John P. Meier, «The Historical Jesus and the Historical Samaritans: What can be Said?», Vol. 81 (2000) 202-232

Careful analysis of the Gospels shows that there is not very much hard data about the historical Jesus’ interaction with or views about the Samaritans. There is multiple attestation, found in the Lucan and Johannine traditions, that Jesus, different from typical views of his time, held a benign view of Samaritans and had positive, though passing, encounters with some Samaritans. However, there is gospel agreement, from silence or statement, that Jesus had no programmatic mission to the Samaritans. Besides the above important conclusions, this essay also makes clear the useful distinction between Samaritans and Samarians.

        While good propaganda, this version of events is bad history. Sifting through the literary sources and the archaeological remains, many present-day historians hold that only a small part of the population of the northern kingdom of Israel was actually exiled by the Assyrians¹³. Primary targets of the Assyrian policy would have been the upper classes, especially in the capital city of Samaria. Correspondingly, those foreigners who were then brought into the former northern kingdom were probably settled in a few urban areas, the most notable being the capital city, where a new ruling class was installed. In subsequent Palestinian history, it was often this ruling class in Samaria (best called ‘Samarians’) that came into conflict with the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. Most of the population in the rural areas and small towns of the former northern kingdom would have probably remained native Israelite. In sum, then, 2 Kgs 17 gives us no direct information about the cultic community centered on Mt. Gerizim that the NT calls ‘Samaritans’.

        Consequently, how a historian is supposed to get from 2 Kgs 17 and its tendentious description of Israelite history after the destruction of the northern kingdom to the emergence of the Samaritans as a distinct religious group a few centuries before Jesus is hard to say. Our sources give us little hard data about the state of things in the former northern kingdom during most of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian rule of Palestine (i.e., from the 8th to the 4th century B.C.). What can be said is that there are no positive indications of a cultic group identifiable with the Samaritans or of any ‘schism’ between such a group and Jerusalem. While the precise historical details of the religious reform of King Josiah of Judah (reigned 640-609 B.C.) are still debated among scholars, it seems clear that his attempts to win northern Israelites back to the Jerusalem temple did not collide with any rival cult at Shechem or with any cultic group we could equate with the Samaritans of the NT period. Indeed, the Book of Deuteronomy or some part thereof apparently played an important role in Josiah’s reforms; that same book wound up as part of the Samaritan Pentateuch. Moreover, within the Masoretic Text of Deuteronomy, Mt. Gerizim is mentioned (11,29; 27,12) without any censure or slur. In fact, in both passages, Mt. Gerizim is associated with the positive cultic ritual of pronouncing