Religious scholar Reza Aslan destroys ‘charlatan’ Joel Osteen: Jesus hated wealth

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41. Parable - a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson

So what moral or spiritual lesson is being taught by saying that someone who does exactly as you said is going to be punished? What happens to the servant who invests money and looses it? In the much apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews the servant returning 5 talents actually wasted the money on women and song and it is he who is cast out - not the unadventurous servant.

Now the next point is that a parable does not have to be an allegory, metaphor or analogy the story can be literally true as long as it is illustrative. Oddly the Luke version of the story may well be a metaphor for a real event, the journey of Herod Archelaus to Rome.