Stories with Intent by Klyne R. Snodgrass

Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus by Klyne R. Snodgrass ISBN-13: 9780802842411 Hardcover: 864 pages Publisher: Eerdmans Released: Jan. 11, 2008

Source: Bought.

Book Description from Goodreads:
Stories with Intent offers pastors and students an accessible and comprehensive guide to Jesus' parables. Klyne Snodgrass explores in vivid detail the context in which these stories were told, the purpose they had in Jesus' message, and the ways they have been interpreted by the church and modern scholarship. While holding a consciously evangelical approach, Snodgrass deals throughout with a broad spectrum of opinions and interpretations.

He begins by surveying the primary issues in parables interpretation. Offering both a new, more functional classification system for Jesus' parables and guidelines for interpreting them, he provides an overview of other parables -- often neglected in the discussion -- from the Old Testament, Jewish writings, and the Greco-Roman world. The remaining chapters group the longer and more important parables of Jesus thematically and give a comprehensive treatment of each, including background and significance for today.


My Review:
Stories with Intent will probably most appeal to pastors or academics as it goes into more detail the most people will be interested in. He doesn't look at every single parable but looks at different categories of parables and explores the main ones. For each parable, he looked into the main ways that people have interpreted the parable throughout history. He also looked at cultural background information, including quoting sources from around that time period that relate to the topic (like references to procedures for inheritance if the father has not yet died, when studying the Prodigal Son parable). He gets into Greek words and tenses and how this may change how a sentence is interpreted. He talked about if the parable is the same as a similar one in another gospel or if it is not. He favored the more obvious interpretations and the assumption that the parables were really spoken by Jesus. I read the entire thing and, overall, agreed with his analysis and his reasoning. I'd recommend this book to those who want extensive study on parables or simply want this as a reference book.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.


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