First published in German as Die rabbinschen Gleichnisse und der Gleichniserzähler Jesus in 1981—and now translated into English for the first time— The Rabbinic Parables and Jesus the Parable Teller is a seminal work by Professor David Flusser and remains an important and unparalleled contribution on Jesus as a storyteller in the Jewish rabbinic tradition.
Using a literary approach to study extant rabbinic parables, he argues that Jesus’ parables belong to a genre that exists only in rabbinic literature and the New Testament. In order to analyze the theology behind Jesus’ parables, we need to understand them as a first-century literary art form.