The Parable of the Sower and the Seed

Two well-known characteristics of the book of Mark are that it appears to have been the first gospel written and that it served as the textual authority for Matthew and Luke, the other two synoptic gospels (Biblical, 1999). The fact that Mark functions as textual provenance for other gospels is relevant to understanding the parable of the sower and the seed because the internal evidence of the text--together with the fact that it was written in the apostolic era, possibly before the Roman destruction of the temple at Jerusalem in A.D. 70 but after the martyrdom of Peter at Rome in A.D. 64--is that the text itself was meant to function as a defining doctrinal source authority as the Christian cult (or more exactly the various cults of Christianity that scattered from Jerusalem through various parts of the Roman Empire) moved toward institutional status.

It is, indeed, difficult to overstate the context for the parable of the sower and the seed. In the modern period, as Anderson notes, interpretation of context was marked by a move away from the view that the parables stood for "a

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ew also makes a connection to the importance of authoritative text in the community of faith, in the reference at the end of the parables to "every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven" (13:52), i.e., to those who do not remain outside the community of faith but come inside, to see and perceive, hear and understand. The reference to scribes is a reference to text, which drives Jewish religious practice and which is implicitly the mechanism of decoding the keys of the kingdom, just as the symbolic system of the parables (oblique as it may be) is a mechanism for explaining the framework of the new faith. Luke's version of the parable also follows that of Mark, especially in Jesus's explanation of what the parable means. "Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God" (Luke 8:11). Mark puts it thus (4:14): "The sower soweth the word." Despite Anderson's comment (p. 126-7) that there is much disagreement among the experts about the meaning of the parable in itself and in the series of parables in Mark 4, Luke 8, and Matthew 13, and despite the distinction Williamson draws (1983, p. 87) between stories that are "attractively simple on the surface" and that begin "an ever-deepening dialogue through which we begin
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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