The Good Samaritan: What the Parable Answers (9 of 26)

The lawyer asks a question and never gets it answered.

He asks who his neighbour is. Jesus tells a story and then asks him which of the three men in it was a neighbour to the wounded man. That is a different question, and the substitution is the whole lesson.

What Is Wrong With the Lawyer’s First Question?

It contradicts itself, and a man in his profession would know it.^[1]

What must I do to inherit eternal life. Inheritance, by definition, is what one family member receives from another. It is not wages. Nobody earns an inheritance by performance, and a specialist in the law of Moses spent his working life with texts about inheritance.

Ibn al-Tayyib noticed something else about it a thousand years ago. The natural question for a religious lawyer is how can I obey God. That is not what he asks. He asks what he must do to secure an outcome for himself, which is a different orientation entirely.

The same question comes back at Luke 18:18 from the rich ruler, in the same words, and gets an answer he also cannot meet. Both times a short parable sits at the centre of a tightly constructed exchange.

What Was the Lawyer Actually Doing?

Testing, and then defending himself, and Luke says both.

He stands up to test Jesus. Jesus turns the question back and asks what is written in the law. The man answers correctly, with the two great commands, and Jesus tells him to do that and he will live.

Notice the order he gives them in. Love the Lord your God comes from Deut 6:5. Love your neighbour as yourself comes from Lev 19:18. Quoted in the order they appear in the canon, the neighbour command would come first. He puts God first, and Bailey reads that as the correct arrangement rather than an accident: loving an unlovely neighbour has to run on something, and a person sustained only by the responses he receives will stop when the responses stop coming.

He was also not the first rabbi to compress the law that way. A generation earlier a Gentile asked Shammai to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot and was driven off. He asked Hillel, who told him that what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour; that is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it. Jesus takes the same reduction and turns the negative form positive.

Which should have ended it. Instead Luke says the man wanted to justify himself, and asked who his neighbour was.

That second question is a request for a boundary, and there was a text ready to supply one. Lev 19:18 says love your neighbour as yourself, and the same verse limits it to the sons of your own people. Stop reading there and the obligation has an edge. Read sixteen verses further into the same chapter and the stranger who sojourns with you is to be loved as the native-born. And if a man prefers the other direction entirely, Ps 139:21-22 is available, where the psalmist hates God’s enemies with perfect hatred.

The lawyer is not looking for guidance. He is looking for a stopping point, and Scripture is large enough to supply one to anyone who reads selectively. That is not a first-century problem.

Bailey reads the exchange as Jesus handing him a standard he cannot meet, so that he might discover eternal life is not earned. Snodgrass objects that this reads a concern into the parable that the parable does not have, and prefers a different account: the question is not what do I have to do but what kind of person are you.

Why Did the Priest and the Levite Pass By?

Bailey’s answer is that the man was stripped and unconscious, and that removed every marker they needed. It is a good answer and it is also a contested one, so I am going to give it as his and then give the case against it.^[2]

Clothing identified a person in that world. So did speech and accent. A naked, silent body on a roadside is unidentifiable, and on Bailey’s reading the priest cannot tell whether he is looking at a Jew he must help, a Gentile he need not, or a corpse whose touch would defile him.

Contact with a dead body cost a priest a week of purification and the income from his tithes during it, and his household’s income with it. Bailey pushes the risk further than inconvenience. The Mishnah records what happened to a priest who served at the altar in a state of uncleanness: the young priests took him outside the Temple Court and split his skull with clubs. Even the possibility of being accused would frighten a careful man.

The Levite’s problem, on the same reading, is social rather than legal. He was almost certainly aware that a priest was on the road ahead of him, and may well have been that priest’s assistant. Should a Levite publicly do what a priest had just declined to do? And whatever he decides on the road, he will be in Jericho that evening, and so will the priest.

I had the purity dilemma in the first version as though it were settled, and it is not. Levine, Snodgrass and Blomberg all reject it, and their objections are hard to get round. The priest is going down from Jerusalem, which Luke says in the first line of the story; his temple duty is behind him, so there was no service to protect. Touching a man who is half dead defiles nobody, and the priest’s own book, Lev 21, would have required him to check whether the man was alive. Even if he had found a corpse, the rabbinic texts hold that the duty to bury a neglected body falls on a high priest and a Nazirite alike, and they argue only about which of the two should defile himself first. And a life in danger set aside every purity rule there was. Levine’s shortest point is the Levite: he had no priestly purity to protect at all, so whatever explains the priest cannot explain him, and the story gives them the identical verb.

Snodgrass allows that the parable sits inside a real halakhic argument over which command takes precedence, avoiding a corpse or loving the neighbour, but his verdict is that more is going on than corpse defilement. Levine’s preferred motive is Martin Luther King’s: the priest and the Levite asked what would happen to them if they stopped, and the Samaritan asked what would happen to the man if he did not.

Where that leaves me is that Bailey has described what a careful priest might have told himself, and the others have shown that his own law would not have let him off. Both can be true. Each man had a question he could dress up as a duty, and each resolved it in favour of his own position, which is worse than simple callousness rather than better.

Bailey’s point survives the objection. Neither man could locate his duty by consulting a code. Compassion reaches past what any law specifies, and that is precisely why the code did not help them.

Why Is the Third Man Not a Jewish Layman?

Because the story sets up a series and then breaks it, and the break is where the parable does its work.

Priest, then Levite. Any first-century listener knows what comes third. The sequence is the standard division of Israel and the next term is an ordinary Jewish layman, which would make the story a comfortable piece of anticlericalism. The professionals fail and one of us does the right thing.

The audience is waiting for that man and he never arrives.

Bailey’s comparison for what this felt like is that settlers in the American West did not tell stories in which the hero was an Indian. There is a category of person your own community’s stories do not permit to be the good one, and Jesus reached for it deliberately.

A word on how that hostility usually gets documented. Commentaries on this parable often say that Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues and that Jews prayed daily that Samaritans would have no share in the life to come, and some add that accepting help from a Samaritan was believed to delay Israel’s redemption. I have not used either line and I would not. Snodgrass traces the curse to a misreading of the twelfth of the Eighteen Benedictions, which is aimed at heretics and may be later than the first century anyway, and the redemption claim to the misuse of a late Talmudic passage. Levine follows the redemption claim back through the reference works to Walter Grundmann, who ran the Nazi-era institute for removing Jewish influence from the German church. The hostility was real and can be shown from Sirach, Josephus and the Mishnah without it.^[3]

There is also an older story underneath this one, and three of the commentators I read think Jesus built on it. In 2 Chr 28:8-15 the army of the northern kingdom, Samaria, takes two hundred thousand captives from Judah. A prophet named Oded confronts them, and the leaders of Samaria clothe the naked among the prisoners, give them sandals, food and drink, anoint them, put the weak ones on donkeys, and carry them to Jericho. Levine, Snodgrass and Blomberg all name that passage as the source text, and Snodgrass thinks it a better fit than the Hosea 6 echoes Bailey found. Once you have seen it, Jesus’s Samaritan is doing what Samaritans had once done in the Bible the lawyer knew: clothing, anointing, a donkey, Jericho. Levine’s summary of the earlier story is that the people who want to kill you may be the only ones who will save you.

He could also have told it the other way round, in Samaria, with a good Jew rescuing a wounded Samaritan. That version teaches the same thing about mercy crossing lines and costs the audience nothing. He inverted it instead.

The lawyer’s reaction at the end confirms the hit. Asked which man was a neighbour, he cannot bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He answers, the one who showed him mercy.^[4]

What Did the Samaritan Risk?

More than money, and this is the part usually reduced to generosity.

He puts a wounded Jew on his own animal and walks him into a Jewish town. Then he stays the night at the inn.

A Samaritan arriving in Jewish territory with an injured Jew invites the obvious conclusion, and the obvious conclusion in that setting could get him killed. Bailey reads the overnight stay as the sharpest detail. He does not drop the man at the door and leave before anyone can react. He remains, and settles the account in the morning.

There is a reason he cannot simply leave him at the edge of town. Innkeepers had poor reputations, and a lodger who could not pay his bill could be held and sold to recover it. This man has nothing at all, not even clothes. Without the two denarii down and the promise to cover the rest on the way back, the rescue is void the moment the Samaritan rides away.

And the story does not close. Whether the Samaritan got out of that town alive is not stated, which is the same open ending several of these parables use. The audience is left holding it.

Bailey also notes how the last three scenes answer the first three. Robbers took everything the man had; the Samaritan pays out of his own pocket. The priest failed to move him; the Samaritan carries him. The Levite could at least have bound the wounds; the Samaritan binds them. The story is built as a ring, in a Jewish rhetorical form, by someone who expected Jewish readers to hear it.

Is the Good Samaritan a Picture of Jesus?

Bailey argues yes, and it is worth marking as an interpretive reading rather than the plain sense.

On that reading the parable is not only ethics. It is a picture of what Jesus is doing, told to a man asking about eternal life: help arrives from the direction the audience despises, at cost to the helper, for someone who could not ask for it.

Snodgrass will not go there. He grants that the oil and wine might echo the temple offerings, though at most as irony, and he credits Bailey for the definition the parable actually produces: your neighbour is the one you see in need. But on the identification itself he is blunt. He sees no justification in the parable for it, and calls every attempt to find Jesus mirrored in the story illegitimate allegorizing. Levine files the church fathers’ version of it, with the man in the ditch as the sinner and the Samaritan as Christ, under allegory that would have mystified a first-century Jewish audience.

The christological reading does not cancel the ethical one and it is not required by the text. It sits alongside, and anyone teaching this should be clear about which of the two they are presenting.^[5]

What Is the Question Jesus Substitutes?

Who is my neighbour is a question about limits. Which of these became a neighbour is a question about action.

The first can be answered with a list, and a list can be completed. The second cannot be answered at all except by doing something, and it never finishes, because the answer is anyone in need regardless of language, religion, or origin.

Snodgrass puts the same move a third way, and his version is worth keeping. Our fear of earning salvation has produced an idea that Christianity is concerned only with what a person thinks rather than what a person is, and that is a shallow understanding of belief. The parable, like most of Scripture, is about identity. When people asked Jesus what they had to do, he asked in return what kind of person they were.

The lawyer wanted to know how far the obligation extended. He was told to stop measuring and go.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the parable of the rich fool and the great banquet.

Footnotes5

1. The mismatch between doing and inheriting is easy to miss in English because we use inherit loosely. In a legal register it is precise, and the man asking was a legal specialist. Whether Jesus is playing on it deliberately or the lawyer simply spoke carelessly cannot be settled from the text, but the tension is there and the answer he gets does nothing to relieve it.
2. How the priest's dilemma is handled matters for how the parable is preached. Presenting him as a heartless man who could not be bothered makes the story comfortable, because most listeners are confident they are not that. Bailey's version, a man weighing a real cost and choosing his own position, is less comfortable. The objection from Levine, Snodgrass and Blomberg is less comfortable still, because it removes the cost: on their reading the priest had no purity to protect on the way down, his own law told him to check the body, and he passed anyway. Either way the listener who thinks he is not the priest should look again.
3. The curse claim usually appears as a quotation from Oesterley, that the Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues and a petition offered daily that they might not be partakers of eternal life. Snodgrass notes that the twelfth benediction it rests on is a curse against heretics, that it may have been added toward the end of the first century, and that one recent argument has the pre-70 form aimed at the Sadducees. The delay-of-redemption claim comes from Strack-Billerbeck's handling of b. Baba Batra 10b, and Levine follows it back to Grundmann's 1957 life of Jesus. The evidence that does hold up is Sirach 50:25-26, which calls the people of Shechem not even a people, the bone-scattering in the temple that Josephus reports from just before AD 9, and the Mishnah's line that eating Samaritan bread is like eating pork, which another rabbi in the same passage rejects.
4. That the lawyer will not say the word Samaritan in his answer is the smallest detail in the passage and one of the most telling. He has understood the story completely and he still cannot get the name out.
5. Christological readings of parables need a higher bar than ethical ones, because they are easier to construct and harder to falsify. This one has an unusually good case, since the parable is told in answer to a question about eternal life rather than a question about conduct, and Bailey can list Origen, Ambrose and Augustine behind it. It is still a reading rather than the text's own claim, two of the four modern commentators I read reject it outright, and the post says so.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 22. Supports the reading of the lawyer's second question as a request for a boundary, the significance of the order in which he quotes the two commands, the priest's dilemma over an unidentifiable body (presented here as Bailey's reading, with the objections to it), the Levite's social position relative to the priest, the deliberate inversion of the expected third figure, the Samaritan's risk in entering a Jewish town and remaining overnight, the ring structure in which the last three scenes answer the first three, and the christological reading. Supplied in full.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Good Samaritan". Objects that reading the parable as an argument against self-justification imports a concern the parable does not have, and offers the identity question in its place. Rejects the identification of the Samaritan with Jesus as illegitimate allegorizing while granting the oil and wine as possibly, at most, ironical. Sets out the case against the purity defence: the duty to bury a neglected corpse bound even a high priest or a Nazirite, and nothing, not even purity laws, stood in the way of saving a life. Names 2 Chr 28:8-15 as the passage the parable is almost certainly moulded on, and finds the Hosea 6 contacts less compelling. Identifies the synagogue-curse claim as a misappropriation of the twelfth of the Eighteen Benedictions and the delay-of-redemption claim as a misuse of a late tradition in b. Baba Batra 10b. Credits Bailey on the definition of neighbour. In print, and in Logos.

Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperOne, 2014), chapter 2. Supports the objections to the purity defence: the priest is going down from Jerusalem; there is nothing impure about touching a man who is half dead; Lev 21 would have required the priest to check whether the man was alive; and the presence of the Levite makes the priestly concern irrelevant. Traces the delay-of-redemption claim through the reference works to Walter Grundmann. Supplies the 2 Chronicles 28 reading and the line that those who want to kill you may be the only ones who will save you. Gives Martin Luther King's framing of the two questions. In my Logos library.

Craig L. Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), chapter 7, the Good Samaritan. Supports the point that the direction of travel removes the purity excuse, since priestly service in Jerusalem afforded no excuse for neglect when the clerics were heading home to Jericho, and cites Spencer on 2 Chronicles 28 as the parable's source. In my Logos library.

Mishnah, Sanhedrin 9:6, on the penalty for a priest who served at the altar while unclean, cited by Bailey. Compiled c. AD 200. The complete Soncino Talmud, which carries the Mishnah text, is free in full at halakhah.com.

Mishnah, Nazir 7:1, on the high priest and the Nazirite both contracting uncleanness for a neglected corpse, cited by Snodgrass and Levine. Same collection and access as above.

Babylonian Talmud, Shabbath 31a, for the exchange between the Gentile enquirer, Shammai and Hillel. Compiled c. AD 500 to 600, so the story is attested late even though the two rabbis are first century BC.

Ibn al-Tayyib, eleventh-century Baghdad physician, monk and biblical commentator, cited in Bailey. Never translated into English.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 10:25-37, Luke 18:18, Deut 6:5, Lev 19:18, Lev 19:33-34, Lev 21:1-4, Ps 139:21-22, and 2 Chr 28:8-15.

Where the sourcing stops: the christological reading is Bailey's and is presented here as an interpretation rather than the plain sense of the passage, and Snodgrass and Levine both reject it. The purity regulations governing a priest's contact with a corpse are standard background rather than something Luke states; the reconstruction of what the priest was weighing is Bailey's inference from those regulations, and the first version of this post presented it as settled when Levine, Snodgrass and Blomberg all argue it cannot be. The Levite's relationship to the priest ahead of him on the road is not in the text and is Bailey's proposal. The Hillel and Shammai exchange is preserved in a source compiled around AD 500, which is late evidence for a first-century BC conversation. That the parable was built on 2 Chronicles 28 is a scholarly proposal (Crossan and Spencer first, then Snodgrass, Blomberg and Levine) rather than something Luke signals; the verbal and plot contacts are what carry it. The rabbinic passages on corpse burial and the Eighteen Benedictions are cited through Snodgrass and Levine; I have not checked them against a full edition.