Cracking the Spiritual Code of the Parables
Parable of the Hidden Treasure
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”
Matthew 13:44
“The living presence of God is wisdom hidden in the Scriptures, which a sinner discovered and took to heart. In his joy, he goes and converts and believes that Scripture.”
TSM interpretation
The secrets of the Bible begin with the parables of Jesus. These brief pointed anecdotes are more than what they appear to be, for the simple surface narratives conceal deeper revelations that were not meant for everyone.
Jesus may have explained their meanings to his disciples, but only a few of those were written down. Since the Early Fathers of the Church, however, various scholars and teachers have sought to understand their hidden meanings by exploring the symbolic basis of the Bible. They have proposed numerous readings to explain the parables and other enigmatic passages littering the Holy Scriptures. They believed that if they could just crack the spiritual code of the parables, they might unlock a higher, more insightful meaning for advanced students not only to the parables but many difficult passages in the text.
For the last twenty years or so, I have diligently hunted down these figurative definitions of Biblical words and phrases through innumerable sermons, commentaries, and books of theology, particularly those of the first centuries. At this point, my sources include definitions derived from 9 books of Scripture, 6 extra-Biblical texts, 52 works of the Early Church Fathers, 5 books of Aramaic/Hebrew idioms, and 18 reference books by modern preachers and scholars. A large collection of orphaned attributions from scattered sources have also been assembled. All these results I carefully distilled down and compiled into a spiritual dictionary, The Word Unveiled.
Since publication during the pandemic, the database behind this effort has since grown tremendously. More sources have been added. Much effort has been put into enlarging and transforming the dictionary where meanings had been cooked down into a mere 1,100 definitions into a expansive table of over 16,500 individual entries. Each specific line of data contains fields with information about the term’s use, and the interpretation of every word or phrase is weighted both by authority and popularity.
But that is just the beginning. The first purpose of this collection of thousands of allegorical definitions of Biblical terms into one list is to crack the spiritual code of the parables. I plan to show that they can be solved by a simple textual replacement technique. Characters can be identified; spiritual issues made clear; and even why this information was hidden can be understood. Not only that, but new symbolic meanings of terms may be logically derived to further extend the potential of these techniques.
Once that is demonstrated, the fun really begins. Artificial Intelligence will be employed to see if these methods may be usefully applied to other Biblical texts. If that is possible, then who knows what buried treasures may be found?
A unique, possibly revolutionary, experiment in Biblical interpretation and computing has now begun.
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