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.

in John 4 reflects John’s own theology and his way of structuring a story to serve that theology. The narrative betrays typical theological concerns of John and typical Johannine vocabulary⁵². Especially prominent as a structuring device of the whole story is what we might call a ‘christology of encounter’. As elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel (the gathering of the first disciples in John 1,35-51; the blind man who gradually comes to see who Jesus really is in 9,1-39), a person (or a group of persons) who has not previously met Jesus ‘bumps into him’, struggles to understand and articulate who he is, and runs through a series of titles or descriptions, usually in a carefully arranged ascending order of prominence. This is certainly true of the Samaritan woman, who is guided by Jesus on a spiritual journey that leads her from an initial, slightly hostile reference to Jesus as ‘you, a Jew’ (4,8) through descriptions of him as ku/rioj (‘sir’ or ‘lord’ in 4,11.15), an ironic question about whether he is greater than the patriarch Jacob (4,12), and an affirmation that he is a prophet (4,19), to the climactic though hesitating suggestion to her fellow Samaritans that this Jew may be the awaited Messiah (4,25 + 29). After encountering Jesus themselves, the Samaritans conclude this narrative essay in christology with the choral acclamation: ‘This is truly the Savior of the world’ (v. 42). Fittingly, then, right in the midst of the story, during an interlude in the action, Jesus seems to refer prophetically to the future mission of the early Christian church to the Samaritans (vv. 31-38; cf. Acts 8)⁵³.

        All this makes one wary of claiming that behind this magnificent