Looking for an Analogy

What should be our relationship with those of a different religious faith? This is an inceasingly urgent and practical question.

A veneer of secular tolerance, never deep, has been thinning, chipping, and rolling off. This has uncovered some angry, ugly, and dangerous attitudes, especially concerning relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Tolerance itself is sometimes accused of being naive, unprincipled, and anti-religious.

I am a Christian. I want to be a good Christian. This means I try to live in accordance with the teachings of Jesus. What does Jesus say on this issue?

In the New Testament the inter-religious issue is framed as between Jews and Gentiles (mostly Hellenistic peoples) and between Jews and Samaritans. The relationship between Jew and Samaritan was especially tense as a result of how much was shared between the two religious traditions.

The Samaritans were (and are) a people centered in Samaria, a region north of Jerusalem (in yellow below).





Samaritan origins are disputed. The Samaritans themselves claim to be descendents of the twelve tribes of Israel, especially the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manansseh. The Samaritans see themselves as a remnant of the Northern Kingdom that survived Assyrian exile. Jews who returned to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity considered the Samaritans an entirely separate people, despite a wide range of linguistic, geographic, and theological proximities.

The Samaritans consider themselves the true descendents of Moses. The Samaritan Bible is almost identical to the first five books of the Jewish Bible. But the Samaritans do not consider the other books - the prophets and readings - to be sacred. The Samaritans focus their tradition at Shechem and Mt. Gerizim. The Jews (Judeans) looked to Jerusalem and Mt. Zion.

It was roughly 500 years from the reestablishment of the second temple at Jerusalem to the life of Jesus. Over these five centuries the religious differences - rather modest to an outsider - were exacerbated by a host of political and cultural conflicts. To Jewish contemporaries of Jesus the Samaritans were entirely other and spiritually polluted.

How did Jesus engage this otherness?