The conceptual world of a Biblical metaphor: the metaphor of sowing in 4 Ezra and Matthew

There is a growing understanding of metaphor as fundamental to the way we think as embodied ‘minds’. They are more than a literary flourish but structure how we think, perceive and feel. The article will look at a shared metaphor in two quite different literary genres to illustrate how metaphor functions beyond the categories of literature. Its focus is the metaphor of sowing as it appears in 4 Ezra and the Gospel of Matthew. Though various terms can be used to denote the literary object under consideration here, we will employ ‘parable’ as perhaps the most widely applied term. For our purpose a parable is an extended or narrated metaphor.