I have pointed out that the dinner episode begins with a unit that falls within the definitional boundaries of a chreia and that the remaining parts are of the kind which ancient instructors in the rhetorical arts considered to be essential in constructing a chreia-based argument. Before pursuing the intuition that where there is a chreia followed by analogies there is probably an argument waiting to be analysed, it is worth noting that the intuition itself has the support of a scholarly tradition, though one neglected until very recently.

Chreiai, parables and arguments

In the second edition (1933) of his Formgeschichte des Evangeliums Martin Dibelius introduced a discussion of the Hellenistic chreiai and noted their similarity to the gospel units he called ‘paradigms’ (pp. 149–64). In the context of a notice that Luke seems particularly keen on casting traditional material into a ‘chrienartige Fassung’ he also observed that this evangelist tended to frame parables with a ‘Situationsangabe’ reminiscent of the sayings chreiai. Among the six parables he cited as examples is 14.16–24 (p. 161). Dibelius oddly offered this only as a bare observation, but one which nonetheless is suggestive for further study.