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.

Luke’s schematic vision of many Jews rejecting the gospel while at least some inhabitants of Samaria accept it may be prefigured in his distinction in the story of the ten lepers: only the Samaritan has faith (pi/stij), and so only the Samaritan is not only healed physically (i)a/qh, as were the other nine) but also saved spiritually (with the full symbolic sense of se/swke/n in v. 19). While I think that the story of the ten lepers represents L tradition rather than a pure Lucan creation and that the L tradition is not simply a reworking or a variant of the healing of the leper in Mark 1,40-45, I do not feel that, given the many Christian and specifically Lucan concerns in Luke 17,11-19, the details of the story can be confidently traced back to the historical Jesus. Hence I would not want to insist on the presence of a Samaritan leper in the story as historical. This is not a question of being sure that the detail is not historical; it is simply a question of reaching the frustrating but frequent judgment non liquet (not clear).

        (b) The other Lucan narrative involves a brief reference to the beginning of Jesus’ great journey up to Jerusalem, a journey that in Luke’s story reaches all the way from chap. 9 to chap. 19 and so forms a major compositional element in the Gospel⁴³. Almost as soon as Jesus begins this fateful journey, we are told (9,52-53) that he seeks to enter a village of Samaritans, but they refuse to receive him ‘because