Question by Christian Daniel Dugan, Accra

My Lord, in listening to the USCCB’s reflections on the Gospel reading for Sunday, 12 July 2026 — the Parable of the Sower — a Franciscan priest, Fr Greg Friedman, remarked: “And if you hear the long form of today’s Gospel, you’ll probably hear an interpretation of the parable, probably added by the early Church and not part of Jesus’ original preaching.” How accurate is this statement? I am aware that certain biblical texts, such as Psalm 51:20–21, were appended after the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC, and that the doxology “For thine is the kingdom” was later added to the Lord’s Prayer by our Protestant brethren.

Could you kindly clarify: first, how true is Fr Friedman’s claim about the interpretation of the Parable of the Sower; second, are there other passages in Scripture known to have been added in this way; and third, if the interpretation was indeed a later addition, does this mean that what we take to be the meaning of the parable is not what Jesus himself taught — or perhaps that he offered no explanation at all?

Answer by Most Rev. Joseph Osei-Bonsu

Mr Dugan has raised a question that touches the heart of biblical scholarship and the Church’s teaching on the inspiration of Sacred Scripture. The issue is not whether the Gospels are true, but how God chose to reveal that truth through human authors, oral tradition, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Fr Friedman’s remark reflects a long-established position within biblical scholarship rather than a novel claim, but it deserves careful unpacking, because Scripture does contain later additions — though not all editorial activity is of the same kind.

How accurate is Fr Friedman’s statement?

Fr Friedman’s comment sits comfortably within mainstream biblical scholarship. In Mark 4:13–20, the explanation of the Parable of the Sower is widely regarded as a later interpretive addition rather than part of the earliest form of Jesus’ teaching. His claim holds up well, at least for the interpretation in the form we now find it in Mark and its parallels in Matthew and Luke. The classic scholarly argument is that the parable itself is shorter, more compact, and more Semitic in style, while the explanation reflects the language and theological concerns of the early Church. That does not make the explanation false — most scholars see it as the Church’s inspired reception and application of the parable, rather than a verbatim transcript of what Jesus said on the day he told it.

Few scholars doubt that Jesus himself told the Parable of the Sower. The debate centres on the interpretation that follows in Matthew 13:18–23, Mark 4:13–20, and Luke 8:11–15, where each feature of the story is given a symbolic meaning: the seed becomes the word of God, the different soils represent the varying responses of those who hear it, the birds signify the evil one, and the thorns stand for the anxieties, riches, and pleasures of life that choke spiritual growth. Reading a story this way, where individual details correspond to deeper spiritual realities, is what scholars call “allegorical interpretation.”

Since the pioneering work of Adolf Jülicher in the late nineteenth century, many scholars have treated this explanation as a later addition. Jülicher argued that Jesus’ authentic parables normally carried a single, central point, while allegories loaded individual elements of a story with separate meanings. On this reading, the interpretation of the Sower looks more like the theological reflection of the early Church than Jesus’ own teaching.

Several considerations have traditionally supported this view. The explanation treats almost every part of the story as symbolic, which is not how Jesus’ parables usually work. There is a shift in vocabulary too, especially the repeated use of the Greek term ho logos (“the word”) for the gospel message — language more at home in early Christian preaching than in Jesus’ original Aramaic setting. The focus also moves from the sower and the remarkable harvest to the varied responses of the hearers, a concern some scholars connect to the pastoral experience of the early Church, particularly during periods of persecution such as under Nero or the Jewish War. And the Gospel of Thomas, an early but non-canonical collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, preserves the parable without any interpretation attached, suggesting the story once circulated on its own.

More recent scholarship, however, has questioned the sharp line between parable and allegory on which much of this argument rests. Studies of Jewish teaching methods in Jesus’ time show that allegorical and symbolic interpretation was not at all foreign to first-century Judaism. Jesus himself elsewhere uses allegorical features — in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants, for instance, the servants clearly stand for the prophets and the son for Jesus himself (Mt 21:33–46; Mk 12:1–12; Lk 20:9–19). For this reason, many contemporary scholars are now willing to accept that at least some elements of the interpretation may go back to Jesus, even if the evangelists or the early Church shaped and expanded it in light of pastoral need. Joachim Jeremias, among others, defended the authenticity of substantial parts of the explanation, arguing that Jesus did at times interpret his own parables for his disciples and that symbolic correspondences were not alien to his teaching style. So the real question today is less “authentic or secondary?” and more how the teaching of Jesus and the reflection of the early Church came together in the form the Gospels preserve.

Did Jesus explain it himself?

Several possibilities remain open. Jesus may have explained the parable much as the Gospels present it. He may have given a shorter explanation that the evangelists later developed for their readers. Or the evangelists, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, may have expressed the true meaning of his teaching in language suited to the needs of the early Church. The Church has never settled on which of these is historically correct.

In the ancient world, disciples were expected to apply their master’s teaching to new circumstances, and Jesus probably explained his parables on many occasions — though not necessarily in the exact Greek words the Gospels preserve. When the evangelists later wrote their accounts, they framed the explanation in a way that spoke to the challenges facing the first Christian communities, including persecution and the danger of falling away, while staying faithful to the substance of Jesus’ message.

The case for continuity with Jesus is substantial in its own right. He regularly explains parables privately to his disciples, as in Mark 4:34, and the allegory here is restrained compared with later patristic allegory, staying close to familiar Jewish agricultural imagery. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all preserve the same core explanation, suggesting it was fixed very early, and the Fathers — from Irenaeus and Origen onward — receive it as coming from the Lord rather than as an invention of the early Church. Jesus is shown explaining parables allegorically elsewhere too, as in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Mt 13:36–43). The real question, then, is not whether Jesus used allegory, but whether this particular interpretation originated with him or with the early Church.

Are there other passages known to have been added later?

Yes — and the two examples Mr Dugan mentions are useful illustrations, though the second needs a small correction.

Psalm 51 is a good example. The psalm is primarily a personal prayer of repentance, centred on the plea that God desires “a broken and contrite heart” (Ps 51:17). Yet the final verses (Ps 51:18–19; 20–21 in some numberings) suddenly turn to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the restoration of Temple sacrifices. Because of this shift, many scholars believe that these verses were added later for liturgical use, allowing what was originally a personal prayer to be taken up by the worshipping community after the exile.

The doxology attached to the Lord’s Prayer is another example, though not quite in the way Mr Dugan describes it. The familiar words “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever” are absent from the earliest and most important manuscripts of Matthew, including Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. But the phrase was not a Protestant addition — it existed many centuries before the Reformation. Its earliest known form appears in the Didache, a Christian text from around AD 100, where it reads: “for yours is the power and the glory for ever.” By the late fourth century, the Apostolic Constitutions had added the word “kingdom,” producing the wording familiar today. Because this fuller form made its way into the Textus Receptus — the “received text” widely used during the Reformation — it was carried into the King James Version of 1611 and many later Protestant translations.

The Roman Catholic liturgy reflects this history in an interesting way. After the Lord’s Prayer, the priest alone recites the embolism — a Greek word for an “insertion” or “expansion” — which develops the final petition, “deliver us from evil”: “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil…” The congregation then responds with the doxology: “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and for ever.” In this way, the Church preserves both the prayer Christ taught and the ancient liturgical conclusion that grew up around it in Christian worship. Many Protestant traditions, by contrast, fold the doxology directly into the Lord’s Prayer itself, reflecting the Textus Receptus tradition.

Other examples are well known to students of Scripture. The Longer Ending of Mark (Mk 16:9–20) and the story of the woman caught in adultery (Jn 7:53–8:11) are both absent from the earliest manuscripts of their respective Gospels, though the Church continues to regard them as inspired Scripture and reads them liturgically. The Trinitarian formula in 1 John 5:7–8, naming “the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit,” appears to have been added later during theological debates about the Trinity; the biblical scholar Raymond E. Brown concluded that this phrase originated long after the apostolic period as a theological reflection on the original text.

Similar textual variation appears elsewhere in the New Testament. The Western textual tradition — an early group of manuscripts and citations by the Church Fathers — frequently preserves longer or fuller readings than the Alexandrian tradition represented by Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. The Acts of the Apostles survives in noticeably different forms across these two traditions: Acts 8:37, containing the Ethiopian official’s profession of faith before baptism (“I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God”), appears in manuscripts associated with the Western tradition but is missing from many of the earliest Alexandrian witnesses. Luke 22:43–44, describing Jesus strengthened by an angel with sweat “like drops of blood falling to the ground,” is present in some early manuscripts and absent from others — another illustration of how complex the transmission of the New Testament text can be.

The Old Testament offers similar examples. Deuteronomy 34, recounting the death and burial of Moses, was almost certainly completed by a later inspired author, since Moses could hardly have recorded his own death. Many scholars likewise believe the titles attached to the Psalms — including the heading of Psalm 51 linking it to David’s repentance after his sin with Bathsheba (cf. 2 Sam 12) — were added during the later transmission of the text rather than part of the original compositions.

Many scholars also hold that the Book of Isaiah developed over a long period and draws on material from different historical settings, giving rise to the familiar distinction between First Isaiah (chs. 1–39), Second Isaiah (chs. 40–55), and Third Isaiah (chs. 56–66). Similarly, many hold that the Pentateuch — the first five books of the Bible — was compiled from several earlier traditions, edited and combined over a long period. This is the documentary hypothesis, which distinguishes four principal sources: the Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D) traditions.

None of this should be read as evidence of corruption or deliberate falsification. It illustrates, rather, the way God chose to communicate his word through human authors, editors, scribes, and believing communities across many generations. The Bible emerged within a living tradition of faith, worship, and teaching, and its development reflects that history.

What does the Church teach?

The key lies in the Church’s doctrine of inspiration. The Second Vatican Council teaches that the evangelists faithfully handed on what Jesus did and taught for our salvation, while also selecting, arranging, and explaining their material according to the needs of their communities, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (Dei Verbum 19). So even when the Gospel writers shaped the presentation of Christ’s words and deeds, the resulting text remained fully inspired and truly the word of God.

Inspiration therefore embraces not only the direct words Jesus spoke but the entire process by which the biblical books were remembered, proclaimed, written, edited, and handed on within the Church. As the Catechism teaches, Scripture “firmly, faithfully, and without error teaches that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures” (CCC 107). The primary purpose of biblical inspiration is the communication of saving truth, not the provision of exhaustive historical or scientific information.

If the explanation were a later development, would that change its meaning?

No. Catholic theology distinguishes between the exact words Jesus spoke in Aramaic, the intention behind his teaching, and the inspired interpretation the evangelists provide under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So even if the explanation of the Parable of the Sower, as we now read it in the Gospels, was developed or expanded by the evangelists for the needs of the early Christian communities, it still carries full apostolic authority and faithfully conveys the mind of Christ. It does not compete with Jesus’ teaching — it represents the way the risen Lord continued to instruct his Church through the inspired witness of the evangelists.

Nor does this alter the meaning of the parable; if anything, it deepens our understanding of it. The parable proclaims the generous, abundant coming of God’s Kingdom through the sowing of the divine word, while the explanation applies that message to the different ways people receive and respond to it. The two belong together: the parable presents Jesus the storyteller announcing the Kingdom, while the explanation shows the apostolic Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, reflecting on the meaning of his teaching and calling believers to become good soil in which the seed of God’s word can bear lasting fruit. Whether Jesus gave the explanation in precisely this form, or whether the evangelists drew it out more fully, the essential message stands: the word of God bears fruit only in hearts that receive it with faith, perseverance, and understanding.

Conclusion

Fr Friedman’s comment reflects a respected scholarly theory, but it should not be taken to mean that the early Church invented the meaning of the parable. Rather, the Church faithfully preserved Jesus’ teaching and, under divine inspiration, handed it on in a form that also spoke to the needs of the first Christian communities. Whether Jesus himself gave the explanation exactly as we now have it, or the evangelists drew out its meaning more fully, it remains part of the inspired Gospel.

We do not possess a recording of Jesus’ voice, but we do possess the faithful witness of the apostolic community, which preserved both his words and his meaning. The process of editing and transmission should not weaken our confidence in Scripture — it shows, instead, how the Holy Spirit guided the Church in preserving God’s word for the salvation of his people (Dei Verbum 11, 19).