’an, and I will end by asking why Assmann might downplay the toxic theological dynamic that my comparison has highlighed. The answer, it seems to me, is that he is attempting to extract some redemptive core to the monotheistic revolution, which will allow him to declare it, despite everything, a progressive step toward the inclusive secular world order he is clearly hoping for. That core, he claims, is the universal demand for justice, which could form the basis of a universal law, though never a universal religion. Yet the dynamics I trace in this paper call the justice of God deeply into question, as an entire nation’s history is reduced to an object lesson or a ladder to truth that can be safely kicked away. It is no mistake that Romans 9-11, where Paul grapples with the salvation of the Jews, is also Christian theology’s locus classicus for the doctrine of predestination, which seems to reduce God to an arbitrary monster. The hope for a universal justice is surely a valid one, but to get there, we need to break more definitively with the habits of thought that the secondary monotheisms have bequeathed to us.

Who is my neighbor?

In the wake of the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, a new meme has emerged on the right: the killer, Daniel Penny, was acting as a “Good Samaritan.” A more craven and blasphemous distortion of Jesus’s parable is hardly imaginable. In fact, I almost hesitate to dignify it with a response. Neely himself is so obviously the victimized party here, and if anything, his murder shows what happens when a “Good Samaritan” doesn’t show up. Moreover, the fact that the story a story that is so obviously about moral decency that crosses lines of ethnic enmity and distrust — the Jewish victim’s co-religionists pass him by, while a member of a hated, supposedly half-breed sect provides generous help — can be deployed to apply to a member of a privileged in-group using lethal violence against a multiply marginalized person displays the kind of willful, spiteful ignorance that only committed racists can pull off.

This isn’t the first time the story has been misunderstood. There are numerous accounts of preachers crafting a contemporary version of the parable where a priest and a deacon pass the victim by, while an atheist (or an illegal immigrant, or a trans person, or whoever else) generously helps. The punchline is always that the parishoners — who have presumably known this story all their lives — inevitably find this retelling offensive and insulting.

This misunderstanding is all the more puzzling given that Jesus clearly intends for the listener to identify with the victim. The interlocutor asks Jesus “who is my neighbor,” presumably to get out of the exhorbitant demands of Jesus’s teaching by applying them only to a limited in-group. Jesus tells the story and then asks essentially, “Okay, who was that guy’s neighbor?” The pride and presumption of the interlocutor, who wants to be able to pick and choose his neighbors, is undercut by a scenario in which he is radically vulnerable and is no position to turn away any neighborly assistance.

Except! Yes, that’s right, there is a catch, and it’s the fateful last exchange: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’” Go and do likewise — suddenly the interlocutor is no longer identified with the victim, but with the hero. What’s more, this isn’t just any guy off the street, but a teacher of the law. There is nothing a teacher of the law knows better than how to get out of things, so we can imagine the gears turning: “Go and do likewise — but in what respect? Was it not the case that the Samaritan was helping my fellow Jew, filling in for the neglectful priest and Levite? Perhaps I, like the Samaritan, should help Jews in need so that they aren’t put in the embarrassing position of relying on the help of a Samaritan, who surely has his own Samaritan problems to attend to. And if I’m supposed to take away the message that Samaritans are worthy of respect, surely the best kind of respect is not to impose on them, right?” And so it goes.

There are other trap doors as well. Could we not see the scenario as precisely a failure of policing? Again, we wouldn’t have needed to bother the poor Samaritan if our Roman men in uniform had done their jobs! Better, perhaps, than cleaning up after someone is victimized would be to intervene before it gets to that point, right? In this interpretation — presupposing, of course, the racist premise that Neely was somehow primed for violence, which no empirical evidence supports — Penny was a true neighbor to everyone on that train, a kind of super-Samaritan! And the fact that he is being persecuted for his actions by the usual rogue’s gallery of liberals and reporters and various social jusice warriors shows that he must have done the right thing. Maybe he’s even a little bit like Jesus! In fact, I wonder if we can detect some Christ-like imagery in these dramatic photos portraying Penny between two subordinate figures, like Christ crucified between two thieves:

All these various plot holes and “outs” may be an indication that entrusting the moral formation of one’s society on a half-remembered story that may have been told by an apocalyptic preacher in first-century Palestine is a questionable move. This is not, I hasten to add, because those stories are garbled or incoherent. No, the reason this is a risky procedure is that they are designed as traps. At one point, the disciples ask Jesus why he preaches in parables. His answer is not that they are more memorable or easier to understand or anything we might expect on a common-sense level. Instead, he offers a more paradoxical answer:

He answered, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:
“You will indeed listen, but never understand,
and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.”

As my theology professor Craig Keen loved to paraphrase this passage, Jesus is saying, “I tell them parables rather than preaching straightforwardly because otherwise they might turn and be saved.”

A parable, in other words, is not a memorable tale or a moral lesson. It is a judgment — or better, it is a way to get people to pass judgment on themselves. We can try all we want to point out to these people identifying a cold-blooded murderer as a Good Samaritan how much they have misunderstood the text, but the text is doing what it is meant to do — it is giving them the opportunity to demonstrate that they are well and truly lost. What we do with that information is unclear, given that we do not expect the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, but the information itself is unequivocal. Anyone who could bring themselves to utter such a blasphemous thing is beyond help, beyond hope. They are damned, and to live as they do is surely a living hell.