Parable of the Sower

The Parable of the Sower is central to the case put forward in Cracking the New Testament. Many aspects of biblical scholarship are subjective and speculative, but the analysis regarding the Parable of the Sower in Cracking the New Testament is quite definitive. The Parable of the Sower provides the smoking gun that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the canonical Gospel of Mark is not the original version of the narrative. And further, it proves that the original version of the Gospel of Mark was different in ways that significantly challenge the traditional concept of Christian origins.

What’s so significant about the Parable of the Sower? The Parable of the Sower has long been interpreted as a simple commentary on different types of believers. What Price shows in Cracking the New Testament, however, is that the Parable of the Sower actually alludes to various characters in the story. This has gone unrecognized because the canonical version of the narrative has been modified in ways that obscure relationships between the parable and other parts of the story. However, using the parable as a guide, it is possible to reconstruct the original text. Doing this dramatically changes our understanding of the Gospel of Mark and the development of the New Testament as a whole.

The Parable of the Sower is followed by an explanation of the parable. It is actually the explanation of the parable that is the key to unlocking the original Gospel of Mark. Below we see the explanation of the Parable of the Sower provided by Jesus in the story:

Mark 4: ¹⁴ The farmer sows the word. ¹⁵ The ones by the road are the ones where the word is sown; and when they have heard, immediately Satan comes and takes away the word which has been sown in them.
¹⁶ These in the same way are those who are sown on rocky ground, who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with joy. ¹⁷ They have no root in themselves, but are short-lived. When oppression or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away.
¹⁸ Others are those who are sown among the thorns. These are those who have heard the word, ¹⁹ and the cares of this age, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires of other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.
²⁰ Those which were sown on the good soil are those who hear the word, accept it, and bear fruit, some thirty times, some sixty times, and some one hundred times.

The explanation of the parable actually describes the following figures:

1. The “ones by the road where the word is sown” represent John the Baptist
2. The “ones sown on rocky ground” represent Peter
3. The ones “sown among the thorns” represent James and John Zebedee
4. The “ones sown on the good soil” represent Paul

In the canonical Gospel of Mark many of these relationships are unclear because of changes made to the original narrative. For example, in the canonical Gospel of Mark Jesus is baptized by John and Jesus is then driven into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. However, analysis of the baptismal scene shows that in the original story it was actually John who was baptized by Jesus and it was John who was driven into the wilderness to be tested by Satan. This reconstruction is confirmed by the fact that the reconstructed scene is perfectly aligned with the Parable of the Sower.

We see that John the Baptist is the one “by the road where the word is sown”, i.e. the one present when Jesus first appears. In the reconstructed scene Jesus baptizes John, filling him with “the word”. John is then driven into the wilderness where Satan “takes away the word which has been sown in” him. John is never arrested or killed in the original Gospel of Mark, which is why John is never arrested in the Gospel of John, which was derived from a pre-canonical version of the Gospel of Mark.

Cracking the New Testament provides detailed analysis for each of the figures described in the Parable of the Sower. All of this comes together to provide definitive proof that the canonical Gospel of Mark is not original and that it has been significantly revised from an earlier version of the story that depicted John the Baptist and the disciples as failures, while setting the stage for Paul to be revealed as the one and only true apostle of Christ. This, of course, has absolutely earthshattering implications for our understanding of Christianity. Cracking the New Testament uses the Parable of the Sower and many other observations about the Christian scriptures to present an entirely new framework for understanding the development of the New Testament.