America’s Samaritan Problem

Last updated on: March 3, 2017 at 11:39 am by Michael Hardin

America’s Samaritan Problem 2017-03-03T11:39:23-04:00 Michael Hardin

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The way we read the Bible says more about us than it does about God.

As a mimetic theorist I read the Bible with a certain dose of skepticism, a healthy ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ No, I do not take the Bible at face value as the ‘Word of God’ because if I did I would be forced to say that God is genocidal, maniacal, angry without cause, arbitrary and cold hearted. This is certainly not the description of God that Jesus gives us in his teaching and in his life.

Today in America we are faced with a grave crisis. On the one hand we see the current White House embroiled in controversy, stoking the fires of mimetic contagion proffering potential scapegoats in immigrants and Muslims. This sacrificial activity is done in the name of patriotism or nationalism. We know that the Gospel has exposed clearly exactly how this administration is operating. For those who follow the living Lord Jesus, it is clear that this sort of sacrificial marginalizing will not unite the nation for there is a large percentage, even a majority, who refuse to give their blessing to this kind of politico-religious policy.

Notice I said ‘politico-religious’ because culture and religion are born within the same matrix of sacrificial ritual; there is a mutually beneficial relationship that obtains between the two. Critiquing only religion or only politics runs the risk of obfuscating this genetic relationship, they go hand in glove. It has always been the nature of the principalities and powers to frame their narrative as truth. It can only do this if it is able to seduce the whole people with its mythologizing and hiding of real victims.

In Jesus’ day, there was a nationalistic myth in Judea. It had several components. Those who promulgated it claimed to be the ‘true Israel’, descended from David, restored under Ezra-Nehemiah, and liberated by the Maccabees for a season. This is the myth of the South. It has its scapegoat, viz., the Samaritans.

Recent archeological and textual work on the origin, history, theology and liturgy of the Samaritans has overturned the heretofore popular and even scholarly interpretation that the Samaritans were some sort of syncretistic mix of Judaism and paganism following the indictment of 2 Kings 17. Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans (Eerdmans , 2016), summarizes the history of the exegesis of this passage and concludes that it does not refer at all to the Samaritans, and that 2 Kings 17 clearly betrays the hand of several redactors. In fact, Pummer contends that the Samaritans are not referred to at all in the Jewish scriptural canon. The fact is that the Samaritans were the remaining Aaronic priesthood of the Northern kingdoms. The Assyrians did not ‘exile’ the Northern Kingdom, as the Babylonians would the Southern kingdom; and archeological evidence shows Samaria as more prosperous than Judea in the Persian period. In other words, Samaritans were ancient worshippers of YHWH and were never anything else. The first person to read 2 Kings 17 as referring perjoratively to the Samaritans was Josephus and we have blindly followed this interpretation for two millennia. It is not the writer of 2 Kings that is anti-Samarian but Josephus (a Pharisee).

Josephus read the 2 Kings 17 narrative through a mythological lens. Joachim Jeremias in his book Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, citing later rabbinic sources, has Samaritans at the bottom of the social hierarchy, below even women and Gentiles. While there is still intercourse between the Judean Jews and Samaritans during this time, there were moments when things got dicey usually during pilgrimage time when Galileans would travel through Samaria on their way to the Temple in Jerusalem. Galileans were of course looked down upon by the Judeans as uncouth and unlearned (in Torah).
Jesus breaks these barriers. In Luke there are several positive references to Samaritans, and some scholars have proposed a Samaritan influence on Stephen the martyr (although this is contested). Half a century ago Oscar Cullmann (The Johannine Circle) argued for Samaritan influence on the Fourth Gospel and so did John Wick Bowman. Samaritan influence on the Epistle to the Hebrews has been ruled out. Matthew’s Gospel, written in the aftermath of the great split between Paul and the Jerusalem Church, has the anti-Pauline redacted saying in chapter 10 : “…do not enter into any village of Samaria but only to the house of Israel.” This self-identification of a Jew as a non-Samaritan flies in the face of what can be surmised about the relationship between the historical Jesus and Samaritans. In all of the stories about Jesus in relation to Samaritans (and this includes John 8), there is never a negative reference or critique of Samaritanism. Matthew’s Gospel reflects a similar post 70 C.E. Pharisaic perspective such as we find in Josephus.

The Samaritans have their own history, and that tale is quite different than the marginalizing attempts by the Judeans to change the textual history of the Pentateuch to justify their claim to power. Pummer traces this Judean hegemony to the changes in the Septuagintal readings from the Hebrew text (circa 175 B.C.E.) of Ben Sira 50:25-26 circa 124 B.C.E (the publication of the LXX text). In other words, prior to this time Samaritans were recognized as Jews, but the destruction of the Temple on Mt Gerizim by John Hyrcanus, scion of the Hasmonean family mid second century B.C.E., would have certainly created a rift that was not healed in Jesus day, and if John 4 is any indication, is still an open wound.

If we are going to understand Samaritanism we must allow them to speak as we allow Josephus’ interpretation of 2 Kings 17 to speak. Those who would in nationalistic interest, like Ezra and Nehemiah, claim that the true Judaism came back from Babylon, the true priesthood would return, the line of Zadok, did so at the expense of both history and archeology. The facts do not support this tale. Rather they bespeak an emerging construct called Judaism and the entire Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods are a constant mix of voices all clamoring for self-identity in the face of the propaganda of the ‘other.’

Today we Christians in America are faced with a similar hermeneutic crisis. A nationalistic myth with deep religious overtones is being forged in the fires of the White House. In this myth the outsider is unpatriotic because they are ‘un-American’ (which is usually ill-defined). This myth only has hegemony in people’s minds when they are blind to the Gospel of the cross of Christ where all social boundaries are eradicated, every social construct, be it sexual, class, race, or anything else, is decimated by the inclusive forgiveness and love of God displayed in Christ on the cross (Romans 11 second half, 2 Cor 5:16-21).

If Christians really wish to follow Jesus they must learn to see through the mythologizing capabilities of The Cultural-Religious Matrix. They must renounce all forms of nationalism and denounce the sacrificial religion that holds the masses enthralled, just as the Lord Jesus did in his lifetime. If Christians wish to follow Jesus they will intentionally learn to listen to the stories of the marginalized others, as did the Lord Jesus, and they will subvert their own culture’s mythmaking by including them where the dominant metanarrative excludes.

Christians must not perpetuate the Samaritan myth any longer, they have a fair and just claim to be the true heirs of Judaism before it went and got all scholastisized and bureaucratized in Babylon by the Southerners. Nor must we justify our current marginalization of others by appealing to the nationalistic myth of Southern Judaism, a myth rejected by both Jesus and Paul. Rather, like Jesus and Paul, we recognize that the world only knows how to marginalize and so we take our place with them, and in so doing, God takes God’s place with them through our acts of charity, kindness and solidarity.

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