Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes– Kenneth E Bailey

I had heard the name of Kenneth E. Bailey for years, but since my areas of research, teaching and writing over the past twenty-five years have focused in the areas of Theology and Church History I had never gotten around to reading any of his many works on biblical era culture and how understanding that culture opens up the scriptures for to us as individualistic, post-Enlightenment westerners. Bailey died a few weeks ago and I read his obituary in Christianity Today. Prominently displayed was Wheaton College’s Gary Burge’s assessment of Bailey’s legacy: he was the “premier cultural interpreter of the life of Jesus.” Bailey lived over half of his life in the Middle East and wrote numerous significant volumes. His great insight came from on the ground contact with those in the culture. For example “he told the parables of Jesus to peasants from Morocco to Pakistan, and their insight helped him (and so us) gain new understanding that would be available no other way.” Unlike our western culture which is constantly changing, the culture of the Arab world has been close to static for many centuries. That allowed Bailey to travel across the centuries and confront a culture that had a world and life- view that was very similar in many ways to that of the first century and before.

I have on two occasions traveled to the Middle East and been fascinated by the culture there so different from our own. This experience prompted me to obtain Bailey’s Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. What I discovered was delight and acute insight. The teaching of and about Jesus related in the gospels while profound is often hard to understand. We read the words and understand what they say but often miss the meaning because we do not understand the context.

When I was in seminary, my preaching professor Haddon Robinson related the difficulty he had in preaching the parables. He related that he would sometimes ponder hours before he “cracked” the meaning of a parable that opened up its significance. That made me wonder how the parables could have been understood by the unschooled peasantry of rural Galilee.

In the late 1980s Robert F. Capon wrote three volumes on the parables of Jesus focusing on the themes of Kingdom, Grace and Judgment. As such his work opened up new levels of understanding that was profound.  But Capon came to the text as a 20^th century westerner. While his analysis of the parables is very good, he does not bring the depth of knowledge and texture of the culture that makes things that we cannot begin to figure out blatantly obvious. This Bailey does as second nature. His life in the Middle East gave him the ability to explain the text to us in details that we would never be able to grasp on our own.

This is a volume worth digesting. It is an eye-opener. For anyone who is preaching or teaching on Jesus, and especially on the Parables it is a must! An extra benefit is that his style of writing already provides much of the content for preaching and teaching these passages,-including rhetorical analysis—the pastor/teacher just needs to make the application to our own situation. This is not to say that this is a book for just pastors and teachers—Bailey’s style is clear straightforward and simple to understand. It is an easy (although profound) read suitable for anyone seeking a greater understanding of the parables and the life of Jesus.