The article discusses the ‘key text’ by David Flusser, Die rabbinischen Gleichnisse und der Gleichniserzähler Jesus. While the book could have done with a stiff round of editing, it harbours treasures of insight and learning. Flusser’s main partners in discussion are Adolf Jülicher and his interest in fables, and Joachim Jeremias, whose book on Jesus’ […]

The similes and parables in Islamic tradition are strongly influenced by their Christian or Jewish predecessors. The Arabic mathal is related to the Hebrew mashal and both words convey a broad range of meanings, from proverb to simile and parable as such. Still, slavish copying is not in order here. Older studies of the Jewish […]

In her book, Levine undertakes a double task: ‘How do we hear the parables through an imagined set of first-century Jewish ears, and then how do we translate them so that they can be heard still speaking?’ Levine astutely exposes anti-Jewish readings of the parables by Christian authors, but she is not equally critical with […]

This article takes the narrative nature of parables seriously and looks at their role from this perspective. After theorizing the role of stories from a ‘culture and cognition’ perspective, four meshalim from the Tanhuma Midrashim are studied: ‘Grasshoppers in a jar’ (about the Tower of Babel), ‘Abraham’s circumcision’, ‘The baby on the table’ (about the […]

Some scholars have argued that the parables attributed to Jesus in the New Testament featuring women as characters have had a specifically radical and liberating quality for women within early Christianity. The present article challenges a similar appreciation of the texts by comparing them to rabbinic parables which use the same imagery and narrative techniques. […]

This study provides the outline of the Research Project ‘Parables and the Partings of the Ways’, a comparative reading of Rabbinic and synoptic parables (Utrecht and Tilburg Universities, 2014–2019). It delineates the status quaestionis of comparative parable research, focusses on issues of form and rhetoric of parables and argues a multi-faceted methodology to study parables […]

Reflecting on the contributions to this special issue, in this afterword I argue that the current fragmented state of religious studies in the Netherlands may well be taken as a laboratory to develop a study of religion for the future. Religious studies ‘new style’ can break with all sorts of path-dependent constraints, including the religious […]

In her book Material Christianity, published in 1995, the American scholar of religion Colleen McDannell calls attention to the importance of material culture in the everyday religious practice of American Christians in the 19th and 20th century. Her book demonstrates a breakthrough in the study of the history of Christianity: the one-sided emphasis on institutions […]

Looking beyond religious studies, not in a temporal but in a spatial sense, this brief essay identifies openings for multidisciplinary research and reflection in the study of material religion. The discussion focuses on categories, formations, and circulations—the historical contingency of basic categories of religion, the colonial and imperial forces in formations of religion, and the […]

In Germany the distinction between theology and Religionswissenschaft remains firmly in place. This article compares the institutional context of both disciplines. A related development is the recent creation of chairs and programs of Islamic theology. While Christian theology is shielded by constitutional and legal privileges and is far bigger than Religionswissenschaft, the latter has benefited […]