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Japanese The parable of the Good Samaritan is the story Jesus told a lawyer who wanted to know who counts as a neighbor. In Luke 10:25–37 robbers leave a man half dead on the road to Jericho. A priest and a Levite pass by. A Samaritan, from a people the listeners counted as enemies, stops and cares for him.
What happens in the parable?
Luke sets the story on Jesus’ last journey, after “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus tells it in six verses:
“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’” (Luke 10:30–35)
A Levite was a temple assistant from the tribe of Levi, serving under the priests. Luke gives the wounded man no name, no people and no religion, only his need. Many readers know the story in the King James Version, where the man “fell among thieves,” the priest and the Levite “passed by on the other side,” and the Samaritan “set him on his own beast.”
What was the lawyer asking?
The lawyer was an expert in the law of Moses, and he asked Jesus, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus sent him back to the Law, and the lawyer joined two commandments, from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus agreed: “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” Then the lawyer, “desiring to justify himself,” asked, “And who is my neighbor?”
The question had an edge. In Leviticus 19:18 the command sits in a sentence about “the sons of your own people.” Later the same chapter extends it to the foreigner living in Israel: “you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). The lawyer wanted to know where the word “neighbor” stopped.
How does Jesus turn the question around?
Jesus never says who counts as a neighbor. At the end of the story he asks something else: “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer had asked whom he was obliged to love. Jesus asks who acted as a neighbor. The lawyer answers, “The one who showed him الرحمة,” without saying the word Samaritan, and Jesus sends him off: “You go, and do likewise.”
Readers in very different traditions have drawn the same lesson from that turn. Augustine concluded that “he is our neighbor whom it is our duty to help in his need.” John Calvin wrote that “the greatest stranger is our neighbor, because God has bound all men together, for the purpose of assisting each other.” Pope Francis, in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (أيها الإخوة جميعاً), put it in the first person: “I should no longer say that I have neighbours to help, but that I must myself be a neighbour to others.”
Who were the Samaritans?
The Samaritans lived in Samaria, between Judea and Galilee, and worshipped on Mount Gerizim, by the town of Shechem, rather than at the temple in Jerusalem. Jewish tradition traced them to 2 Kings 17, where, after Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, “the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria”; Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, calls them “the nation of the Cutheans.” The Samaritans claim descent from three of the twelve tribes and regard their worship as the faithful keeping of Israel’s religion.
By Jesus’ day each side had wronged the other. Josephus records that the Jewish ruler John Hyrcanus took “Shechem and Gerizzim” and the Samaritan temple there; the Bible scholar Tim Wardle dates the temple’s destruction to 110 BC. Josephus also tells of a Passover under Coponius, the Roman governor of Judea from AD 6 to 9, when “some of the Samaritans came privately into Jerusalem, and threw about dead men’s bodies, in the cloisters” of the temple.
The Gospels show the rift: “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9). In the chapter before the parable, a Samaritan village turned Jesus away, and when James and John offered to call down fire on it, Jesus “turned and rebuked them” (Luke 9:55).
Why would a Samaritan hero shock the first listeners?
The story sets up an expectation and breaks it. Amy-Jill Levine, who teaches New Testament and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt, points out that “Jews in the first century (and today) typically are either priests or Levites or Israelites.” After a priest and a Levite, the listeners would expect an ordinary Israelite. “The parable shocks us,” she writes, “when the third figure is not an Israelite, but a Samaritan.” She warns against calling him an outcast: “Samaritans were not outcasts at the time of Jesus; they were enemies.”
Luke tells a second story like it. Of ten lepers Jesus healed, only one came back to thank him, “Now he was a Samaritan” (Luke 17:16). Levine also hears an older story behind the parable, in 2 Chronicles 28, where men of Samaria sent war captives home: “carrying all the feeble among them on donkeys, they brought them to their kinsfolk at Jericho, the city of palm trees” (2 Chronicles 28:15).
Why did the priest and the Levite pass by?
Luke does not say, and scholars disagree. The best-known explanation is ritual purity. The law told priests, “No one shall make himself unclean for the dead among his people, except for his closest relatives” (Leviticus 21:1–2), and a man left half dead might already be a corpse. The New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham suggests that the story poses a real dilemma in Jewish law, “since the commandment that a priest avoid contracting corpse-impurity conflicts with the commandment to love the neighbour,” and that Jesus’ answer implies “that the love commandment should always override others in cases of conflict.”
Levine rejects the purity reading. The priest “is not going up to Jerusalem, he is going down” from it, so he was leaving his temple service, not hurrying to it, and the rule on corpses bound priests, not Levites. She also cites the Mishnah, the code of Jewish law compiled around AD 200, which says that even a high priest must “become impure to bury a corpse with no one to bury it” (Nazir 7:1). For Levine the priest and the Levite are the storyteller’s first two figures, setting up the third.
Another reading is fear. Preaching in Memphis on 3 April 1968, the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. imagined the Levite asking, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” The Samaritan, King said, “reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”
What was the road from Jerusalem to Jericho like?
“Going down” is exact. Jerusalem stands in the hills and أريحا (Jericho) in the Jordan Valley far below. Walkers from the Bible-geography site BiblePlaces took eight hours to cover the 15 miles (24 km) from Jericho up to Jerusalem, a climb of about 3,400 feet (1,060 m). The old road ran up “the ascent of Adummim” (Joshua 15:7), and Jerome, in a letter of 404 about his friend Paula’s pilgrimage, says she passed “the place called Adomim or the Place of Blood, so-called because much blood was shed there in the frequent incursions of marauders.”
How much were two denarii?
A denarius was a day’s pay for a laborer; in another parable a landowner hires workers “for a denarius a day” (Matthew 20:2). The Samaritan’s two coins were two days’ wages, left with one stranger for the care of another, along with an open account: “whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.”
Is the Good Samaritan a picture of Christ?
For much of Christian history the answer was yes: the early church read the story both as a command and as a picture of what Christ has done. In Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the second century, the innkeeper stands for the Holy Spirit, to whom Christ entrusts the wounded man. He writes of “the Lord commending to the Holy Spirit His own man, who had fallen among thieves, whom He Himself compassionated, and bound up his wounds.” Origen, preaching on Luke, passed on a fuller version from “one of the elders”:
“The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the Law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ.”
In the same reading the inn is the Church and the Samaritan’s promise to return is the Second Coming. Origen, Jerome and Augustine also read the name itself as a title of Christ. Origen writes, “The name means ‘guardian.’” Jerome speaks of “the Samaritan, that is, the guardian,” who brought the man to “the inn of the church.” Augustine noticed that when Jesus’ opponents called him a Samaritan with a demon (John 8:48), Jesus denied only the demon, “For Samaritan means keeper.”
The allegory did not replace the plain command. Augustine held both in the same book, and Orthodox preaching still holds both, as when Fr. Daniel Kovalak of the Orthodox Church in America sees in the oil and wine “the mysteries of the Church wherein Christ Himself is manifested as the good Samaritan to us” and in the same reflection calls the parable a “call to charity.”
Protestants divided. Calvin knew the Christ reading had been “admitted by almost universal consent” and refused it: “we ought to have a deeper reverence for Scripture than to reckon ourselves at liberty to disguise its natural meaning.” Luther preached it gladly: “This Samaritan of course is our Lord Jesus Christ himself, who has shown his love toward God and his neighbor.” Catholic teaching keeps both layers. John Paul II wrote that the parable “is in profound harmony with the conduct of Christ himself,” Benedict XVI called Jesus “the Good Samaritan par excellence,” and Francis wrote that for Christians Jesus’ words “have an even deeper meaning.”
Why do laws and hospitals carry his name?
The parable has given its name to anyone who stops for a stranger. John Paul II wrote in his 1984 letter on suffering, Salvifici Doloris, that “the parable of the Samaritan of the Gospel has become one of the essential elements of moral culture and universally human civilization.”
American law generally puts bystanders under no legal duty to rescue a stranger. Good Samaritan laws exist so that fear of a lawsuit does not stop people from helping: according to Purdue Global Law School, all 50 states and Washington, D.C., have one, and they give a volunteer who gives emergency care in good faith a defense if the person helped later sues, unless the helper was grossly negligent. Vermont went further in 1968 and requires anyone who knows another “is exposed to grave physical harm” to give “reasonable assistance” when it is safe to do so, on pain of a fine of “not more than $100.00.”
Hospitals took the name too. In Cincinnati the Sisters of Charity founded St. John’s Hospital in 1852; it became Good Samaritan Hospital.
Van Gogh, Rembrandt and the Good Samaritan in art
Vincent van Gogh, a minister’s son who had once preached among the miners of the Borinage in Belgium, painted The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix) in early May 1890 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the month he left it. On or about 2 May he wrote to his brother Theo, “I’ve also attempted a copy of Delacroix’s Good Samaritan.”
Delacroix painted the subject twice around 1850, and Van Gogh copied, from a black-and-white reproduction, the version in which the Samaritan lifts the man onto his horse. The Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, which owns the canvas, says he “makes his own translation in colour and on canvas, based on his memories of the painting.” The Samaritan bends under the wounded man’s weight, an open chest lies at the roadside, and two small figures farther along the road are usually read as the priest and the Levite, as the Victoria and Albert Museum reads them in Delacroix’s other version.
Rembrandt painted the story in 1630, on a small panel now in the Wallace Collection in London, and in 1633 made an etching so close to it that “it appears that it was traced directly from the painting.” The etching seems to show the arrival at the inn, with a dog added in the foreground; the Metropolitan Museum’s impression is in the public domain.
