the role of the lukan parables in terms of the purpose of luke's gospel

message for the living. 8
On the one hand, there were also attempts to find biblical antecedents for our parable.
Cave suggests Gen 15 as a relevant background to Luke’s story. For him, just as Eliezer of
Damascus is a gentile, so in Luke’s story Lazarus represents gentiles, whereas the rich man is
Abraham’s child, that is, a Jew. Along this line, Luke’s story conveys the instruction that if
Abraham’s child, viz, a Jew persists in their unrepentant state, there will be severe judgment
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on Israel. On the other hand, R. Dunkerley and Donald J. Bretherton claim that the parable
is based on the story of the raising of Lazarus in John 11, and that that historicizes the parable
on the grounds that both contain the same name, i.e., Lazarus and resurrection. 10 However,
the relevancy to the name between Eliezer and Lazarus is not clear. In addition, the name
Lazarus at that time was not a particularly rare one, but was rather common. 11
There are several arguments concerning the unity of the parable: In the first place, R.
12
Bultmann claims that the two parts (vv. 19-26 and vv. 27-31) in the parable are inconsistent
with each other in that the parable has two separate points, viewing the whole story as a
8. Outi Lehtipuu, The Afterlife Imagery in Luke’s Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, 38.
9. Cave, “Lazarus and the Lukan Deuteronomy,” 323-25. Cf. V. Tanghe, “Abraham, son fils et son envoyé (Luc
16:19-31),” RB 91 (1984), 557-77. On the other hand, M.D. Goulder, argues that the parable is based on Isaiah
61 with the restoration of Israel that has already appeared in Jesus’ inaugural sermon (4:18-21), and the reversal
in the Beatitudes and Woes (6:21-26). According to his argument, Luke, in the parable, combines the prophetic
reversal in Isaiah 61 with the alms-Mammon context in Matthew 6 and the fire-torment context in Matthew 18,
on the basis of the hypothesis that Luke used Matthew. It is very questionable, however, as to whether Isaiah
61:1-7 has a reversal comparable to the parable, apart from Goulder’s theory regarding Luke’s strategy in using
Matthew. Goulder, Luke: A New Paradigm, 634-37.
10. R. Dunkerley, “Lazarus,” NTS 5 (1959), 321-27; Donald J. Bretherton, “Lazarus of Bethany: Resurrection or
Resuscitations?” ExpTim 104 (1993), 169-73. Cf. Keith Pearce, “The Lucan Origins of the Raising of Lazarus,”
ExpTim 96 (1985), 359-61.
11. Marshall, Luke, 629; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus 2: Mentor, Message,
and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 822-31; Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 206, n.95; Snodgrass,
Stories with Intent, 427; Lehtipuu, The Afterlife Imagery in Luke’s Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, 30. In the
same vein, Derrett suggests that the parable has affinities with the midrashic tales that Eliezer lived on this earth
in disguise reports back to Abraham on how his children observed the Torah, especially concerning the
treatment of the poor and on hospitality to strangers. Derrett, “Dives and Lazarus and the Preceding Saying,” in
Law in the New Testament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970), 78-99.
12. Even though Jülicher contends that the original story ends at v. 25 and v. 26 functions as an editorial bridge
connecting the two sections, many scholars regard v. 26 as a part of the original story. Jülicher, Gleichnisreden,
634; Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, 1126-27; C.F. Evans, Saint Luke, 614-15; Crossan, In Parables,
65-66; Scott, Hear Then the Parable, 146; Hultgren, Parables, 112. Donahue, in contrast, divides the parable
into three parts, not two: vv. 19-21, vv. 22-26 and vv. 27-31,’ whereas recent literary analyses, in quite a
different view, divide the parable into three parts in preserving the unity of the dialogue: vv. 19-21, vv. 24-31
and vv. 24-31. See Donahue, The Gospel in Parable, 170; Walter Vogels, “Having or Longing: A Semiotic
Analysis of Luke 16:19-31,” ÉgIThéol 20 (1989), 27-46, 29.
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