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.

stance of the Jews vis-à-vis the Samaritans on the proper place for the public, communitarian worship of God (‘we [Jews] worship what we know’, v. 22). Indeed, Jesus sums up his Jewish view of things vis-à-vis that of the Samaritans in the lapidary pronouncement: ‘Salvation is from the Jews’. One suspects that this is not a pure redactional creation of the evangelist especially noted for his polemic against ‘the Jews’. In addition, the Samaritan woman’s expectation of a Messiah who is a prophet, teacher, or revealer figure (v. 25) confirms for the 1st century what we learn from later Samaritan sources: the Samaritans awaited an eschatological figure called the Taheb. The Taheb was not a royal Davidic figure but more of a prophet-teacher-revealer like Moses (cf. Deut 18,15.18)⁵⁷. In sum, as in many other narratives in the Fourth Gospel, we seem to be hearing in John 4 early Christian-Jewish tradition that is well informed about the situation in 1st-century Palestine. Whether or not this material goes back in part to the historical Jesus, we find in John 4 an important contribution to or confirmation of our fragmentary knowledge of Samaritans in the 1st century A.D.⁵⁸.

        (b) Finally, in John 8,48 we have a saying that uses the word ‘Samaritan’. However, in this case, the saying is spoken not by Jesus