Entre a parábola e o conto: Jesus, um contador de histórias

In this study, we intend to demonstrate that Jesus was a real Storyteller. The Lucan narrative traditionally known as parable of the Prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32), is not technically a parable, due to the fact that assumes the formal shape of a short story, in which one can find all the characteristic of such literary genre “ the short story”. In it is possible to find his configuring properties in his individualization as a genre: the moral conclusion of a closed story, with a beginning, a middle and an end; the concentration of space, time and a reduced number of characters; the short syntagmatic extension, but always extensive when comparing with short stories. In short, it is possible to conclude that we are before a real and extraordinary short story. There are, however, other gospel narratives whose characteristics are similar to the prodigal son. We can thus identify the Unfaithful administrator (Luke 16: 1-8), the narrative of the Winemakers murderers (Luke 20: 9, 19), the Gold coins (Luke 19: 11-27) and the respective parallelisms by Matthew (25, 14), which are of very similar characteristics to the Prodigal son, even though they are much less developed. We characterize them as short stories embryos.