Movements  Robert W. Funk's Contribution to the Study of Parables Bernard Brandon Scott

Robert W. Funk was one of the most insightful and influential parable interpreters of the twentieth century, yet he never wrote a book on that subject alone. Quite appropriately, the essay was his preferred form for dealing with parables, and his work on them has therefore been scattered throughout a number of publications. Although one of his books was entitled Parables and Presence (1982), it also dealt with issues other than parables. This present collection brings together his most important essays on Jesus' parables. These seminal contributions not only inaugurated a new age in parable criticism and interpretation, but also set an agenda that still remains to be further investigated. Only by bringing together under one cover the broad sweep of Funk's work on parables can we begin to recognize its far-reaching implications.

Funk's career as a parable interpreter can be divided into four movements. As with a symphony, a strong continuity marks the shift from movement to movement, and yet each has distinctive accents, themes, and rhythms of its own.

• The initial and revolutionary movement begins with Funk's effort to understand parable as metaphor. Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God (1966) is the major work of this period.
• Then comes Kafka as Precursor, which heralds one of his most creative periods. Jesus as Precursor (1975) gathers together the major essays of this period.
• In the next movement, Funk employs more formal linguistic methods, culminating in the publication of his Poetics of Biblical Narrative (1988).
• In the final movement—away from academia and on to the formation of Westar—Funk shifted his audience and with it his style and way of thinking. Honest to Jesus (1996) and A Credible Jesus: Fragments of a Vision (2002) typify this movement.

I shall use these four movements to organize this introductory essay and thus help the reader understand the development of Funk's thinking about parables as well as its significance. In the book, however, the essays are organized topically. [See the Table of Contents.] At the head of each of the four sections dealing with the four movements in Funk's career, I have listed the essays in this volume that come from and illustrate that movement. A reader can therefore choose to read the essays either chronologically or topically. Funk would have supported this implicit rejection of a canonical way of reading his texts.

While this book concentrates on Funk's work on parable, the full range of his scholarship was much wider. He was an important Greek grammarian, a scholar of Paul and hermeneutics, a transforming executive secretary of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and his teaching career left its mark on a number of campuses. Still, despite the wide diversity of his interests and competencies, his writings on parable run like a rich vein throughout his life's work.

My task is not to summarize Funk's work, for his analyses always require careful reading and grant rich rewards. Rather, my purpose is to indicate the ongoing development of his thought and its significance. I have tried to evaluate his work in light of the history of scholarship, but have said little on contemporary parable criticism. After all, it took more than forty years for Adolf Jülicher's work to take hold; and if I am right in my assessment that Funk initiated a revolution at least as momentous as Jülicher's, then it is too soon to evaluate the response. Indeed, in the course of rereading Funk's oeuvre, I was constantly surprised at how much I had missed or misread. He once told me, "I taught you. You just forgot!" Perhaps I could argue in defense that the episodic essay form makes it difficult to arrive at a synoptic view of Funk's accomplishment, and that this book is a way of saying, "I should have paid better attention."

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