Top register: the Good Samaritan | Rossano Gospels, f. 7v | Image Source
Matthew Chalmers, Representations of Samaritans in Late Antique Jewish and Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania PhD Dissertation, 2019)
When I started graduate school, I was convinced my main project would examine Clement of Alexandria’s hermeneutical strategies. My first article, even, examined the rhetorical use of medical language in his Paedagogus – a second-century text that combines instruction on proper Christian behaviour with the performance of Greco-Roman learning [1]. Although my dissertation tackled decidedly different material, it began from the same triangulation of rhetoric, representation, and identity. How did ancient writers identify, articulate, and manage the distinctiveness of their religious identity? Moreover, which repertoires of representation interest ancient authors more than contemporary scholars? One set of representations stuck out. Intensive scholarly attention to representation as a means of identity construction for late antique Jews and Christians frequently passed over an array of early Jewish and Christian representations of Samaritans.
Among the religious groups which populated a late antique Mediterranean jostling with gods, the Samaritans are set apart as a Torah-observant community who, like Jews and Christians, traced their religious identity and their scriptures to ancient Israel (for a summary of recent work, see here). They accepted the Torah as authoritative, although resisting the addition of books beyond those of Moses and their Pentateuch differed from the Masoretic text. Moreover, they venerated the Lord, the God of Israel, with a focus on Mount Garizim, some forty miles to the north of Jerusalem. Presently an ethnoreligious minority in Israel-Palestine, there is extensive explicit evidence for discrete Samaritan communities throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, from Persian Yehud and Hellenistic Delos to late Roman Sicily, Egypt, and especially in Syria-Palestine [2]. My dissertation asked how representation of Samaritans in late antique Jewish and Christian texts can restructure the ways we approach religious identity and difference.
In Chapter 1, I challenge the habitual classification of Samaritans as a religio-racial, despised “other” in New Testament Studies [3]. I argue that this construction of the Samaritan results from a retrojection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century views on Jewishness as racial back into first-century Palestine. Despite a lack of ancient evidence, scholarship often presents first-century Samaritans as obviously alienated from Jews. I suggest that the assumption that ancient Jewish hatred ordered the world in terms of religio-racial purity has become habituated through scholarly reliance on key reference works which argue precisely this point, especially those by Joachim Jeremias. This chapter removes a roadblock to the broader study of the Samaritans in late antiquity, namely, the assumption that what needed to be understood by scholars about the relationship between Jews and Samaritans was already fixed by the time of the Gospel of Luke.
Having cleared space for expansion of the historiography of Samaritans, I turn in Chapter 2 to the pliable and varied representations of Samaritans in the works of Christians in the fourth century, a time of particularly intensive Christian self-fashioning. For Cyril of Jerusalem, both Jews and Samaritans represent real (but discrete) dangers to his catechumens due to the allure of their magical practices. John Chrysostom retells a version of their distinctive Israelite history as ammunition to deploy against his contemporary “Jews.” He conceives of Samaritans as a biblical fossil, easily weaponized to regulate his Antiochene community by impressing on them quite how far back the failure of “Jews” to respond to correction went. Finally, Amphilochius of Iconium (an understudied protégé of Basil of Caesarea; see Andrew Jacobs’ translation here), forges a striking literary analogy between Samaritan idolatry in the time of the biblical King Jeroboam and the misplaced radical piety of his ascetic opponents. To Amphilochius, his heretical opponents are Samaritans in the midst of his orthodox community. Thus, not only is the meaning of representations of Samaritans not fixed; Christian writers invoked Samaritans as part of a diverse repertoire of difference, demonstrating how generative “Samaritan” was as a category.
In Chapter 3, I focus in particular on the work done by representations of Samaritans in the writings of the arch-heresiologist Epiphanius of Cyprus. I argue that the way Epiphanius deploys his knowledge of Samaritans helps him craft a claim that Christians have the authority to manage the history of piety and heresy. It also, however, demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between universal knowledge and his own Christian identity. Sure enough, he weaponizes bookish knowledge of the Samaritans within the history of Israel, but he articulates this knowledge in ways which often decenter “Christianness” from the picture. For example, in his On the Twelve Gems, any identification of Christian truth disappears from his account of Samaritan deviance from Judaism. Instead, his account focuses on variant Hebrew scripts and the scribal role of Ezra. In order to include Samaritan Israel within the universalized scope of imperial knowledge, I suggest, Epiphanius provincializes his Christianness. Epiphanius’ techniques for managing difference cannot be reduced to a binary pair of Christian and other – and sometimes, especially with the Samaritans, he is unconcerned by this. Thus, I demonstrate how epistemological excess is not so much a failure of Christian hegemony to capture the variety of lived experience, but rather should be understood by us as a component in the multilateral engagement of Christian intellectuals with religious difference.
Turning from Christian to Jewish material in Chapter 4, I suggest that rabbinic texts also partake of the multiple possibilities of representing Samaritans seen in the fourth-century Christian material. Unlike Christian representations of Samaritans, scholars have recently studied rabbinic Samaritans (usually denoted as kutim). This scholarship has typically argued that early tolerance of Samaritans reflected in the Mishnah and Tosefta make way for categorical exclusion of the group from Israel in the Babylonian Talmud. In fact, this approach tells only part of the story. Particularly on matters of halakhah, the Mishnah does tend towards inclusion while the Bavli often explicitly rejects Samaritan incorporation into Israel. But when we look beyond halakhah, the Samaritans of the Talmud retain their concrete, non-generic difference in matters such as circumcision, legal observance, and acceptance of the teachings of rabbis. Samaritan distinction is not a simple matter, but a continued opportunity and risk; they remain, to rabbis, not-quite-other “others.” This tells us that although essentializing, abstracted categories like goy do increasingly come to shape rabbinic rhetorics of difference in the Bavli, as scholars have recently argued, “Israel” remains a contested entity. Such a realization helps us model the taxonomy of Talmudic difference more adequately. More importantly, it sows the seeds for a methodological course correction. Scholars of Rabbinic literature frequently debate the relevance of the category “heresiology” to rabbinic difference. This chapter suggests that the nativity or non-nativity of the category is besides the point. Attention to group-specific strategies for managing consensus and dissent found in both rabbinic and early Christian literature provide a basis for robust comparative work.
My dissertation accomplished my initial aim: to reposition Samaritans in the historiography of the complex religious ecosystems of Late Antiquity. But how can I extend these arguments in my current book project? So far, the book works to connect the dots plotted in the dissertation. Mapping the complexity of Samaritan identities and the representations of Samaritans by others does more than expand our accounts of late antique religious identity. It also challenges a conception of Samaritans as a minor player on the late antique religious stage, drawing conspicuous attention to the moments at which, trackable in intellectual historical terms, scholars count some representations of difference (especially those by and of Jews and Christians) as more relevant for analysing the legacy of Israel than others. While questions of Christian and Jewish boundary making have dominated our historiography, I argue that examining the tension between historical Samaritan relevance and historiographical preference enables an archival reformation.
The book has become an explicit attempt to shift and expand the set of texts that feed our scholarly analysis of Judaism and Christianity. By doing so, it aims to make space for a diachronic history of late antique religion that resonates for a richer range of ancient material. By incorporating Samaritan representation of difference in their own late antique midrash and piyyutim, and distilling chapters on discrete textual corpora into an approach ordered in terms of strategies of representation, my book seeks a model for the incorporation of groups often reduced to peripherality – Samaritans, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and so forth – into mainstream scholarly discussion. What happens when we render Samaritans as full-bodied participants in an array of representation and counterrepresentation, as both subjects and objects of strategies of differentiation?
I’m gesturing at work to come in this, a dissertation spotlight, for one simple reason. A dissertation is a significant achievement. It really matters. It is a testing ground for your ideas. It is an unrivalled context for developing your writing voice. It is the first project, often, that many of your future colleagues will ever associate with you – and if the number of peer-review requests for articles related to Samaritans I’ve received since August is any guide, there’s no getting away from those associations for at least the immediate future. It is also, nevertheless, a springboard.
[1] “‘Seeking as Suckling’: The Milk of the Father in Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus I.6,” Studia Patristica 72 (2014): 59-73 (here).
[2] Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016)
[3] See for example Bruce W. Longenecker, “The Story of the Samaritan and the Innkeeper (Luke 10:30-35): A Study in Character Rehabilitation,” BI 17 (2009), 422-447; many such references take as their point of departure Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967 [Ger. 1962])
[4] Esp. see Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)
Matthew Chalmers is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Washington and Lee University and Deputy Editor of Late Antiquity at Ancient Jew Review (Twitter: @Matt_J_Chalmers).