Parables for Our Time: Rereading New Testament Scholarship After the Holocaust‪.‬

Parables for Our Time: Rereading New Testament Scholarship after the Holocaust, by Tania Oldenhage. American Academy of Religion; Cultural Criticism Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 189. $42.00. This book, the revision of a Ph.D. dissertation submitted to Temple University, is the result of interdisciplinary work bringing together Holocaust research and NT scholarship. Oldenhage examines central studies of NT parables research (in particular Joachim Jeremias, Die Gleichnisse Jesu [Zwingli, 1947; Eng. trans. The Parables of Jesus (2d ed.; Prentice Hall)]; John D. Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges [Harper & Row, 1976]; and Paul Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics," Semeia 4 [1975]: 29-145) in light of the questions raised by Holocaust scholarship and research. She presents a historical contextualization of NT study. At the time of their publication it was not customary in biblical scholarship to reflect on one's own historical context. Oldenhage mainly examines explicit or implicit comments on the Holocaust found in those works. She coordinates them with the public perception of the Holocaust in the United States or Germany, using the language of scholarship as well as an autobiographical approach. "It became helpful for me to build a strong 'I' in my text, an 'I' that is positioned in relation to both to the events of the Holocaust and the hermeneutics of parables, an 'I' that picks up, responds to, and intersects with these allusions and echoes" (p. 9). These autobiographical reflections have two important consequences: not only does the book become very readable, but it is also in solidarity with the authors it criticizes. For example, Oldenhage reports on her reading in 1994 of Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor(trans. R. Czerny; University of Toronto Press, 1978). She wanted to use a poem in order to apply her reading of Ricoeur to a concrete piece of poetry. She recalled a poem that Wolfgang Harnisch had cited in his book on the parables, "made a copy and taped it on [her] desk." It was a poem by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (from Ein Wort weiter [Claassen, 1965]), written in the 1960s, "about the forgotten and returning memory of Auschwitz: On Sundays / The forgotten comes / On crowsfeet with spurs / They carve in the parquet for me / A pattern, thus / It is cut out for us / The nettle-cloth/ When the rose-colored/ Wallpaper opens/ And expels the drawer full / Of emaciated Jewish heads ... " (pp. 13ff). She used the poem in order to practice the theory of metaphor formally but without reflecting on the content of this poem. Later she studied the book by Harnisch (Die Gleichniserzahlungen Jesu: Eine hermeneutische Einfuhrung [Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985]), asking how he had used Kaschnitz's poem. He too drew on it to elucidate formal principles. "What enraged me about 'the older generation'--that is, Harnisch--were not the committed acts of genocide [Harnisch belongs to the second generation] but a neglected act of remembrance or acknowledgment" (p. 27). Then she remembered her own use of that poem. "I was ashamed of what I had done with Kaschnitz' s piece. My question was not only 'How could he?' but also 'How could I have done the same'?" (p. 28).