Why Jesus Spoke in Metaphors? Matthew, Mission, and Meaning | Robert Lane

In this episode of Exploring the Language of Scripture, Daniel Mikkelsen is joined by Robert Lane—a missionary, linguist, and PhD candidate in New Testament at the University of Edinburgh—for a deep dive into why Jesus spoke in metaphors and how understanding them helps us read Matthew’s Gospel more faithfully.

Drawing on years of cross-cultural mission work and a research focus on metaphor in the Gospel of Matthew, Robert shares how metaphors do far more than illustrate—they shape meaning, reveal divine truth, and bridge cultural and experiential gaps. Together, they explore well-known passages like “I will make you fishers of men,” the kingdom parables, and the phrase “bread of life,” unpacking how these metaphors work and how they often get lost or misread in translation.

Whether you’re passionate about biblical interpretation, engaged in cross-cultural ministry, or simply want to understand the Gospels more deeply, this conversation will equip you to grasp the power of metaphor in Scripture—and see the teaching of Jesus with fresh clarity.

📢 Don’t Miss the Next Episode:
In our next conversation, Daniel sits down with Diego Dy Carlos to explore how Paul speaks of peace-making through blood in Colossians—and what this means for reconciliation in both theology and practice.

🎯 Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
01:41 – Meet Today's Guest – Robert Lane
03:41 – From Missionary to Scholar: Robert’s Path into Biblical Languages
15:24 – How Life Experience Shapes Our Reading of Scripture
18:22 – When Culture Skews Interpretation: The Need for Contextual Reading
22:21 – “Fishers of Men”: What Does It Mean?
28:17 – Why Matthew? A Rich Tapestry of Hebrew Metaphor in Greek
37:47 – What Exactly Is a Metaphor? And How Is It Different from a Parable?
42:18 – Do Metaphors Actually Help Us Understand the Bible Better?
47:53 – Translating Metaphors Across Cultures: Bread, Pigs, and Pickled Herring
50:46 – Why Jesus Describes the Kingdom of God in Metaphors
52:57 – Reading the Greek Text: What We Gain—and What We Risk Missing in English
56:27 – The Importance of Original Language in Interpretation
01:01:38 – When a Familiar Metaphor Gains New Clarity

🎵 Music Credits:
Music from #Uppbeat
🔗 https://uppbeat.io/t/all-good-folks/aspire

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Podcast Keywords:
biblical languages, New Testament, Old Testament, Christ, bible study,  Relationship with God, learn biblical languages, Biblical Theology, Christianity, Covenants, New covenant, old covenant, language acquisition, Biblical Greek, Biblical Hebrew.

Transcript

0:00

We can get it right or we can get it wrong just based off of how we are interpreting this one metaphor. I will make you fishers of men. What does that mean? The Greek context is very clear, but if we impose kind of, you know, a modern context, then you will get an exact opposite interpretation. When Jesus is attempting to describe the kingdom of God, he is aware that The experience that is available to the people there does not equip them to understand the fullness of the Kingdom of God. So that's why he starts saying Jesus is very concerned that that concept is understood well. We're not going to go and tell everybody that I'm the Messiah because we don't have the right definitions yet. I will make you fishers of men. There's no additional narrative to that. There are men, they are fishing, there are nets, they're by a sea. And so Jesus speaks a metaphor and it goes directly into the local context. But a parable doesn't do that. A parable always has. Welcome back to another episode of Exploring a Language of Scripture, brought to you by NT Greek Tutoring, the place for personalized Greek learning in your spare time. My name is Daniel Mikkelsen. the host. If you don't know who I am, then I am the founder of NT Greek Tutoring and I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh in New Testament and Christian origins. And this podcast exists to make gems from biblical studies accessible to everyday Christians and show them how the biblical languages opens up Scripture. And we do that in order to hope to increase your love for God and His Word and for His mission. So, and today I am delighted to be joined by Robert Lane, who is a fellow PhD candidate in New Testament and Christian origins here at the University of Edinburgh. We're not quite in the university, we're in my office. But yeah, and Robert is working on metaphors, or the use of metaphors in the Gospel of Matthew, which we will be... be discussing a little bit more later on in this podcast. I'm quite excited about that because I don't actually know quite a lot about metaphors, but if you want to know how that can help us increase our knowledge of the Bible and understanding of the Bible, then stick around for that. And Robert would also share an application in the end. but before Robert did his studies, doctoral studies, did a BAS in linguistics. and Christian ministry from Dallas Baptist Seminary. he also... University. Sorry, yeah. That's also in my notes. I can't talk. Anyways, and then you did... Of course, that's a very important distinction, of course. But also did an MSc in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. you also have an MA in Intercultural Studies from Southeastern Theological Seminary. Yes. Yeah, so that was the seminary. And Robert also been a missionary in Chad, Uganda and South Sudan. where he has been teaching people how to learn other languages and training people for ministry work in their countries and countries abroad in different language areas. And before he came to Edinburgh, Robert also was a missionary in residence at Union University of where he amongst other things have been teaching New Testament and missions. And it's a privilege to have you on and getting to know you while we've been studying together here at the University of Edinburgh. And it's great honour to have you on the podcast today. Wonderful. Anything else you want to add before we jump into some questions? Now let's do it. Let's get into it. good. So how did you get into studying the biblical languages? So it was kind of a roundabout way and I'm certainly a late comer to studying the biblical languages. So I guess the first time I went overseas to do Christian work was to Peru and I left with a group called the International Mission Board and that was who I've served with for about 13 years in total. But ended up working in Peru. with a very remote tribe, and so we were there working in a language called Yaminawa. And so we spent a period of time learning that language, and we were able to do a little bit of translation work, and then we were relying on a very large translation project that actually SIL had done. So they did the Old Testament Bible story translations in this local language. And then for me and my partner who was from Colombia, Efrain, they gave those translations to us and then we flew in a small bush plane. We would spend months in the jungle, in those villages, and we were teaching and encouraging others to teach these Bible stories in their local language. we just began to notice some very interesting things, especially even at the time, I didn't realize it, but this is how I began to think about metaphor on how the metaphors would be changed in translation or be adjusted to fit context. I remember we were teaching the story of the wise man who built his house upon the rock. And I remember going through that and it said that this was the wise man who set his post in the Oshishada. And I'm reading this and I go back through this Oshishada and I knew that Oshishada did not mean the rock and it means the red earth. And so just remember I went to one of the men in the village and I'm discussing this with him saying, you know, this is a significant change and what's happening and he said well, nobody's going to build their house on a rock because if you build your house on a rock, there's nowhere for the post of your home to anchor into. They said, but if you build it in the Oshishada or the red earth, that's clay. And you could dig holes in the clay and your house would be very firm from wind or floods or rains or anything That's the best place to build your home And I remember that just stuck in my mind on county appropriateness of that type of translation What process would you go into it? How do you shift the biblical context to the local context and? my goodness and Daniel that was 2006 2007 and it really began just kind of this process of working from one language to another and encountering these very same things, these interesting adjustments to metaphor in translations. And then by the time we got to Africa, my wife and I, we started out in Uganda with no kids. And then we ended up almost 10 years later in Chad with two little boys. And we just saw so much during that time. And I felt like that I grew personally. I began to understand these, maternal metaphors, metaphors regarding fatherhood or family. I began to understand them in ways that I hadn't before. I began to relate more towards the biblical context than I'd ever had. scripture began to change for me. Some of those metaphors unfolded in a way in which I understand them more clearly, just based on my own personal experience. And I thought, wow, maybe there's a lot more to this. And then finally we ended up in Chad. Whereas before we were normally using, relying heavily on English Bibles and then teaching in local languages. In Chad, SIL again, had recently completed a translation of the whole Bible in Chadian Arabic. So it was the local Arabic, and so we were doing all of our Bible teaching was coming out of the Arabic Bible. And what we found was that as we were teaching, you know me and the other teachers in the group, we found that as we're doing these exegetical type Bible studies that some of the men who had backgrounds that in many ways based off of their nomadic culture, family structures, even kind of cultural orientations that as Arabic speakers, as Arabs, or even as nomads, that they were closer to the biblical context than anything that I had in my experience. And so found that their kind of life world gave them access to biblical truth, even though they may have been very young in their faith, they had insight. into biblical truth that was amazing to me. As somebody who had really studied in some areas they had a deeper understanding. And so I wanted to know more about that process and how we could essentially understand God's Word better through these little thing called metaphors. And then, when did you get into the biblical languages in this? Exactly. Yeah, that's the question. So it had always been in the back of my mind to jump into doing biblical languages, but honestly, I was so caught up in a lot of the other language work that I was doing that I had never really been able to give myself much time to do that. But I read an interview about a mountaineer. So this is this mountain climb. And he had this unique distinction of having climbed the seven summits. So these are the highest peaks on each continent and and he had done them in a unique way. He was the only person to had climbed the seven summits without ascending ropes. So he used safety ropes, but he would essentially free climb each of these seven summits and at the time he was the only man who had who had done that. So the interviewer had asked him, why is it when so many people have climbed these summits, why did you want to be the person to climb them without ascending ropes? And his response, you could tell that he was confused. He said to the interviewer, he said, no. He said, you just said that there many people who have climbed these summits. He said, there are not. He said, I'm the only person who's ever climbed these summits. He said, all the others climbed their ropes. And I never will forget that. I read that interview 20 years ago and I realized that what... When you come to the scriptures by way of translations, you're climbing the ropes that other people have laid down and praise God that those ropes are there. They are very useful. They make the mountains accessible, but we have to have people. have got to be men and women in the church who have the ability to check, to adjust the ropes, to set new anchors, to check to make sure that that whole structure of ropes that are being climbed that they are right and And that always stuck in my mind that I wanted to be a person who could lay my hands into the biblical text and to be able to read them in a way that brought me into community with these first century writers and the early church. And so that really kind of stuck in my mind. And then when I had the opportunity to teach at Union University, I was there with really great group of professors and there was one professor in particular named Professor Mark Dubas. He's done a lot of work in the Greek language. He was very encouraging to me and helped me get set up. He encouraged me with a thing called Bible Mesh Biblical Software and I just started out into that and then it just grew there. I began to do more formal classes in Greek and then even taking classes here at the University of Edinburgh. which really focused on kind of ancient texts and translations, translation history. So all that really kind of unfolded. I did not kind of set off on this PhD journey to be a biblical scholar, but it seemed to be unavoidable at some point. and this is the reason why. The longer you study the Bible, the more difficult it is to not... dedicate yourself to the original languages. And at some point it becomes very difficult to study the Bible at a deep level without having the biblical languages or at least having access to the biblical languages in some way. So I felt like that I was kind of willingly brought in to the really kind of dedicated study of Greek, in particular right now, but Hebrew as well, but focusing on Greek right now for the very reason that we need to be able to take this, these narratives, these stories and these specific teachings and then to find out how can those be recontextualized in into other languages and other cultures. And as we write, it's recontextualized into other time periods. And I mean, I probably should have mentioned as soon as we get done with the PhD here, we will go back with the International Mission Board to work at a place called Uganda Baptist Seminary. And there we will be teaching and helping to train local missionaries and pastors and Christian leaders that are from about nine or 10 different countries and autonomous regions throughout central and Eastern Africa. That's my goal, to be able to take what we were doing in Chad with Arabic and trying to... give unique insight and understand the unique insight that is kind of contained in these local churches and then to be able to use that to encourage the church at large. We're trying to do that at just at a larger level. So when we are teaching somebody in their background, okay, the language that they are thinking in, that that could be Dinka, Kikuyu, Luo, in trying to take out that big middle step of kind of this the dominant English translation. If we can take that out and we can move from the original languages into Kikuyu or Dinka or Nuweir, then we will have a far more accurate picture and understanding of how God desires for these particular languages and cultures to contextualize the Christian message itself. Yeah, so they're not any middle man. It's about that they also get the access that we have from English. The people that when we learn Greek and then we can compare the Greek with the English translation that we use in our churches and we can help people say, this has this nuance or... this translation, I don't understand quite why they got there or things like that. Will you be able to do the same thing within these local languages? Yeah. that's in many ways, you already said like how that's in a sense, it's the goal of like how you see that these biblical languages is opening up scripture, but I still want to like, so how do you see or how have you experienced that the biblical language has opened up scripture for you? yeah. Okay, so when I sit down and I take my English translation, it's important to know that every word, right, all of the nouns and all the verbs that I'm reading in my English translation are really defined by my own experience. words like forgiveness, words like servant, words like family, illustrations involving weddings, things like that. They, by default, my defining of those terms is directly related to my own experience with that. And it really ends up being, I have to be very careful because when I'm reading about Jesus at a wedding, it's very difficult when I'm reading the English translation to not put Jesus into when I'm trying to make sense of this or when I'm imagining this in my mind, this story, this narrative, the scenes that kind of are called up, it's Jesus. And in many ways, the wedding resembles more the weddings that I've attended in my own kind of past patterns, the emphases that would be placed on kind of that event. And it would be the same for not just for weddings, but for other types of events that you may find within the New Testament, specifically in the book of Matthew. But when you come to it in the Greek text, I think that we're not so naive. And it protects us from an over-contextualization of the biblical text into kind of a modern-day setting. So if you just take, you know, you know, a Greek word like δοῦλος (doulos) that would be translated as servant. Well, if, know, when I hear the word servant, right, I the images that are called to my mind probably are more like kind of Downton Abbey or things that I've seen, you know, in kind of British high drama, more so than kind of first century servitude and the ways in which that would be defined. So when you are Working through the Greek text, I think that it protects us from... an unbiblical from imposing an unbiblical world upon the biblical text. And it helps us to be able to say, okay, we need to be careful because we don't necessarily know what this word means or this word means or this word means. It may take us a little bit of work to be able to do the research or the comparative studies to be able to say, okay, in this text, what is this relationship between a father and son or a servant and master or an employee and an employer? you know, what are these relationships and how did they work? Not today and not necessarily in my own life, but how did they work at that time in which this, you know, metaphor or narrative is being communicated in the original audience? How would they have received that? And I really have to push myself in that direction and protect myself from a misreading of scripture that could lead at times in a possibly harmful interpretation or something that's just totally inaccurate. Yeah, that's helpful. And yes, my experience as well is to like read things, then you get to think about it more. It's like I think a lot of people who have been on the podcast would say that it slows me down so that I can, I think more carefully about the text. But there is also this like cultural dimension to it. It's not just about reading it slower. It's also about, maybe I didn't understand the cultural concept as well. For example, I'll give an example from this actually because I think that when in the biblical text we have to be often the words when they're going to meals it talks about reclining. But most English-speaking people, Danish-speaking people, people who are not emerged into a first century Middle Eastern culture, they skip over like reclining. as if they are sitting with a table as we are used to. Like when we go to a dinner table, we usually sit on chairs that are like this. We're sitting here, maybe this is an armchair, so it's not quite a little bit higher. So that's we think. And we very easily skip over that when we read, like, for example, the Last Supper or Jesus' Last Meal, or however you want to, like... want frame it, but the Passover meal that he has with his disciples there, that we don't really get that when it talks about the disciple at his breast, it's because they're lying down and he's lying next to them. He's the one that lies in front of Jesus. Right. And we don't get that because we just think that people sit at chairs. It's interesting. So when we would be doing these types of things with Arabic speakers They did not have that cultural handicap because every time that they sat down to eat a meal they were reclining You know, we lived in Chad for a few years and Never did we have a meal with Arabic speakers that was not on a mat in which we were reclining and it's just a far more intimate setting. It's a far more vulnerable setting. And so, yeah, I think that that's a very good example of, when we come to it as Westerners, we come to it with a certain maybe naivety. But then you have this other culture, this Arabic speaking culture. When Arabic speakers come to that, because of the way that their language is kind of formed based off of their cultural context, they do not have that, you know, how would you put it? They don't have that... that gap in a cultural understanding of the context. Yeah, exactly. And I actually feel like when I read the Greek text first time, was like, they're lying down. And this was explained to me. And that's what the Greek does to you is that it makes you think one more time about what you're reading. It's not just slowing you down so that you read more carefully, but it also makes you slow down. And so you see those differences. It's like, oh, this is not the way that I was thinking about it. Right. Yeah, the image that I had in my head may not be accurate. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. And the Greek text forces that. It's true. I find that really helpful. Thank you for pointing that out. Do you have any specific examples where you have experienced God's Word opening up for you? Yes, so I remember I had a really, really dear friend of mine, um, was a pastor at a church and I remember he came to me Sorry to interrupt the episode, but if you're enjoying the content, please consider subscribing and leaving a like. It really helps the algorithm and helps the podcast grow. Thank you for your support and now back to the episode. Do you have any specific examples where you have experienced God's Word opening up for you? Yes, so I remember I had a really, really dear friend of mine, was a pastor at a church and I remember he came to me and obviously this was a bit of a disagreement, but it was really kind of the first time that I, I want to say, put this, that I saw kind of a misreading of scripture based off of a personal context. What I mean, so he comes to me and he says, you know Robert, he said I've been doing some reading and Jesus tells us to be fishers of men. And I said yeah, he said so the way I see it, when you go fishing, you bait the hook with something that the fish really like. That way the fish come to you. I thought about that. I said to him, I said, So, but you know they're talking about fishing with nets, right? And so, but just think about the consequence of that. When you see the word fishing, right? And so my friends from North Carolina, you anybody who's, you know, who grew up inland, right? So there's some exceptions for, you know, some people who may. But most people who go fishing where I'm from, they fish with hooks, right? and you bait the hook and that is an attractional model of fishing, right? So we're trying to attract them to our hook so we can get them. But think about the difference of fishing with a net and what that is. When you're fishing with a net, you have to be able to know where the fish are going to be anyhow in their normal stream of life. Where the fish going to be just as they're going about their own day. And then you have to put the net on top of that. You have to go to where the fish are going to be. You have to put the net on top of that. But just think about when you use your personal context to interpret that biblical text. In that example, my friend got an attractional model of evangelism. He says, if we're going to be fishers of men, we need to attract people to us. Whereas, Reading the verse within context is a missional model of evangelism. Jesus is saying we need to go to where the fish are. So it is an entirely opposite interpretation whether you think that he's talking about fishing with a hook or fishing with a net so we can get it right or we can get it wrong just based off of how we are interpreting this one metaphor. I will make you fishers of men. So if we're going to be fishers of men, What does that mean? Do we need to stand on the bank and have things that are shiny and attractive? Or do we need to go into the deep waters and to be there where the fish are going to be anyhow? Yeah, and then go to the places where people are. Yeah, to go where they are. Yeah, do we go to them? that's probably the clearest example that I've had recently where I saw kind of the Greek context is very clear. But if we read that and then we impose kind of a modern context or a personal context on that, then you will get an exact opposite interpretation. Yeah, because Jesus is not saying that you should tell people what they really like. Would you actually go to tell people, you go to where they are and you say, this is better news than what you're doing now. This is not what you should, the way you're living now, you should live with Christ. You should not live for yourself or whatever you might worship at that time. So you need to, to, to... go away from that and come to Christ. And that's very different. I think in the Danish context you also have people fishing with hooks, but that's usually domestic. That's what you do at home. You might go fly fishing or you might go fishing by yourself and your friends. But if you are doing commercial fishing, then you use nets. Unless you are going for... for cod or something like that. That might work with lines as well. But if you want to fish with nets, at least that's what traditionally was done. at least you need to move the metaphor to the right place. Yeah, yeah. Right, and that's a very good example because the context may still, in your example with your language, the context may still exist in a similar richness to what was understood by the original audience. But you may need to be able to say, when Jesus is talking about this, notice the nets in the story. Notice how we would fish with nets within kind of our own local context and be able to push the context of the metaphor towards something that would be current and understandable and would be similar to the biblical context. And then the metaphor begins to make sense. Yeah, and that actually is a good segue into the topic. So you're studying metaphor in relation to biblical studies and this is actually a dual question. it's why have you been doing studying metaphors in relation to biblical studies and why Matthew and not another NT book? Yeah, I think Matthew has special significance for the first century church. think that in many ways it is a founding document and it has a very, very rich Hebrew context. And so the ideas and it even more so than the other gospels. I think that Matthew, particularly the figurative language in Matthew, is richly steeped within the Old Testament traditions. It flows right along ah in kind of the same trajectories of that. But something interesting happens, right? It's in Greek and not in Hebrew. And so you have these Old Testament concepts, right? You have these Hebrew concepts of of Messiah, of the Kingdom of God, and the people of God. You have all these and it flows, right? It's flowing along kind of, you know, largely in Hebrew within Matthew's world, and then it flows right into Greek. Now, I think that what we're picking up on here, the reason why Matthew is so rich in metaphor, and of course, Okay, the whole Bible is rich in metaphor. And I don't think that Matthew is unique in that at all. But I think that when you see these biblical truths, this continuation of Old Testament history, right? When it comes right into the age in which it is communicated and understood. The medium of that is Greek. Now, I think that Matthew often, often, that he bumps up against the conceptual limits of the Greek language. And when he bumps up against the conceptual limits of the Greek language, then Matthew is using and selecting metaphor. For instance, John the Baptist. It is amazing to read about John the Baptist because he is soaked in metaphor. People talk about John the Baptist in metaphor. John the Baptist talks in metaphor. And so it is our recourse as humans, when we get to a point in which some, we know that somebody will not understand something, then what do we do? We resort to figurative language. So for instance, you know, I've never been to your, to your country. I've never visited your home. So what is a meal? just what would be like a meal or a type of food? that you know well, that you know, you would be able to anticipate that me, somebody who's spent time in Africa, lived in Scotland, and who is from Tennessee, I would not know this. So give me the name of what would that meal or dish be? you May not, I've run across it, but we, so it's, at Easter we would. You do that, my dad actually does this year round. He eats that every day. So he has, he has pickled herring. Okay, okay, pickled, I have never had pickled hearing. How do you call it in your language? marinerede sild So I've never had that, I don't know what it is. So if you said to me, Robert, I want you to come to my flat and we are going to eat pickled herring. Now, the way that I load those words with meaning, herring, pickled, eat, I do not have the ability to conceptually understand what you're saying, right? I will most... likely misinterpret your words. So what do you do? You would say, you would anticipate what I would already have experience with. You would piece out the concepts and you would say, and I would say, well, what is pickled herring? And then your response in English would be, it is like this. is like, this, it is like this. It's not like this, but it's a little bit like this. So you would parse out the flavor, the texture, the temperature, the amount, you would piece all of that out. And then you would give me some type of metaphorical language, right? We like to be able to say it is like this or it is like this, it is like this. What you are doing in that instance of pickled herring, You are giving me a composite meaning of this dish, right? And in doing that, in taking the key concepts that I would need to grasp to perceive pickle herring, you are parsing that out and you are giving me individual metaphors and you would say, well, it has the texture like this fish and it kind of has the flavor of, have you ever had? it would have the flavor like this and it's normally served like this and then you would give me an initial state meaning so I would then have a composite meaning of what you know quite well and in doing that it allows me to perceive something that previously was imperceivable to me. Now why is that special? Well, the way in which words Normally accumulate meaning is direct is through direct experience. Hmm So the two things that you can do to help me to understand what pickled herring is is you can give me pickled herring and If I eat pickled herring, then I will have a good definition of what pickled herring is right? So it is experience Right that is beyond language. So when we talk about the world around us those words are normally, they're normally packed with meaning based off of personal experience. Except in this amazing and fantastic case of metaphor. Metaphor is the ability to learn, the ability to experience without direct experience. It is the ability to take composite meanings and to be able to not only understand, but then to be able to perceive the world without direct experience. And I think that it is very unique linguistically. think it's very unique across the board, but I think it's fascinating when you see the biblical writers doing this because... what are they? I mean, Matthew has such a challenge to take all of this transcendentness, all of these things that he would have learned from His experience with Jesus, his direct experience with relating to Jesus, what he has been exposed to beyond language, right? When Jesus calls out his disciples, he does not say, come and listen to me. He says, come and follow me. So a relationship with Christ is directly experiential. And then how do you put that into a book? How do you put that into a gospel? Well, it will rely largely on figurative language. So if we can understand the power that metaphor has and how it's deployed in the book of Matthew and in the Gospels and in the Scriptures, then when that process is understood, then our lives will be changed and we will be able to use that same approach to be able to parse out concepts. that may not necessarily already be within a given culture of Kikuyu, Dinka, Arabic or Luo. And then as Bible teachers, then we will be able to help people to understand the Bible more. And in that process, we may find that the Dinka, the Kikuyu and the Luo, that they have insight that our culture as Westerners, does not give us access to. So they may understand the biblical metaphors far better than us. They may understand concepts reclining at table or especially a pastoralist concepts. Nomadic groups understand the story of the one lost sheep far better than I will. So then they have the ability to teach the church at large these maybe deeper insights. that are still available within these at times very small societies are still available because the context is still preserved as shepherding peoples. it's a bit of a process and it's still multifaceted. My project, my PhD project is just on... the use of metaphor, but my eventual goal is to be able to use that in a specifically missional context. Yeah, so that's helpful. And you also explained what a metaphor is. It's a way of describing something that you do in picture language. What is the difference between imagery and metaphor? is that just two ways of saying the same thing? So all metaphor is imagery, but not all imagery is metaphor. So metaphor, I am limiting it to language, but you can have imaging language that can be done through music, the visual arts, the performing arts. So that can be imaged through a painting or a performance. indeed, that can be metaphorical in the broadest sense of the word. In limiting myself to the metaphors in Matthew, I'm talking about the Greek text and how that comes down to us. Yeah, that was helpful, the distinction between the two. So, my next question is then what is the difference between a metaphor and a parable? Because there's quite a lot of parables in all the Gospels, but maybe actually particularly in Matthew. Yes. yeah. Okay, I think this is a good question. The way that this has been answered before is that parables are clusters of metaphors. And I do think that metaphors form kind of the base material of every parable. Parables indeed are metaphorical, but the way that I define a parable as different from... metaphor strictly speaking is that a parable requires an additional narrative in the text and so Like the parable of the Good Samaritan, it is a cluster of metaphors, but it requires another story That is kind of rest on top of that that history you have the historical narrative and then just Jesus gives a fictional narrative And within that fictional narrative, there are metaphorical components to that. But when you look at, for instance, when Jesus says, I will make you fishers of men, there's no additional narrative to that. There are men, they are fishing, there are nets, they're by a sea. And so Jesus speaks a metaphor and it goes directly into the local context. And as it would be, as it would be under, under, understood there. So. But a parable doesn't do that. A parable always has... a second level narrative, right? And it normally is going to give a simple plot and characters. They're going to be kind of part of that as well. So the difference is to say that a metaphor can be something conceptually meaningful in a very small like, for example, if I was to describe you what rye bread was, is a Danish particularity, now we're talking about food before. Sure, yeah. You need to have rye bread in order to eat pickle herring. Okay, okay. that is a... And rye bread, so if I say rye bread is like, is bread, but it's much darker. And it's usually, it can be, if it's made well, it would be soft, but it's not soft in the same way as like the bread that we usually eat here, but it's quite more dense. And there's lots of seeds in it. So that's me describing using. You know what Seed says, you know all these things. So that's metaphorical language. Whereas a parable is that I will tell you a story. Once upon a time there was this guy and he did this and I will use this story to make a point. So that's the difference. That's the difference. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, yeah, there's an additional story component to the historical narrative in that. And so the way that I'm delineating that for my project is that I use the term aphoristic metaphors. So metaphors are aphorisms and They do not introduce an additional narrative, which the parables always do. They always introduce a new setting, a new characters, and a simple plot. Okay, sure. So what does aphoristic mean? a simple statement. Yeah, so you already mentioned like, I will make you fish as a man. That's a simple statement. That is not deriving from a story with a specific point or with several specific points based on the cultural context. That leads to the question, so like how does a metaphor helps us understand the text better? Right. Or we can also say this a different way. Or do metaphors help us understand the text better than we do if we just read the text in context? So the second one is a little bit more loaded. Alright, well let's start with the second one and then we'll go back to the first one. So let's read the second one again. So do a metaphor helps us understand the text better than if we were just reading it in context. so I guess what you're saying is, is the metaphor more useful than a paraphrase of the metaphor that would not be figurative? Yeah, well, just if I was reading through the Gospel, just be very careful in reading the texts in its context. Do I need to describe that I am reading a metaphor or can I just understand the text based off like just reading it closely? Right. I think... that that's a very good question. And there has been some division on that in metaphorical studies where some philosophers of language see metaphor as adding no unique aspect to the understanding of a text. And that is a rather prevalent school of thought. And then there's an opposing view that says metaphor is doing something radically different. And so in my thesis is that metaphor is always doing something different. more or less radical. think that metaphors can be poetic. think that they can, you know, add kind of emotive energy into a text. think that metaphors can be descriptive. They are just very efficient. And I think that if a metaphor is poetic, if it is descriptive, if it just saves words on a page, because you can just give the metaphor instead of just saying what you mean. which may take up more room, then I would say, sure, just a careful understanding of kind of the local context. You should be able to go right through the New Testament and understand kind of the gist of the text. But there are some metaphors, especially metaphors related to the kingdom of God that I think that, and I call these constitutive metaphors. These are metaphors that are not just descriptive or poetic, that they actually have the ability to allow us to perceive. And I think that that takes a... When we come to certain types of metaphors in the New Testament, we need to stop. And we need to go through a process of understanding, who is writing this? Who is speaking this? And who is understanding this? And I think that we need to move back and forth between that. And I think that it requires additional levels of interpretation to be able to say, what does the writer know about the speaker? What does the speaker know about the audience? What does the audience know about the speaker? And I think that in relation to the given metaphor, I will make you fishers of men. We need to know what does Matthew know about Jesus? What does Jesus know about the disciples who were there who heard it on that day? What and then what did they know about Jesus? I think we need to go back through there needs to be some way that we can anticipate kind of perspectives and then we need to go through and in that order we need to attempt, right? We need to attempt to put ourselves in the position of the speaker, the hearer. in order to have a fuller understanding of what the writer is actually attempting to communicate. And I do think that it requires not just... an understanding of the text, but an understanding of the perspectives that are within the text. And I think that that's very important. And I think that when you come to certain types of metaphors, especially these constitutive metaphors, that I think that you have to stop and you have to work your way through the story, taking the positions. And you'll have to do research. the research will have to be... and biblical studies and historical studies and textual studies to be able to understand kind of what the writer and the speaker in the audience, what are they trying to communicate and how are they perceiving that? And then you need to know that it may be beyond what your cultural experience gives you access to. What do you do at that point? Well, there may be... There may be books that are written. People may have worked on this that can give us particular cultural insights and they can do just what you did with the bread. They can say, okay, when Jesus is talking about the kingdom of heaven, he is talking about it in these ways and there may be some great work that's been done, but you may also find that there are other cultures in this world, right? There are other churches that maybe are in smaller societies. and they have a similar cultural context and they're able to understand it in a way that gives them unique insight. And these churches may be in Asia or Africa or South America, they may be outside of kind of the realm of traditional Western Christianity which has written most of the books. They may be kind of outside of that, but still they may have a type of insight that the church at large desperately needs. Yes, for example, I've actually have an example I came to think of. So, I think it was at Madagascar. were talking about sheep. like the sheep, so like the... that Jesus is asked, like, lamb of sacrifice. Because like, obviously that's a Jewish very specific, like, temple metaphor. That Jesus is the one that's being sacrificed on our behalf. But they didn't know... what that meant. They used the pig instead. Of course that's inappropriate for the Jewish culture because a pig is a unclean animal. But for them, I think it was the Madagascan culture, might have been Papua New Guinea, but I can't remember which one it was. just the actual particular context, I'm little bit unsure of. But the point was that that worked really well, like using that language of like putting the pig into the same... metaphorical metaphor because that was conceptually what they understood about the pig in their culture. But obviously it's very problematic when you then move out of the culture. Because if you go back to the Jewish culture, like, Jesus is our sacrificial pig. It's like, what? Then it's like, that's not appropriate. So they got so it worked really well until someone went to seminary in America. em So obviously we have There is maybe a good way of explaining it and then they but then we put it in the translation but then Was that the good idea was that like the best idea or should we just have left it there then explain it to people Maybe that's a different question, but but I just came to think of it when you were talking about like metaphors and how Conceptually how we understand things Yeah, it is a very good example of that because you're right. It gets you far enough down the road within that one particular text and they can understand the importance of that animal. But then it disassociates that text from the biblical motifs that would go all the way back to the early part of Genesis. We had this when we were in the jungle with the yamenawa. We were taking the Lord's Supper and They don't have bread there. There's no wheat and so but that piece of life or that space that bread feels within their life is Yuka, you know also known as Manny Manny awkward cassava and so it is a fibrous root and it is eaten in a similar way as bread would be in other parts of the world. So I can remember when we were going through and we were teaching on that and we would say, okay, they talk about Jesus is the bread of life, right? And so we had to move to those steps that you just described. said, okay, you know, and we don't have bread here, but this is the space This is this is how bread would have worked in their families and communities and in that time it would have been something that would have been Part of meals. It would have been something that would have been Nutritious it is something that they would have had daily and then they then the people would say yeah That's like that's like Yuka for us. Okay. Yes, so the scripture says Jesus is the bread of life and that is like saying that Jesus is the Yuka of life. And so we didn't change the scripture, right? But we stacked metaphors, which I think we used a metaphor to describe a metaphor, which I think you have to do that very, very carefully. And I don't think that that verse is overly complex, but I think that some verses may. So yeah, you have to do that very, very, very same thing because the meaning of the concept may shift greatly within a particular cultural context. when you go back to how far can we separate form from meaning, and it just has to be done carefully. So that's why I think biblical teachers must know the biblical text and they must, yeah, you gotta know your Bible. Yeah, well the example about the pig might have been working in that particular culture, but maybe they should have done two steps instead. Yeah. Because it created a problem when they came out of the context. Yeah. Where exactly it was, that's because of it's a long time since I heard the story. But maybe we should like say you say that Jesus has to describe the kingdom of God using metaphor to us and to us to understand it. Why is that? Okay, so it's like we were talking about before when there's a unique concept so when there's kind of a novel idea that you do not have direct experience with there's two options. One, experience. So Jesus could say, I'm going to take you into the fullness of the kingdom of God and you will be able to experience that in the same way that you could be able to say, you want to know what pickled herring Pickled herring is? The best way to do that is to say here is pickled herring and I would eat it, right? I mean kind of Yeah, that's the best way to bring you into that experience, right? And apart from doing that our primary course our next best strategy is Figurative language it is going to be something metaphorical. So when Jesus is attempting to describe the kingdom of God he is aware that the experience that is available to the people there does not equip them to understand the fullness of the kingdom of God. So that's why he starts saying... the kingdom of God is like and he describes one aspect of the kingdom of God The kingdom of God is like, and he describes one aspect. The kingdom of God is like, and he describes another aspect of it. And so in doing that, then he gives series of metaphors, and those series of metaphors create a composite meaning. I want you to understand what the kingdom of God is like based off of your past experiences. And then in doing that, then he's able to help people to perceive what the kingdom of God is without direct experience at that time with it. So it really is, I mean, it's our only two options. So in that, those kingdom of God metaphors, right? And some of them are parables, but that figurative language of the kingdom of God, then it is constitutive. It is constituting a reality, which then they're able to perceive, right? And it's incredible. I mean, it is absolutely amazing. when you see that, especially when you're looking at the way in which Jesus very meticulously describes this word, well, Χριστός (Christos), when he's describing this concept, this Messiah concept, as it's coming from the Old Testament, right? It's washing down upon the first century, and then it's squeezed into the Greek language. And Jesus is very concerned that that concept is understood well, and if people don't understand it well, then he tells them, talk about it. Don't, don't, don't. We're not going to go and tell everybody that I'm the Messiah because we don't have the right definitions yet. We're still working on that. And I mean, it's amazing how long the disciples are with Jesus, right? Until finally Peter goes, my goodness, thou art the Christ. And In that instance, Peter was able to get this composite meaning. He was, Jesus was able to help him understand aspects of Messiah to the point to where all of a sudden he perceived Messiah. I think it's a very clear example of how figurative language works in relation to experience and then which gives us the ability to perceive what others cannot perceive or what Peter himself was not previously able Able to proceed. Yeah, then Jesus also adds that it's the Spirit that's helped him understand that. So God has revealed it. Yeah, Yeah, it's the illumination that comes through, yeah, through understanding. a God-given message, which is what we still have the opportunity to do today in the New Testament. Yes, yeah, definitely. Yeah, so does it help us to understand? I actually have two questions, but I might want to lump them together. So it's both like how does reading Matthew in Greek helps us understand it better? And then what do like reading it in English do to the metaphors? Yeah. And there are some loss of meaning. uh so So reading the book of Matthew in Greek, allows us to understand... basic grammatical constructions which control emphasis. How is this being emphasized? Just on a very basic level, can say, is the emphasis of this phrase, is it on the verb? Is it on the noun? And I think that we can see that. think that that is very difficult to see in English, but I think that it's that nuance of meaning and emphasis is far more clear in... Greek grammatical construction. Do you have an example? Yeah, I think the active and the passive cases are very good examples and you may be able to add examples as well here. What is fronted in the sentence? What is kind of shown as important within the sentence? Yeah, so you're thinking about the passive and the voice of the verb. And you could probably say that like front-loading like cases because as English is a very controlled language is controlled by word order, which Greek is not. So is that what you say that... that the emphasis within the, we have to like add adverbs or add adjectives in order to show what we in English think is the most important bit of the word we're trying to say. whereas in Greek, you can say it's the dative, it's the indirect object that is more important. So we put it in the front of the sentence. So we put it in front of the sentence because we want you to... to pay attention to the indirect object. That is the people who are receiving what Jesus is saying, for example, that that is the people who is important. So I don't have a specific example from the top of my head. I'd hope that you had one, it's sometimes a bit complicated from the top of our heads to remember the structure. So don't know if you have any. No, but I mean, I think that to go back to the question, the... when we read the biblical text in translation, what we are getting is a type of language that is kind of crafted for a certain group of people. Right? So if you have, you know, the Christian standard Bible, the, or the ESV or the NIV, it is, it is English, right? That is, that is calibrated in a certain way for a certain group of people. nobody is necessarily part of that group. Right? so, but when you are, when you are reading the Greek text, you're doing something remarkably different. You're reconciling your own understanding back to the Greek context. And so you are giving up on the Bible coming your direction and you are moving in the direction of the Bible. Now I am a 100 % for translation and I think that we need to have far more work. done in translation and I think that it has been one of the greatest blessings of the church, especially in the modern era that we have so many wonderful translations. Somebody has to lay the ropes. ah But uh there also has to be those who can check and update and to be able to reset the anchors when those anchors become, um what would you say, maybe less useful. So translations must be updated. We must be trying to keep in the English situation that the language is current and understandable to kind of English as it experiences shifts and changes, right? But the biblical scholars not doing that. We are trying to move ourselves, our whole kind of... everything that goes into reading the Bible, we are trying to push that and move that and to reconcile that back towards our best understanding of the Greek text itself. And that's an enjoyable process. Yeah, I think that's helpful, like joining the two sort complications of the Bible coming to me rather than I going to the Bible. Obviously, it's preferable if you can do the latter, but it's not wrong to receive it the other way. And it's still useful and it can still bring us to Christ if it comes to us. That's how I hear you. you have the opportunity to be able to go towards, then that's the better option. Yeah, and especially in situations where we are doing working with churches or we are planting churches and with groups that don't come out of kind of a strong Christian background. in many places may not even have a translation or a useful translation of scripture. There's so many places in the world that still need translation work and that translation work needs to be, I don't know, done in a way that most clearly reflects the original intent of the text. That makes sense. So when I come to the point in the podcast of our tradition to ask a question, so how we've been talking lot about metaphors and pictures and images. And how can the viewers or listeners of our conversation here today, how can they apply this into their everyday life with Christ? Okay, yeah, let's go back to the illustration when Jesus says, will make you fishers of men, right? Yeah, just simply put, if I were talking with someone about this very verse, I think you would just need to work through some steps. When I hear that verse, will make you fishers of men. you talk about fishing, I love fishing. To me, growing up in Tennessee, fishing is a recreation. It's a leisure activity. We do it for fun, right? But it's important to remember as we move through this kind you know, these interpretive steps to say, once we get back to, to that original audience, how would they have understood it? So, you know, these men who are on the, the shore of the sea of Galilee with the boats, the nets, how did they, did they think boy fishing? This is so much fun. You know, whenever we get a day off, we go and risk our lives on this wild sea. that is tormented by, ah you know, weather that's difficult to predict, is uh rife with spiritual forces that we don't understand. Is this something that we just want to do for fun or is this something that we do to live? And I think that it really kind of flips our understanding of what it means to be a fisher of So if somebody said, Jesus said to me, Hey, I'm going to make you a fisher of men. would think, that's great. We do that on the weekends. You know, when the weather is nice, we go fishing. You know, it's something that you can always opt out of. It's something you kind of do for a hobby. Right. But if you told somebody, let's say, you know, from, from your own culture, if you told a, let's say a young Danish man who is from a fishing family, um, who understood the perils of sea. the risk to life and family and relationship, the risk of economic collapse, understood the risks that go into heading out on that. water that's impossible to predict and dropping nets and hoping that you got it right. think that if Jesus says, will make you fishers of men to that man, to that Danish man who's familiar with the risks of the fisherman's trade, I think that he makes a far better Christian. I think that when he says, okay, I will do that when he puts down his nets and when he follows, he understands what he's going through. But somebody from my background, they put their stuff down and then Jesus starts requiring far more of them. they thought, wait, wait, Jesus, I signed up to be fishers of men. It's a weekend activity. We do it when the weather's nice. It's fun. If we want to keep the fish, we keep, if we don't want to keep the fish, we throw them back. You know, but for somebody who would have a similar understanding To the disciples that day then they would be able to say I know the risk involved and when things did not go well following Jesus, they would say I was prepared for this and I would say how are you prepared and it and then that that one would say Jesus told me that I would be fishers of men and I know the risk that it takes to be a fisherman I know the cost that it takes to be a fisherman. I know what we have to go through to be fishermen. No fishermen. whose family had been in it very long would not understand or would not know very intimately the labor and toil and risk impossible death of anybody on the Sea of Galilee would have known people who went out and did not make it. That's what Jesus was calling them to. to follow him. and to accept the risks in a similar way that the fishermen took every single day. And so to work through those steps to say, okay, what's Matthew trying to communicate here? What is Jesus really saying? And how is it being understood? And how is it being understood based off of what the audience knew of the speaker and what the speaker knew of the audience? and to live in that interaction and to work through the steps, to take those perspectives as simply as we can. What that does is it protects us from imposing our own context and thinking that following Christ is a leisure activity, that following Christ is a weekend activity, that following Christ is something we do when the weather is right. But to say, what was it like for those men on that day, and I'm so amazed that they put down their nets and they followed Christ. It's so humbling to see that, but to think that for you and I, when we were called to Christ, we did the very same thing. And that's exactly what we signed up for, whether we knew it or not. We may have thought we were signing up for something that was way easier, but it's no less demanding and the risks are no... would you say, are no less for us than it would have been for many that day. We have risked our eternal existence on Jesus being who he claimed to be. That's a big deal. and that makes it worth it. makes it uh worth it. Yeah, exactly. That's why we take the risk. Jesus is worth the risk. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think that's a very good way to end. Thank you for joining me the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you, brother. God bless. uh But before you go, if you enjoyed this podcast and you want more people to see it, please subscribe and leave a like. It really helps us create more episodes like this one. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Have a great day and I'll see you in the next one.