The Parable’s Authenticity
The Parable’s Authenticity
As we noted in ch. 13, Jesus’ parables are generally authentic.5 Besides this general consideration, this parable also does not appear to be invented based on the details of Jesus’ execution, since he was not killed in the city and thrown out (Mk 12:8).6
Although understandable in Jerusalem (where Mark has Jesus tell it, perhaps to some who economically identified themselves with the landlords on whose estates tenants worked), this parable offers an accurate depiction of rural life. It makes better sense from a rural teacher like Jesus than from the later Jesus movement, which spread quickly from Jerusalem to other urban centers.
The viticulture is accurate enough, although this accuracy stems from the Isaiah allusions,7 and little of it would require specialist knowledge. The viticultural details fit the rural Mediterranean world: fences (often a wall of loosely-fitted stones) or hedges protected vineyards from animals8 and watchmen could use a tower,9 often “a hut of leaf-covered wood or possibly of stone which served both as a look-out . . . and as a shelter for the vinedressers at harvest time.”10
Tenant farmers worked the land for its owners, often absentee landlords, and paid the landowners as much as half the resulting produce.11 This arrangement was familiar enough that later rabbis also told parables of vineyards tended by tenants;12 they also could tell of an owner uprooting a vineyard that provided no fruit to portray God’s judgment on a people who refused to repent.13
Probably more telling in favor of its authenticity than its accurate Galilean or rural flavor here, many Semitisms appear in the Markan parable.14 It may also adapt some elements of early Palestinian Jewish story lines.15 It does not distinguish the climactic messenger, the “son,” from the earlier messengers as sharply as later Christians would distinguish Jesus from the prophets.16 Given what we know about Jesus, there is no reason that the parable could not stem from him.17