Jesus: the greatest storyteller of all

If He didn't, say a Scripture scholar and a best-selling author, He could never have communicated God's teachings to human beings.

"If He explained things the way His mind worked, they wouldn't have understood," said Rev. Joseph Girzone, a retired priest of the Albany Diocese and author of the best-selling series of books beginning with "Joshua," a story of Jesus in today's world.

As for "those who didn't understand, it was because they chose not to understand," he noted. "Like the Pharisees: They were trained from childhood to recognize the Messiah; but because they were so blinded by hardheartedness, even though Jesus would tell simple stories, they wouldn't get the point. God didn't blind their hearts; they were already blind."

Scripture scholar Rev. Roger Karban, a regular columnist for The Evangelist (see page 20), admires Jesus' storytelling for its subtle means of getting His point across.

"Stories are a very gentle way to convey teachings," he explained. "People remember the story, and the teaching is hidden in that story. A parable is almost like a trap. It snookers somebody into admitting something on one level; then Jesus says, `If you admit it on this level, you have to admit it on this [other] level.'"

Even though the Apostles themselves sometimes had to have Jesus' stories explained to them, Jesus continued to use them because "everyone could understand the stories," said Father Girzone. "They were like diamonds: You could look at them from different angles. His stories were very carefully chosen and carefully told; they were simple but profound."

The author discovered the power of stories himself in writing "Joshua" and its many sequels. "When I first wanted to get the message of Jesus across, I was going to write them in scriptural form," he recalled. "Then I said, `Who's going to read them?'"

He decided to tell stories instead. Today, it's estimated that 30 million Americans have read the priest's novels.

According to Father Karban, there is one problem with the stories Jesus tells in the Gospel: They aren't "in their original settings. The parables were doctored up by the Gospel writers, who were facing new situations that the historical Jesus never faced."

For example, he said, the Gospel writers made the different kinds of seeds in the parable of the sower stand for different kinds of people who had received God's word; but Jesus' original intent in telling the story was simply to show that He wasn't wasting His time teaching.

When modern-day homilists explain the Gospel, he added, they tend to do the same thing. He noted that the characters in the story of the Good Samaritan are often compared to today's heroes and villains, "but that was not the original intention of the parable. A parable had just one point."

Father Girzone's "approach to the Gospel stories is that I accept them as true till someone can categorically prove them as not true. There's no evidence for the Gospel stories except that the persons that wrote the Gospel stories were not trying to write fiction. They saw something and jotted it down. Otherwise, it's not the inspired word of God."

The author believes that some scholars try to further their reputations by coming up with startling theories on the real meaning of Gospel stories, but "by the time you get to the end of it, people are so confused, they don't know what's true and what's not. I don't believe [the stories aren't true] unless they can deny it with evidence. I'm very hard-nosed about this, because I've seen so many kids in high schools and colleges who have lost their faith because teachers have debunked what's in the Gospels, and [the young people] don't know what to believe any more."

There will always be scholars at all points on the spectrum of the literal truth of Gospel stories, Father Karban noted, but we can be sure of several things: for one, that Jesus "hung around with sinners." His doing so was so radical that if it hadn't been true, the biblical authors would not have created the idea, because it caused so many problems.

Of course, Father Karban noted, we also know that Jesus "teaches real truths" and that He used stories "because it gave people something to hang onto. You remember stories. Jesus used parables to pull people up to a different level than they were on."

(Father Girzone's latest book, "Joshua: The Homecoming," in which Joshua deals with the millennium crisis, is due out in October.)

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