Finding Depth in Jesus’s Farmer Parables

The Bible and Beyond

Jesus was an educator who taught in the Greco-Roman mode the importance of morality, virtue, and goodness. Although his own trade was a carpenter, he used the better-known Greco-Roman farming parables to teach his deeper meaning. Of course, the specifics of Jesus’s education differed, but his common technique made him a recognizable teacher within the context of the educational system of the time. The parables in the Gospels of Mark and Thomas illustrate this point.