List of Appendices
5.4. Proclaiming the Year of the Lord’s Favour
5.6.6 The Samaritan Leper – Luke 17: 16
καὶαὐτὸς ἦν Σαμαρίτης (But he was a Samaritan).
The identity of one of the lepers as a “Samaritan” is very instructive. The question that came to my mind is, “Why did Luke make the Samaritan leper the hero of the story?”
Hendrikson (1978) said “it was with marked emphasis that the evangelist adds “and he was a Samaritan” as if to say ‘think of it, a Samaritan!’ One of the striking features of Luke – Acts is the prominent visibility of Samaritans. Luke specifically re-arranges the journey of Jesus in Luke 17 towards Samaria so as to plunge the readers into the Samaritan world (Luke 9:51-56). References to Samarian and Samaritans are concentrated in Luke-Acts and John. Mark and Matthew do not mention the geographical region of Samaria. In fact, they do not appear at all in the other two synoptic gospels except for a negative note about Samaritans in Matthew 10:5, “Enter no town of the Samaritans” In Luke-Acts, Samaritans appear in several different contexts, and doubtless play some theological role in the Luke-Acts schema. In Luke 17:11-19, the Samaritan leper was given prominence by Luke as the only one who came back to give thanks to Jesus. This shows Luke’s perspective on the Samaritan, who was later tagged “foreigner”
in the passage.
There have been a number of attempts to prove that for Luke these Samaritans
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should be classified as Jews. Some of Marshall’s discussion seems to indicate that the Samaritans are to be distinguished from both Jews and Gentiles. In his discussion of Acts 8, he calls them schismatic. His further comments, however, make it clear that he thinks of them as Jews when he says “Although we might be tempted to see in the mission to Samaria the Church’s first attempt to evangelize Gentiles, this would be a wrong interpretation. …… (they are) part of the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (1980: 153).
Jervell (1972:117; cf. Ellis 1966: 209), on the other hand, argues that there is something of a scholarly consensus that they are Gentiles. His statement is made with the presupposition that Samaritans must be either Jews or Gentiles. S. K. Bietenhard (in Walles 1975: 6-8) argues that the use of ἀλλογενής, which occurs only in Luke 17: 18, is evidence that Jesus regarded Samaritans as non-Jews: “The grateful Samaritan who returned to give thanks after being healed of his leprosy is called one of another race, a foreigner, for he was not a Jew”. Another factor to keep in mind is the care that Luke takes to show that these converts of Samaria are unable to experience the full benefits of the messianic message through the ministry of Peter and John. If they are Jews, then how, is it that they need such care and attention from Jerusalem?
Though of less importance in Luke’s narrative, Jerusalem’s interest in the Samaritans seems to parallel in some ways Peters later ministry to Cornelius in Chapter 10: 1 (8:16). Although, the Samaritans are not Jews, they are religiously very close to Judaism and therefore cannot be said to be Gentiles.
Luke’s point in recording the story of the Samaritan is to indicate that the gospel is embracing a group of people who have been historically excluded from Jewry, thus edging this young movement away from the fierce particularism that characterized Judaism. Preaching and extending the gospel to Samaritans represents an obvious cultural step in the movement of the gospel. But apart from the word foreigner, we might think that the Samaritans were some kind of minority group within Jewry. They are definitely not Gentiles in Luke’s understanding. Luke gives almost no information on the cultural differences between Jews and Samaritans, but when he narrates the care with which Jerusalem incorporates them into the Christian movement, which for Luke, is a theological point, it indicates a major cultural step has been taken in the gospel becoming universal. The church has taken a major step in overcoming historic racism.
According to Pilch, we can apply the theme of purity and impurity as the
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overriding category for all depictions of illness. Similarly people afflicted in one or another part of the symbolic body with sores can also be considered not wholesome.
Their perceived lack of symbolic bodily integrity is perceived to point to a deficiency in purity, wholeness, holiness. Leprosy, Pilch suggests, is a disease of boundaries. The lepers were in a medical condition paralleled by the “boundary conditions” of Jewish and Samaritan territories. Mary Douglas sees in the body a symbol of society, hence we see the powers and danger credited to social structures reproduced on the human body.
Health issues for people of Jesus’ day had less to do with the eradication of symptoms and nothing to do with the destruction of bacteria; it had more to do with the social estrangement lepers experienced when their boundary disease, seen as a social threat, excluded them from social interaction. The embrace of Jesus undid this diseased boundary condition and made them whole.
The use of the word “foreigner” by Jesus in Luke 17: 18 shows the boundary line between the Samaritans and the Jews. From the Jewish perspective the Samaritan was indeed a foreigner, a stranger, an alien. The word ἀλλογενής is a New Testament hapax legomenon. The Classical equivalents are ἀλλόθρους (Acts 10:28) and ἀλλοεθνής. In the LXX ἀλλογενής is used of non-Jews (Exodus 12:43; 29:33; 30:33). The word was used in the inscription on the barrier placed in the Temple in the court of the Gentiles stipulating that Gentiles who crossed the barrier did so on the pain of death (Plummer 1908:405;
Wallace 1960:153).
The Samaritan outcast closed the spatial gap that customarily existed between Jews and Samaritans, the distance of disease and social isolation. The cleansing of the lepers broke their human solidarity before the cleansing. The nine Jews had easy access to the temple and the priest, hence parted ways with the Samaritan. A new marginalization takes place and the Samaritan is excluded and alone; the old boundaries are re-established as the nine were too eager to fit back into the old oppressive human purity laws (Draper 1991). It was only the Samaritan, shut out, refused and oppressed owing to his race that returned to the source of the cleansing to show gratitude.
Verse 17: “Were there not ten cleansed? But where are the nine?” This is the very climax of this narrative. Bultmann (1963:33) is of the opinion that this interrogative statement could not have circulated without the preceding healing story. Betz (1971:319)
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argued that the saying could not have been original to Jesus but a ‘imitation saying’
which violates the most important feature of what it imitates. Marshall (1978:625) takes Betz’s deduction from Bultmann’s observation as illogical and sees no justification in his assumption that the story is unhistorical. The mournful remarks by Jesus about the nine lepers (all of who are assumed to be Jews) who did not return creates a difficulty for expositors. Manson (1942:196) claimed the nine can hardly be condemned for not returning from an errand on which Jesus had just sent them unless we assume that they all went first to the temple and that only one return to give thanks.
Why then Jesus’ remark? The problem here is that if this incident is historical is whether Jesus expected them to return or if it is entirely due to Luke or pre-Lukan redactor, one wonders why he makes only one out of them, and a Samaritan at that, return. Geldenhuys (1961:436) and Morris (1974:258), both of whom agreed with the historicity of this account, are satisfied with the remark that the nine were so selfishly taken up by their unexpected cure that they forgot to return appreciation to the person who had made their new freedom possible. It follows also that the problem of misunderstanding the meaning of bodily healing through divine grace on the part of many is raised, we may accept that it is of Jewish unbelief and their failure to recognize Jesus as the anointed one in spite of the many miracles he had performed; those healed went back to remain in Judaism. In the light of this Wallace (1960:184) talks of those who remain at a distance from Christ all their lives; even though they are healed, they never come back to Jesus, they keep their lives to themselves and remained untouched by Jesus in their inmost being.