The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine.

The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine. By John S. Kloppenborg. WUNT 195. Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. Pp. xxix + 651. Cloth, $191.00.

This book--monumental in size, scope, and price--is actually two separate but connected scholarly volumes in one. The first volume is a very detailed discussion of the parable of the Vineyard Tenants (pp. 1-353). The second volume gives and translates 58 papyri on ancient viticulture from the third century BCE to the fourth century CE (pp. 355-586). Bibliography (pp. 587-618) and Indices (pp. 619-51) complete this second volume. Each volume is excellent in itself but, unfortunately, nothing from the second one interprets definitively the problems raised in the nine chapters of the first volume.

Chapters 1-2 concern ideological presuppositions that consistently read the parable as pro-power despite Mark 12:1-12 where Jesus uses it against high-priestly power. GThom 65 also uses it for anti-power--with that initial lacuna in the Coptic manuscript filled to read not "a good man" but "a creditor or usurer" (p. 43).

Chapters 3-5 review past scholarship on the parable as "early Christian allegory" (pp. 50-105) or as "realistic fiction" (pp. 106-48). First, those scholars who read it as an allegory by the historical Jesus either wrote before the discovery of, or else dismissed, the GThom 65. But, thereafter, taking the Markan parable as an allegory from Jesus himself is not persuasive (p. 103). Second, those who read it as a realistic parable from Jesus often disagree on which later elements were added, and even when they agree on those additions--from either Isaiah 5 and/or Psalm 117--they often interpret its meaning quite diversely.

Chapter 6 argues that, since "Mark agrees with the LXX but never with the MT against the LXX" that would indicate that, if the parable came from (an Aramaic-speaking) Jesus, it originally contained no "explicit allusion to Isaiah 5" (p. 172).

Chapter 7 studies the parable in Matthew 21:33-46 and Luke 20:9-19. First, Matthew's version is based exclusively on his Markan source but with typical redactional additions. He adds "polemic against the ruling elite; and apologetic interest in accounting for the destruction of Jerusalem; and didactic and hortatory concerns" (p. 198). Second, Luke's version is also based exclusively on Mark but also with his own typical redactional changes. He omits "most of the elements that Mark took from Isa 5,2" (p. 203) at the start of the parable, and he creates a simplified sequential escalation as the tenants reject three preliminary slaves.

Chapters 8-9 examine the versions of Mark 12 and GThom 65 against their common themes from ancient viticulture: wealthy but absentee owners requiring agents for administration and prevalent labor conflicts requiring family members for negotiation. First, Mark's parable is his Gospel in creative miniature and is redactionally integrated into the polemical context of Jesus' last days with the crowd (vineyard) on his side and the high-priestly authorities (tenants) against him. Second, Thomas is, in general, independent of the Synoptics but, in particular, there may be some cases of "secondary (scribal) harmonization with the Synoptics ... especially when the Gos. Thorn. was rendered into Coptic" (p. 248). Third, both Mark 12 and GThom 65 are "two early versions that can easily be seen as performance variants" of a realistic parable from the historical Jesus about an absentee owner who ending up losing both his vineyard and his heir (p. 276). Therefore, "a reading of the 'originating structure' of the parable as critical of wealth, inheritance, and status is the most coherent one, given what we know of other values of the Jesus movement" (p. 351). It is akin to the parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12:16-20.

My own work on Jesus' parables gave two quite different interpretations of that parable's "originating structure" and Kloppenborg cites both (pp. 127-29). The first one in 1971 suggested that it was a model for decisive action akin to that in the Dishonest Steward of Luke 16:1-8. The second one in 1991 replaced that by proposing that the original parable was given in deliberate dialectic with its audience to raise the problem of violence even or especially in an unjust situation. I imagined three sets of disjunctive reactions from "a Galilean peasant audience," three responses of yes/no or for/against the tenants' violence to an unjust situation (as cited here, p. 128). Those questions were not giving my "'agnostic' interpretation" of the parable's original meaning (p. 130) but imagining the original audience's disjunctive reactions to the lure of violence as the parable's original purpose from Jesus. It presumed the injustice of the vineyard's ownership but sought to have the audience question the wisdom of the tenants' violent reaction.

John Dominic Crossan

DePaul University (Emeritus)

Chicago, IL 606114