The Unforgiving Debtor is based on Matthew 18: 23-34
Retelling
A couple of blogs ago, I mentioned two parables that don’t need retelling. The Unforgiving Debtor is a parable that comes very close to ‘doesn’t need retelling’. After all, people still go into debt; they still rack up much more debt than they can ever repay.
What’s Changed?
The way we handle debt has changed since the time of Jesus. Only a few countries now have debtor’s prisons. So, it seems strange that someone could get thrown into prison for owing a few denarii. Because it’s so strange, we might miss the unforgiving debtor trying to choke the other slave, or class the later torture under ‘weird things they did in the old days’.
If we don’t have the luxury of a bible class or sermon to tease out and discuss the strangeness, then the debtor’s prison becomes an area to consider retelling. It’s getting in the way of understanding the parable. Retelling the Unforgiving Debtor’s debt as one acquired by fraud is plausible; it fits in well with the exaggerated amount of debt that Jesus uses.
Ten Thousand Talents
Something else lost in translation is that it’s easy for the listener to hear ‘ten thousand talents’ and mentally translate it into ‘ten thousand pounds’, or ‘ten thousand dollars’. That means they might miss one of the main points – that the man was forgiven an incredible, unpayable debt. One estimate is that a talent was worth 6,000 denarii. One denarius was the standard pay for a day’s labour, so ten thousand talents equal 60 million days of work – which is about 164,000 years.
In modern money terms, this is about six billion dollars, but I went for ‘trillions’ instead of ‘billions’. We have enormous multinational companies nowadays, which might have and repay a $6,000,000,000 debt. But in Jesus’ era, that ten thousand talents would be an impossible, ridiculous amount to pay back. Even most countries wouldn’t have had ten thousand talents! So, changing the amount to ‘ten trillion’ puts the amount back into ‘national debt’ territory. Though, even now, only one country currently has that kind of debt.
Torture
Another strange thing is that the king ordered the unforgiving debtor to be tortured. Admittedly, by this point, he’s added a serious assault to his original debt and the torture may be a punishment for that. But since some translations say: ‘tortured until he should pay back all he owed,’ the torture sounds as if it’s connected to the debt.
Torture is not unknown – its use is being claimed even as I write. But being tortured for a debt now belongs to the world of criminal loan sharks, not kings and governments. So, in retelling, I toned down the original violence. One reason was that, nowadays, the observant slaves who told the King (in the original parable) would have phoned 999 (or 911).
In the original parable, it’s likely that the torture connects to his treatment of his fellow slave. The unmerciful debtor gets back exactly what he meted out. He tortured the slave who owed him money by choking him, so he is tortured in turn.
In my retold version, he takes the woman who owes him money to court, so the boss has him taken to court for fraud. The Unforgiving Debtor is given exactly the same treatment he meted out.
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