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.
Even if we should allow that the substance of the parable goes back to Jesus, what exactly would that tell us about the historical Jesus and the historical Samaritans? In this parable, Jesus uses a Samaritan as a tool in his usual rhetorical strategy of reversing the expectations of his complacent audience: a poor, wounded man (presumably a Jew coming down from Jerusalem, perhaps from worshiping at the Jerusalem temple) is helped not by a Jewish priest or Levite (ministers of the Jerusalem temple) but rather by a despised Samaritan (who, by definition, rejects the Jerusalem temple). In the Lucan context, the parable helps to redefine (or better: it refuses to define) who ones neighbor is (10,29). Implicitly, the parable tells us that the neighbor that the Book of Leviticus commands us to love (Lev 19,18) is not only the fellow member of our own religious or ethnic community but any and every human being in need. Explicitly, though, the parable ends not with a definition of who ones neighbor is but rather with a command to act as a neighbor to anyone in need. In any event, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a call to show mercy and compassion to all the suffering members of our human community, irrespective of religious or ethnic barriers. All this supposes that Jesus deplores the hostile relations between Samaritans and Jews of his day (an idea supported by the anecdote in Luke 9,52-56), although that is not the major thrust of the parable. Admittedly, even if all this is true, it does not get us very far. We are left with the meager datum that, while not undertaking a formal mission to Samaritans, Jesus took a benign view of them51.
(4) In John as in Luke, we find both a narrative about Jesus relation to the Samaritans and a saying mentioning the Samaritans.
(a) The narrative is the famous encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4,4-42). Here we meet the problem of the relation of tradition, redaction, and possible historical core on a massive scale. No critical scholar would deny that the story as it stands