The Master Storyteller

For anyone who tells stories, the example of Jesus in his parables and stories is an artistic treasury. One person who recognized this is William Ellery Leonard, early in the twentieth century. Leonard wrote the following about Jesus as Story-teller:

‘With wonderful economy of effort he sets his characters before us as living men and women. His device is not to describe, but to show them doing or speaking, whether it be the Good Samaritan binding up the wayfarer’s wounds, or the shepherd coming home rejoicing with the lost sheep on his shoulder, or the woman sweeping her house, or the Unjust Steward with his account books, or the rich man begging Father Abraham to send Lazarus to dip a fingertip in water and cool his tongue. With the realistic exactness of one reporting an incident out of his own experience, he mentions now one, now another characteristic detail, such as only a poetic imagination would emphasize. With him it is not simply a grain of mustard seed, but a grain of mustard seed that a man took and cast into his garden, and it grew and became a tree and the birds of the heavens came and lodged in the branches thereof. Even in the brief mention of the woman making bread, he tells us she hid the leaven not simply in the meal, but in three measures of meal—and that makes the difference between a lay-figure and an actual housewife. It is just these apparently trivial touches that betray the born story-teller.

‘ Again, his people are always represented as occupied with something interesting, something in which they are themselves vitally interested—whether it be buying land to make sure of a treasure buried there, or hunting for a lost sheep, or building a house, or guiding the plow….’

Ellery emphasizes the “homeliness that runs through so much of his imagery,” and which would have quick appeal to the common folk who made up his audience:

‘Near to the folk also was his constant use of what our Latin grammar calls “direct discourse”…. He reports the householder, who went out at different hours of the day to hire more laborers into his vineyard, as in actual conversation in the market-place; he does not tell us the Prodigal said he would arise and go to his father, but he lets us overhear the Prodigal’s own spoken resolve.

‘Near to the folk, again, are his repetitions, like those familiar in Homer and in ballad poetry…: “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord” in the parable of the Talents; and “I have sinned against heaven,” etc., of the Prodigal Son; and “I pray thee have me excused,” in the parable of the Invitations: each repeated with the simple directness of an old folk tale.…’

And on the remarkable conciseness in Christ’s stories:

‘The background is but lightly drawn, even in such a vivid scene as the Prodigal feeding the swine; or it is omitted altogether, where, however, the convincing reality of the actors suggests it so truly that we are surprised to find on rereading that our imaginations have supplied so much. Here again is seen the magic of the artist: it is not what his imagination does for us, so much as what it is able to make our imaginations do for ourselves.…

‘Hence the wearisome inanity of most efforts to fill in the parables by paraphrase.…

‘Moreover, his characters are [mostly] unnamed.… And in this way his stories, with all their simple realism, acquire something of that remoteness and mystery characteristic of fairy tales, which usually tell of what happened somewhere, once upon a time, to some certain prince or maiden or forest child whose names we shall never know.…

‘And Jesus, leaving the moral to take hold as it might, was loath to tag his parables with elucidations. He had too much literary taste: as artist he loved the eloquence of suppression, silence, stopping short. He had too much cleverness: he knew human nature too well; he knew the greater force of a point when the listener can catch it for himself.…’

And finally, on his heart appeal:

‘The character of his materials—the personages and incidents—and his manner of arranging and setting them forth offer beautiful evidence of Jesus’ power to play upon the human heart. So many-sided and elusive is his personality.… Indeed, Jesus’ power over the human heart is perhaps his power above all other powers as poet.…

‘But these stories exist not for themselves alone; like all great art, they have a meaning beyond themselves. Each exists for an idea.… They are a part of the glowing concreteness of a poet’s thinking.…

‘It seems indubitable that no other body of poetry so slight in quantity ever contained teachings of equal loftiness and equal scope.’

— from the 1909 work The Poet of Galilee by William Ellery Leonard, as reprinted in The Story of Jesus in the World’s Literature, edited by Edward Wagenknecht (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), pp. 218-221.