Robert Funk was the major seminal influence on parable scholarship in the second part of the twentieth century. His work on parable as metaphor led to the understanding of Jesus' parables as world-shattering. But it went beyond the question of metaphor; Funk redefined the form of the parable, made a substantial contribution to the argument that Jesus' parables originated in Greek, worked out a scale for evaluating parables as compositions, and proposed a model for how parables gave birth to resurrection faith.
