User:Jmmansfield/Andrew Parker (biblicist)

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Andrew Parker (1942 -) is a British biblical scholar and social activist. whose study of the Bible and other texts from the ancient Near East led him to conclude that the ancients' lack of abstract vocabulary caused them to use symbolic or myth-language in order to discuss the natural forces and political powers which affected their lives and that consequently, religion is an unwarranted, if natural, secondary development which came about when mythical symbols, usually in the forms of gods, were misconstrued as sentient beings, amenable to offerings and pleadings.

Family
Parker is the great-grandson of Robert Rainy who was Principal of New College, Edinburgh and after whom Rainy Hall is named.

Career[edit]
Parker was ordained as assistant minister of Dunfermline Abbey in 1967, However, anxious to verify his understanding of the Bible by putting it into practice, he joined the French Protestant Industrial Mission (Mission Populaire Evangelique de France) working first as a builders’ labourer and then as a silk screen press operator printing motorway signs.

In 1972 Parker was put in charge of the Mission centre in Nemours, working two days a week at Sorbonne University, Paris to finance the centre’s activities. Eventually he was joined by a group of young men and women, both Protestants and Maoists and together they started conducting grassroots political activities using the parish magazine Notre Foyer to give a voice to the voiceless within the community.

The group’s work greatly irritated the local mayor Etienne Dailly (an important political figure and vice president of the French Senate) who in the spring of 1973 denounced Parker and took legal measures against him, as the editor of the parish magazine. For a few months Parker and his centre became a cause célèbre as the news media, first in France and then also in England and Scotland, started reporting what he and his team had been doing. Finally, however, in the autumn of 1973, Parker was expelled from France ‘for political activities unbecoming in a foreigner', an expulsion later rescinded in 1976 by the Conseil d’Etat. Parker returned to Scotland and, while earning his living as a porter in Leverndale Hospital, teamed up with Revd John Miller and his wife, Mary to work as community activists in Glasgow.

Parker first wrote two rough works, Digging up Parables 1 & 2 to try out on others and in 1980 he produced his first cartoon book on the life of Jesus; Political Parables.

In 1981, Parker and his wife, Pat, moved to the east end of London where he ceased his community activities in order to concentrate on his biblical research while earning a living as a hospital porter at St. Pancras Hospital.

Parker has written a number of books and articles and contributes to Christian websites and blogs. He remains influential in Christian activist circles.

Books

 * Painfully Clear: the Parables of Jesus  which argues that Jesus did not tell people what to do and believe but opened people's eyes so that they could judge matters for themselves.
 * Light Denied: A Challenge to Historians which argues that scholarship has turned a blind eye to the evangelists' portrayal of Jesus as Yahweh’s light which exposes the hypocrisy of civilisation by demonstrating a better way of living; a strategy taken directly from Second Isaiah.
 * God of the Marginals: The Biblical Ideology Demonstrated by Jesus which details how Second Isaiah's strategy had its roots in the marginal ideology depicted in the Exodus texts and was subsequently put into practice by Jesus.
 * Searing Light: The Parables for Preachers shows that all of the parabolic material associated with Jesus consists of illustrations which unfortunately in time became detached from the events which gave rise to them so that now we can only guess what their original meaning was.
 * The Bible as Politics claims the Bible is not essentially a religious work but is a political work written from a marginal / Hebrew perspective which priestly writers later deliberately attempted to cloud with a blanket of conservative religion.

Cartoon Books
·       Thinking about the Bible Part 1: Ancient Man

·       Thinking about the Bible Part 2: The Mesopotamian Myths

·       God of the Marginals Part 1: The Myth Cycle

·       God of the Marginals Part 2: The Patriarchal Cycle and Exodus Stories

·       Politics Before and After the Exile Part 1: Kingship

·       Politics Before and After the Exile Part 2: Revolutionary Prophets and Revisionist Priests

·       The Gospels as Political Good News Part 1: Overcoming Common Misunderstandings

·       The Gospels as Political Good News Part 2: The Historical Jesus

Articles and Other Publications[edit]
Contributions to the following books, while a member of the Urban Theology Unit (now the Urban Theology Union);


 * Stilling the Storm: Contemporary Responses to Mark 4.35–5.1 Highly Unusual Ideological Magic
 * Acts in Practice Volume 2 The Shame We Don't Want to Face
 * The Servant of God in Practice The Servant in Deutero-Isaiah

Articles in the bi-annual journal of theology;


 * Theology in Scotland Vol III no 2.  The Logic of Parables
 * Theology in Scotland Vol XVI no 1. Thirteen findings on the Bible

Articles for the website of the Progressive Christianity Network Britain


 * What does it mean that Christ died for our sins?
 * Military Might
 * What it Means to be a Marginal
 * Charity as Beside the Point (Part 1)
 * Charity as Beside the Point (Part 2)

His claims that the ideology driving the Bible was for the most part Hebrew marginalism. Since marginals had no political clout, their strategy for humanising the world was a covenant agreement whereby they would show how it was possible to live together without marginalising each other and their God,Yahweh would simply make the shaming exercise work.

According to Parker, the Gospels show Jesus as finally fulfilling this Mosaic covenant; first by correcting the prophets' mistaken vision of Yahweh as an angry religious God; and secondly, by politically demonstrating how to open people's eyes so that they could see for themselves what needed to be done.

since his workmates at the hospital, who had persuaded him to become their shop steward, refused to read the reports he wrote about his negotiations with management. His illustrated reports, however, proved a success and gave

He determined to set aside his own beliefs and political persuasions to concentrate on scientifically working out what precisely was the biblical ideology which had inspired Jesus and to understand the biblical texts from their authors' own perspectives.