I've never thought it this way before! Now as a metaphor it makes sense.
Yes, in fact, though I haven't read it myself, the fact he sees it this way alone makes me nod my head and want to read what he says. Dominic Crossan proposes, and I might well agree with him, that the authors of the Gospels were writing a parable themselves in the whole presentation of the narrative of the life of Jesus. In other words, the entire Gospels themselves are metaphors. From the description of his book
The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus
The world’s foremost Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan shows us how the parables present throughout the New Testament not only reveal what Jesus wanted to teach but also provide the key for explaining how the Gospels’ writers sought to explain the Prophet of Nazareth to the world. In this meaningful exploration of the metaphorical stories told by Jesus and the Gospel writers, Crossan combines the biblical expertise of his The Greatest Prayer with a historical and social analysis that harkens closely to his Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, creating an illuminating and nuanced exploration of the Scripture that fans of Marcus Borg and Bart Ehrman will find fascinating and essential.
There's a lot more I could explore in thought on this, but once you understand that the entire thing is a metaphor about the nature of the relationships of humanity with the Divine Reality (which metaphorically we call God), things like raising of the dead, walking on water, water into wine, the kingdom of God, salvation from the law, etc, all are "pointers" to something beyond the literal interpretation. Literal thinking on these things are really just mental "placeholders" to some abstraction that is far beyond the mind to comprehend.
To begin to penetrate these requires a shift from the "concrete-operational" mind, which Piaget researched in our developmental stages, into a much more post-formal operational stage, or what one might call "fuzzy logic", or vision logic. But that's another matter. When someone is new to something, "dumbing it down", into concrete-literal descriptors, something tangible the mind can look at when confronted with the highly abstract, is a normal thing. The issue is when these Keepers of the Sacred Myth, insist it be not understood beyond those terms, that growth halts. That's why I left them too. It was too, "magical", and not enough real.
Edit to add. In looking further at that book on Amazon, it gives this from the back cover I thought was ironically pertinent as it directly mentions the resurrection story we were talking about:
In 1969, I was teaching at two seminaries in the Chicago area. One of my courses was on the parables by Jesus and the other was on the resurrection stories about Jesus. I had observed that the parabolic stories by Jesus seemed remarkably similar to the resurrection stories about Jesus. Were the latter intended as parables just as much as the former? Had we been reading parable, presuming history, and misunderstanding both?
—from The Power of Parable
So begins the quest of renowned Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan as he unlocks the true meanings and purposes of parable in the Bible so that modern Christians can respond genuinely to Jesus's call to fully participate in the kingdom of God. In The Power of Parable, Crossan examines Jesus's parables and identifies what he calls the "challenge parable" as Jesus's chosen teaching tool for gently urging his followers to probe, question, and debate the ideological absolutes of religious faith and the presuppositions of social, political, and economic traditions.
Moving from parables by Jesus to parables about Jesus, Crossan then presents the four gospels as "megaparables." By revealing how the gospels are not reflections of the actual biography of Jesus but rather (mis)interpretations by the gospel writers themselves, Crossan reaffirms the power of parables to challenge and enable us to co-create with God a world of justice, love, and peace.
I think I'll get this book at some point after getting through the others I'm currently working on from other authors. I don't have any of his books at this point.