The New Testament Wasn't Written Last Week

The New Testament wasn't written last week. Unfortunately, this obvious fact leads to some real difficulties for those of us who read it. In this blog post, I'm going to address three of those difficulties.

Difficulty #1: The Bad Samaritan
     When we hear the word "Samaritan", we almost automatically put "Good" before it in our mind, because probably the most famous parable of all is the parable of the Good Samaritan. The word "Samaritan" has an almost wholly positive connotation. Samaritan's Purse is a charitable relief organization and Samaritan Ministries provides a Christian health cost sharing organization. Some states have even enacted "Good Samaritan" laws to protect people who try to help someone in distress.
     However, when we think "Good Samaritan" we are thinking almost the opposite of what the early New Testament readers would think. I've been in churches where some half-explanation of this has been offered - it's usually along the lines of "Jews really didn't like Samaritans, but Jesus showed them that they should." This has sometimes been accompanied by the message that Jews traveling from Galilee to Judea veered far out of their way to avoid going through Samaria, leaving the congregation with the impression that there was a ridiculous level of prejudice present. All this is an unfortunate result of our reading the New Testament with today's ears, rather than first century A.D. ears.
     Most first century New Testament readers who were familiar with the Samaritans would have thought "Bad Samaritans," and with good reason. The Samaritans were named after the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital city of Samaria. Samaria produced a remarkable 200-year perfect record of every single king there being bad, according to the book of 2nd Kings. When God's judgment finally came, the Samaritans were displaced by the Assyrians and partially replaced by foreigners, with the result being a syncretic religion where God was worshipped along with foreign deities. When Nehemiah returned to build the walls of Jerusalem, the Samaritans opposed his work.
     By the time of the New Testament, the Samaritans had adopted a religion similar to but different from Judaism. They accepted only the Torah, the five books of Moses, rejecting the rest of the Old Testament. Furthermore, the Samaritans had altered the text, producing a modified version of the Torah which included in multiple places instructions to worship on Mount Gerizim. You can find the Samaritan Pentateuch on the internet today and compare. They were politically hostile to the Jews, as evidenced by their refusal to let Jesus and his disciples pass through their territory in Luke 9:52-53. No one would think it strange that the horrible charge leveled against Jesus was that he was "a Samaritan and had a demon" (John 8:48).
     So when we read about Samaritans in the New Testament - whether the helpful one in the parable, or the one who was healed and turned back to say thanks, or the lady at the well with a messed up life, we need to think "Bad Samaritan." We need to remember that these folks started from a position of hostility to the people of God. Their religion was heretical and in general they did not show hospitality to Jews. If we carry that impression of Samaritans with us when we read the scripture, then the true import of its message will be much more powerful. Samaritans may be rotten - but they are still our neighbor. Samaritans are woefully lost, but Jesus still wants to save them.

Difficulty #2: The Good Pharisees
     OK, the pharisees were not all good, but when people of the first century thought of pharisees, they were thinking from their own knowledge and experience, which would give a different picture than the primary one we get in the New Testament. Today, pharisees are thought of almost entirely as really legalistic religious people and really hypocritical religious people, due to their sharp arguments with Jesus and His blistering condemnation of them, particularly in passages like Matthew 23. Yet even in the Bible the picture is more nuanced than that.
     The word "pharisee" is derived from the Hebrew word for "separate." The pharisees originated during the period when Greek Hellenistic culture dominated the middle east. The Hellenistic culture was pagan and polytheistic, entirely hostile to the values and beliefs taught in the Bible and held by believing Jews. Furthermore, the Hellenistic culture carried all the aura of belonging to the winners, while those faithful to God were the conquered losers. It was in this environment that the pharisees arose, going against the grain and vowing to be faithful to the Law of Moses and the traditions of their people.
     The pharisees held beliefs more doctrinally correct than those of other Jewish factions. The pharisees believed in the inspiration of the entire Old Testament. They believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead, with the righteous dead going to a place they called "Abraham's bosom," while the wicked would be cast into a "lake of unquenchable fire."  All men would, after death, stand before the "Judgment Seat of God the Word... whom we call Christ." (This description is from Josephus, Discourse to the Greeks Concerning Hades. The wording matches the New Testament so closely that the authenticity of the treatise has been questioned. In any case, the point remains that the pharisees' doctrine on a number of major issues was correct.) The other prominent religious party was the Sadduccees, who believed none of the above, accepting only the Law of Moses as inspired.
     Readers today sometimes get wrong impressions from phrases like "chief priests and pharisees." The chief priests were Sadduccees, and were frequently cross-wise with the pharisees except that there was considerable agreement between the two in their opposition to Jesus. Since the Sadducees controlled the priesthood, they were the more politically powerful faction.
     Some pharisees would eventually convert and follow Jesus (Acts 15:5). The apostle Paul apparently considered himself to still be a pharisee even after his conversion (Acts 23:6). At other times, some pharisees tried to be helpful or were more sympathetic (Luke 13:31, John 3:1 and Acts 5:34).
     All this background draws a more sympathetic picture of the pharisees, yet one is still left with the fact that overall, the gospels are sharply critical of them. What should this teach us? I think that the main thing is this: if we consider ourselves to be conservative Christians, we should read the gospel criticism of the pharisees as a warning to us. We are the ones most like the pharisees. We are the ones who are more committed, like the pharisees. Like the pharisees, we are the ones who are trying to live a life separate from our worldly culture. Like the pharisees, we have our doctrine much more correct than the liberal branches of the Christian faith. So if Jesus warns the pharisees against legalism, we need to take that warning very much to our own heart, as we can easily embrace convictions that are not scripturally mandated. Then, after we do embrace stricter convictions and disciplines, we can feel more righteous than our neighbors because, say, we refrain from something they don't. Like the pharisees, we have a terrific temptation to be hypocrites. Being a hypocrite first requires that one has an actual standard of conduct (like we do). Everyone can then see that we have a standard, and when a Christian falls, or just falls short of the standard, the hypocrisy is a terrible witness.

Difficulty #3: Slaves or Servants?
     Romans 1:1 begins, "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ..." Or some translations read "slave" instead of servant. One can also find "bond-slave" and "bond-servant." The Greek word is "doulos," and the basic and most correct translation is simply, "slave." But there's a big problem translating the word doulos as slave - the problem is in our own American history. For an American, it is not possible to think of slavery without immediately thinking of the American experience of slavery, which was entirely race-based. If we read "slave" in the Bible it is impossible to get the picture of American black slavery out of our head, since American racial slavery was a dominant factor in our nation's history and left us a heritage that still bedevils us today. But that picture is all wrong. Slavery in the New Testament era was not race-based. So the best translation in terms of accuracy is still "slave," but if a translation chooses another word, I wouldn't blame them.