Jesus, the Anthropologist: Patterns of Emplotment and Modes of Action in the Parables

Abstract

This article uses a typology of action framework to analyze a selection of the gospels’ parables. It does so by connecting these parables to A. G. Haudricourt and C. Ferret’s research on the “anthropology of action”. After summarizing Haudricourt’s and Ferret’s results, I relate modes of action to types of emplotment. I select four parables as the basis of my analysis, using J. P. Meier’s findings as a guide for selection. I discern in these four parables four modes of emplotment, which enables me to insert them into larger narrative networks found within the gospels. I locate the corpus of narratives determined this way in the context of Jesus’ time so as to better appreciate how the four modes of emplotment combine into a typology of action shaped by a specific social and cultural context. Within this typology of action, I put a spotlight on the way our corpus’ modes of emplotment make use of “discontinuous actions” (coined by Ferret). “Discontinuous actions” decisively initiate or correct a specified course of events. The stress on this dimension of action applies to the relationships occurring between humans and the natural world, within the social world, and between humans and the supranatural world, thus connecting one order of reality with another.

Water in the Mencius: Correlative Reasoning, Conceptual Metaphor, and/or Sacred Performative Narrative?

“…An extended story would develop the same plot at leisure. I resonate here with the stress on "emplotment" found in other contributions of the special issue of Religions, i.e., "Plots and Rhetorical Patterns in Religious Narratives", notably Gonzalez (2022), Vermander (2022c), andYou (2022). Clearly enough, this stress finds its origin in White (1973), even when transiting from the field of history to the realm of religion.…”

Animals, Sages and Saints: Alfonso Vagnone’s Rhetorical Strategy in Chinese Context

“…Should we speak of animal "analogies", "fables" or "parables"? The difference is sometimes hard to tell, and it becomes irrelevant when we simply define a parable as a "short stories with allegorical significance" (Vermander 2022a, p. 5, after Meier 2016: even if animal references function as mere simile, they are always anchored into embryonic story-telling: the phoenix teaches its hatchlings to look at the sun without blinking, and it ostracizes the ones who cannot do so; likewise, the elephant teaches its youngsters to dance and purify themselves at each new moon (Falato 2020, p. 296); the nightingale, the deer, the fox and the wolf spare no effort to teach their offspring to respectively sing, run, charm and hunt, each species teaching its youngsters skills that derive from its nature but all sharing the same zeal for education (Falato 2020, pp. 266-67).…”