Through Middle Eastern Eyes
A Life of Kenneth E. Bailey
By Michael Parker
Wipf & Stock, 372 pages, $29
Kenneth Bailey (1930-2016) profoundly influenced pastors and laypeople as a biblical interpreter, illuminating Jesus’ parables through Middle Eastern eyes—a phrase Michael Parker adopts for this biography. Parker skillfully traces Bailey’s career in the Middle East and his writing for Western audiences.
Bailey was raised in Egypt as the son of Presbyterian missionaries and took a similar path himself. After intensive Arabic study, he focused on adult literacy in villages of Upper Egypt. It dawned upon Bailey in his first year there that the villagers had biblical insights unavailable to Western readers. The conviction that a deeper awareness of Middle Eastern culture unlocks layers of meaning in stories from and about Jesus stayed with him and shaped his lifelong work.
Bailey served as a freelance writer and theologian among Egypt’s Presbyterians, and then as a theological lecturer at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, all while learning from local Christians’ instincts for understanding the Bible. He left Egypt and taught at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut starting in 1967, serving through most of the Lebanese civil war. He moved to the Tantur Institute in Jerusalem in 1985, and to Cyprus in 1990, becoming canon theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf. He held a similar position for the Diocese of Pittsburgh once he retired from mission service.
Bailey brimmed with energy and confidence as a teacher, preacher, and writer. He inspired the faith of audiences across the Middle East, the United States, and beyond, speaking year after year to hundreds of churches and various groups, promoting his insights into Scripture arising from his experiences in the Middle East. Bailey also had a measure of influence upon biblical scholarship in the interpretation of Jesus’ parables and in the study of oral tradition’s reliability in preserving Jesus’ teachings before the Gospels were written.
Bailey’s major books include The Cross and the Prodigal: Luke 15 Through the Eyes of Middle Eastern Peasants (1973, revised 2005); Through Peasant Eyes: More Lucan Parables, Their Culture, and Style (1980); Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel’s Story (2003); Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (2008); and Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes: Cultural Studies in 1 Corinthians(2011).
Historian and retired Middle East missionary Michael Parker excels at handling Bailey’s life and work with historical sensitivity, yet also in an accessible, engaging style. His continuous use of the Bailey family’s personal correspondence leads the reader to feel a certain closeness with them. Parker skillfully depicts Bailey’s decades in post-colonial mission, chronicling how he was caught between the locals’ need to assume leadership, his ambition to make outstanding contributions, and his Western mission board’s decisions from afar.
Parker admires Bailey but handles his subject with balance. He acknowledges Bailey’s missteps, such as his sharp criticisms of the local leaders under whom he served. Parker also notes scholarly critiques, granting that Bailey was prone to see chiasm—parallel literary structures—everywhere in Scripture, despite other scholars casting doubt. Parker occasionally mentions the largest scholarly criticism of Bailey’s writing: “How did he know that contemporary villages in the Middle East retain the same culture as that of the first century?” Bailey was certain that his experience of village life gave the New Testament’s stories their proper context. Though Bailey later softened some claims, the question aptly remained: Whose culture should inform the biblical text?
Bailey’s approximately 50 years in the Middle East also gave him a different lens from that of most fellow Americans with respect to Palestine. Bailey loathed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and how Israel’s government treated Palestinians. Faced with claims that American Christians should support the Jewish state, Bailey responded: Which Jews? Those committing atrocities or those who stand in opposition to their government’s brutality? Challenging dispensationalism, Bailey warned that Christians should not support evil in the name of ushering in the kingdom of God.
Bailey modeled imaginative, energetic witness until the end of his life. Those who heard him preach and teach, or who benefited from any of his many books, will greatly appreciate this biography, along with students of Christian mission in the 20th century.
Dustin Ellington is associate professor of New Testament at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Lebanon, having previously taught at Justo Mwale University in Zambia and the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo.
