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The Samaritans in the New Testament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Gerard S. Sloyan
Gerard S. Sloyan*
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

In a painful paradox the word “good” has become forever attached to “Samaritan” by Jesus' Lucan parable (Lk 10:29-37; see 17:16), even while bitter Jewish hostility to this group has continued over the centuries: through the highly redacted polemic against the Samaritans of 2 Kgs 17 (see Sir 50:26) and through Talmudic commentary on it such as that in bKiddushin 75. Dan Jacobson in his recent The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and Its God sees a “propagandistic … intention” in the parable of the Good Samaritan:

It is significant that the passerby who succors the injured man is a Samaritan—i.e., not a Jew, let alone of the priests or levites. (“For Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans,” says the fourth chapter of John, describing a meeting between Jesus and yet another strikingly well-disposed Samaritan.)

In the first century, as now, the praise accorded this separated Jewish group in the Christian writings must have rankled those Judean, Galilean and diaspora Jews to whose notice it came. It would have confirmed them in their view of the noṣrim as incorrigibly deviant from halakah. The principle of the ancient world was, “Your friends are my friends and your enemies are my enemies.” The favorable notice given to these enemies of the Jews by Jesus' followers could only have set the movement back in Jewish eyes.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1983 , pp. 7 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1983

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References

1 From the Tannaitic period (1-200 of the Common Era) cf. expressions of contempt in the Mishnah tractates Berakoth 7:1; 8:8; Demai 3:4, 5:9; Nedarim 3:10; Gittin 1:5; other places are cited by Purvis, James D., The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origins of the Samaritan Sect (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 2).

2 Jacobson, Dan, The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and Its God (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 176, 177.Google Scholar

3 Dexinger, Ferdinand, “Limits of Tolerance in Judaism: The Samaritan Example” in Sanders, E. P.et al. eds., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, Vol. 2, “Aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period” (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), pp. 88–114.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., pp. 98, 332, n. 61.

5 Coggins, R. J., Samaritans and Jews: The Origins of Samaritanism Reconsidered (Atlanta: John Knox, 1975), pp. 13–24.Google Scholar

8 Talmon, S., “Biblical Tradition on the Early Tradition of the Samaritans” (in Hebrew), Eretz Shomron, 1973, pp. 19–33, cited by Dexinger.Google Scholar

7 Macdonald, J., The History of the Samaritans (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), p. 14.Google Scholar

8 Dexinger, p. 91.

9 As Coggins assumes, p. 15.

10 This was the Persian rule of the governor Sanballat at Shechem, himself an Israelite from one of the Beth-Horons despite his Babylonian name. See Neh 2:10, 19-20; 3:33ff. We know no more than this of the successive Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian rules in the north.

11 Bowman, John, The Samaritan Problem: Studies in the Relationship of Samaritanism, Judaism, and Early Christianity (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick, 1975), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar

12 Dexinger, pp. 92-93.

13 Koch, K., “Ezra and the Origins of Judaism,” in Journal of Semitic Studies 19 (1974), 184.Google Scholar

14 Purvis, pp. 16-87.

15 Antiquities XI, 302-25; see Marcus', Ralph Appendix B “Josephus on the Samaritan Schism,” in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, with an English Translation, Books IX-XI, Vol. VI (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 498–511.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 302.

17 Ibid., p. 340.

18 Ibid., p. 344.

19 Purvis, p. 103; pertinent to the papyrus find are the articles of Cross, F. M. Jr., “The Discovery of the Samaria Papyri,” Biblical Archaeologist 26 (1963), 111, 120–21Google Scholar, and “Aspects of Samaritan and Jewish History in Late Persian and Hellenistic Times,” Harvard Theological Review 59 (1966), 201–11.Google Scholar

20 Ant. XI, 340. The term is probably anachronistic, his Samareis of 341 being more accurate. Josephus has already given his poor opinion of them in Ant. IX, 288-91, in a passage dependent on 2 Kgs 17.

21 Purvis, p. 104.

22 Ant. XI, 321-25, just as 326-39 seems to stem from a Jewish tradition. See Dexinger, pp. 96-97 for a source analysis. Alexander appears in Samaritan folklore, though not as the authorizer of the building of their temple. See Marcus, R., Josephus (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, Harvard, 1951), VI, 532.Google Scholar

23 Marcus, 523-25, gives the sources on this (Eusebius, Jerome and Syncellus). The archaeological data are summarized by Wright, G. E., Shechem: The Biography of a Biblical City (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 170–84.Google Scholar

24 Bickerman, Elias, From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees (New York: Schocken, 1962), pp. 41–46.Google Scholar Reprinted from “The Historical Foundations of Postbiblical Judaism,” in Finkelstein, Louis, ed., The Jews, Their History, Culture, and Religion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), I: 70–114.Google Scholar

25 It is paraphrased in the Loeb Josephus, Vol. VI as Appendix C, pp. 516-18. Purvis deals with the question in an Appendix, “Ben Sira' and the Foolish People of Shechem,” pp. 119-29.

26 Josephus takes the same line in Ant. XII, 257-64.

27 Kippenberg, H. G., Garizin und Synagoge, 1971, p. 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited by Dexinger, pp. 105, 335.

28 Identified by the researches of Büchler, Shmueli and Segal, and cited in Dexinger, pp. 96-97. The so-called Manasseh source of the year 170 includes Ant. XI, 315-16, 322-23.

29 George W. Buchanan makes what he calls the “reasonable conjecture” that the apostle John was assigned Samaria as the “only territory left among the ‘circumcised.’” His ministry took place in Samaria, where he had “supervisory responsibility.” See “The Samaritan Origin of the Gospel of John” in Neusner, Jacob ed., Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (Leiden: Brill, 1968), pp. 175–76.Google ScholarHammer, Heinrich, Traktat vom Samaritanermessias (Bonn, 1913)Google Scholar thinks that Jesus and his immediate followers were Samaritans.

30 Freed, Edwin D., “Did John Write His Gospel Partly to Win Samaritan Converts?” Novum Testamentum 12 (1970), 242Google Scholar, quoting his own “Samaritan Influence in the Gospel of John,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 30 (1968), 580–87.Google Scholar On Samaritan place-names in In, see Kundsin, Karl, Topologische Ueberlieferungsstoffe im Johannes-Evangelium, FRLANT, n.s., 22 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1925).Google Scholar I am grateful to my student Rabbi Susan Frank for this reference and that to Hammer in n. 29 above, a work I have not seen.

31 See Barrett, C. K., The Gospel According to John (2nd, rev. ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), p. 232, n. 9.Google Scholar

32 Cullmann, Oscar, The Johannine Circle (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), pp. 48–49.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., pp. 49 and 112, n. 28, citing “Samaria and the Origins of the Christian Mission,” The Early Church (London: SCM, 1956), 185–92.Google Scholar Cullmann claims originality for the insight. Barrett, p. 243, n. 38, thinks the opinion wrong, citing the view of Braun, H., “Qumran und das Neue Testament,” Theologische Rundschau 28 (1962), 192–234.Google Scholar On “Stephen's Samaritan background,” see Albright, W. F. and Mann, C. S., revisers of Munck, Johannes, The Acts of the A postles, The Anchor Bible, 31 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967)Google Scholar, who condense the researches of Abram Spiro in an Appendix of that title (V.), 285-300.

34 Brown, Raymond E., The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist, 1979), p. 37.Google Scholar

35 In an exegesis of the proverb, “Four months more and it will be harvest,” John Bowman holds that the interval is the one between the Samaritan Zimmuth Pesah (the conjunction of sun and moon near the spring equinox) and the grain harvest. The feast “was understood as celebrating the coming of Moses from Sinai after having been commissioned … at the burning bush and his meeting with Aaron” (The Fourth Gospel and the Jews [Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick, 1975], p. 114Google Scholar).

36 Brown, p. 39.

37 Ibid., p. 37.

38 Meeks, Wayne A., The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology (Leiden: Brill, 1967), pp. 216–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 As John Macdonald thinks; see The Theology of the Samaritans (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), pp. 33–34.Google Scholar

40 Meeks, p. 318.

41 Scobie, Charles, “The Origins and Development of Samaritan Christianity,” New Testament Studies 19 (1972–1973), 390–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Note especially the anti-temple sentiment at which Stephen breaks off, Act 7:48-50, and the charge that follows it, vv. 51-53.

42 Ibid., p. 408.

43 Ibid., p. 407.

44 Sloyan, Gerard S., “Israel as Warp and Woof in John's Gospel,” Face to Face, 9 (Winter & Spring, 1982).Google Scholar See Bassler, Jouette M., “The Galileans: A Neglected Factor in Johannine Research,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981)Google Scholar, who thinks, unlike me, that one cannot rely on any argument from history. Since the fourth gospel supplies liberal second level clues to the meaning of Ioudaioi, it must be doing the same for Galilaioi. She finds the latter people (not region) a designation of those favorable to Jesus, just as the former people (not region) becomes a description of those opposed to him.

45 Cf. Finkel, Asher, “Yavneh's Liturgy and Early Christianity,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 18/2 (Spring, 1981), 228Google Scholar: “Minim as God's enemies are associated with Samaritans (Midrash Haggadol to Deut. 32:41), whom Sirach describes as enemies (50:26). Similarly, in the Halakah (Tosefta Hullin 2:20) minim are grouped with idolators and Samaritans, and in the Midrash (Sifre to Deut. 32:21) they are associated with Samaritans…. This classification reflects Yavneh's position on heresy … namely, minim are like the…Samaritans [who] reject resurrection or canonical Torah.”