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I was stunned! It was 1958 in Jerusalem. A British scholar and churchman, Dr. Kenneth Cragg, was lecturing on the Muslim-Christian debates of the Middle Ages. He had just pointed out that the Muslim scholars of the period loved to quote the parable of the Prodigal Son as evidence against Christians. The reason was that, in the story, a son who leaves his father (God), goes into a far country, gets into trouble, decides to return home, is on his arrival welcomed, and his return is celebrated. He needs no incarnation and no atonement, no cross, and no salvation. There is no mediator between the two of them. He simply returns home and his father accepts him. Ergo: Jesus is a good Muslim.

After 40 years, the shock of that speech is still with me. In fact, that lecture inaugurated my personal pilgrimage into the mind of Jesus of Nazareth with this famous text as a road map. Was there any response to this centuries-old Muslim challenge?

This story badly needs to be rescued from familiarity and from its traditional cultural captivity. For centuries, we in the West have read the story in the light of our own cultural presuppositions, which have dulled its cutting edge.

I spent most of my childhood in Egypt, and from 1955 to 1995 our family lived in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Cyprus, where I taught New Testament in seminaries and institutes. For all of my adult life, it has been my privilege to study the New Testament while living and teaching in the Middle East. Indeed, when I began to take seriously the traditional Middle Eastern culture of which Jesus was a part, the parable of "the father and his two lost sons" began to unfold for me in a new and exciting way. In the light of that culture, available through early Jewish and Eastern Christian sources, answers can be found to the original challenge with which my pilgrimage began. In short—are the Incarnation and the Atonement a part of this crucial parable? Yes, they are. I will try to explain why.

This parable must be seen as the third part of a trilogy in Luke 15. The Pharisees challenge Jesus: "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them" (quotations taken from the NRSV unless otherwise noted). The Babylonian Talmud makes clear that rabbis did not eat with the 'am-ha'arets (the people of the land) who did not keep the law in a precise fashion. Luke records, "So he told them [the Pharisees] this parable [singular]." What follows are the three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the two lost sons (the Prodigal Son).

Thus we see that Luke understood them to be three parts of a single parable. A shepherd pays a price to find and restore a lost sheep. The woman does the same for her coin. In these two stories it is clear that Jesus is the good shepherd and he is the good woman. Which raises a question about the third story: Is he also the good father? And does this third story parallel the first two stories by having the father pay a high price to find and restore his son(s)? To answer these questions, which point to the larger issue of atonement and incarnation, at least 14 aspects of the parable need to be rescued from their traditional interpretation.

1. The request. The younger son requests his inheritance while his father is still alive and in good health. In traditional Middle Eastern culture, this means, "Father, I am eager for you to die!" If the father is a traditional Middle Eastern father, he will strike the boy across the face and drive him out of the house. Surely anywhere in the world this is an outrageous request. The Prodigal is not simply a young boy who is "off to the big city to make his fame and fortune." Rather, this young son makes a request that is unthinkable, particularly in Middle Eastern culture. The father is expected to refuse—if he is an oriental patriarch! In fact, he is not, which brings us to the second point.

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October 26 1998, Vol. 42, No. 12