Famous parables re-considered: Good Samaritans without bad Jews

Symon Hill, author of The Upside-down Bible, is encouraged by first-time readers to re-evaluate a series of widely cited Bible stories …

What do Jews make of the story of the Good Samaritan? It's a story that was told by a Jew to other Jews and it's mostly about Jews. Despite this, it is often used to fuel negative perceptions of Jews and Judaism.

Far fewer people in Britain are familiar with biblical stories than was the case a two, three or four decades ago, but there are few who have never heard the phrase “Good Samaritan”. Some know the gist of the story without realising that it was told by Jesus. For others, it may be the only one of Jesus' parables with which they are familiar.

This is not surprising. It's a powerful story. At the time it was told, there were many instances of hate crimes between Jews and Samaritans, groups who were different enough to live and worship separately, but similar enough to resent each other.

Jesus told the story in reply to the question, 'Who is my neighbour?'. The story involves a man walking from Jerusalem to Jericho. It is implied that he is Jewish. He is attacked and left for dead. Important Jewish officials – a priest and a Levite – leave him and pass by. But a Samaritan helps him out, takes him to an inn and pays for his keep.

Part of the story's power lies in the many ways in which it can be re-told. In Samaria, someone might have told a story about a compassionate Jew. In the western world today, we might want to tell the story of the ‘Good Muslim’. In the 1980s, a British Christian drama group produced an update of the parable in which a vicar and a social worker ignore an injured man who was then helped by a punk rocker. A left-wing group could be told a story about a wounded person helped by a Conservative politician after being ignored by a vegan chef and a Guardian journalist.

Many preachers and scholars suggest that the priest and Levite were more concerned with religious ritual than with compassion. Some scholars say that they were focused on the danger of breaking ritual purity laws.

I received a very different set of comments when I asked Jewish readers for their reactions to this parable. They pointed out that Jewish law requires not just priests and Levites but other Jews to help someone who is wounded (whether or not the wounded person is Jewish).

‘In Judaism in general, there's a commandment to be there for people,’ said Alice. Another Jewish reader, Beccy, insisted that the Jewish relationship with God is special precisely because Jews are called to be ‘a light unto the nations’.

Of the Jewish readers with whom I have discussed this passage, only one mentioned purity laws – and she said that any concern about purity should have been trumped by the more important duty of helping those in need. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, makes a similar point.

Jesus was criticising the priest and the Levite not for following Jewish law but for ignoring it. The parable of the Good Samaritan is not a story about Jews being bad but about wider issues of compassion, violence and racism.

It is bitterly ironic that a story that challenges racial prejudice has been used to fuel anti-Semitism. Listening to Jewish readers of this parable is just one example of how Christians can learn from non-Christians about the teachings of Jesus.

Symon Hill is the author of The Upside-down Bible: What Jesus really said about money, sex and violence, to be published on November 26 in paperback and eBook, priced £9.99.