Imitating the Parables: Allegory, Narrative and the Role of Mimesis

For the past 100 years the debate concerning the literary nature of the parables has centered on the question as to whether the parables are allegories or narratives. Rather than consider the allegorical or nonallegorical nature of the parables directly, this article examines the hermeneutical function of mimesis and how it relates to the particular reading strategies we employ when interpreting the parables. Because the parables are a mimetic representation they allow the reader to recognize correspondences based on a pre-existing code and at the same time allow the reader to recognize new possibilities for understanding. This allows the same parable to be read either as an allegory or as a narrative whole. As a result, the different genre classifications we assign to the parables are not only derived from our participation in the mimetic representation of the parables but these classifications are also mutable (not fixed) and will shift depending on the relationship between the reader and the text.