I highly recommend anyone who’s interested in the origin of the phrase “Good Samaritan” check out Isaac Asimov’s excellent essay “Lost in Non-translation.” In it, he offers a very insightful analysis of both Jesus’s parable of the Samaritan and the biblical story of Ruth.
In a nutshell, the basic problem with the common understanding of the Samaritan parable is that most people today are really not familiar with who the Samaritans were in the time of Jesus. The Samaritans were considered hated heretics, with whom the Jews had sustained a centuries-long conflict. The whole point of the parable is lost because the word “Samaritan” is not translated into its proper meaning: “someone from a group which receives and deserves nothing but contempt from us.” Asimov takes a stab at rectifying the non-translation, asking us to consider a story of a white man in the Jim Crow era South, beaten and left for dead, passed up by a mayor and a minister, but helped by a poor black sharecropper. He does a similar translation of Ruth… a widely misunderstood biblical story if there ever was one.
The essay appeared in more than one of Asimov’s books and shouldn’t be that hard to find in a used bookstore.
Also, anyone interested in an excellent (and hilarious) modernization of the Samaritan parable should check out the Veggietales video “Are you my neighbor?”
I just returned from a business trip and read the staff report explaining the historical context of the “Good Samaritan” (link supplied above by Duck Duck Goose)…
I just want to thank Dex and Euty for their report. It was thorough of course, but more importantly to me, it caused me to do a Homer (execute a head slap to myself while exclaiming “doh!”). I was raised in a Pentacostal religion and heard the Good Samaritan parable numerous times. The only message I ever received was “be kind to others in need”. I never understood the full historical context of who these Samaritans really were, so as a consequence never had it explained to me what Jesus’ true message was.
[sub]… or maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t listening closely to the sermon?..[/sub]
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My understanding is that they are now considered a “sect” of Judaism. They are “assimilated” into Israel in the sense of being Israeli citizens with full rights and wossnames thereto; they are not “assimilated” in the sense that they maintain their own separate religious practices.