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.

and not a temple building as such. This stands in contrast to the OT and later Jewish traditions that focused on the temple built on Mt. Zion²².

        Interestingly, in line with this point, no Samaritan temple is mentioned in the first Jewish (and deuterocanonical) text that clearly refers to the Samaritans (though not by that name). This highly polemical text, Sir 50,25-26, forms part of the end of the Book of Ben Sira (if we may put aside the text-critically problematic chap. 51). In Sir 50,25-26, we read, according to the Hebrew text preserved in manuscript B, a couplet in the form of a numerical proverb²³: ‘My soul loathes two nations [gôyîm], and the third is not [even] a people [(am]: those who dwell in Seir [= Edom] and Philistia, and the foolish nation [go=y na4ba4l] that lives in Shechem’ ²⁴.