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The Parable of the Good Samaritan

Satisfactory Essays

A parable is simply a metaphor or simile. Parables are drawn from nature or common life and are both vivid and strange (Dodd, 1961 in Dowling, 2010, p. 20). They leave the mind in “sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought” (Dodd, 1961 in Dowling, 2010, p. 20). In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a lawyer who aims to challenge Jesus and clarify things for himself, asks Jesus a number of questions. The lawyer asks Jesus a key question, “Who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). Jesus’ response to this reveals the purpose of the parable as a whole as it radically reshapes the traditional Jewish understanding of the Law (Collins, 2010, p.112). In response to the lawyer’s question, Jesus tells him the parable of the Good Samaritan. This essay will explore the genre and the didactic purpose of this parable and attempt to explain how the parable unpacks the Kingdom of God.

Firstly, this essay will place more emphasis on the social context of the parable. The Good Samaritan is a parable targeted at a Jewish audience. The oil and wine reflects the Samaritan situation in the first century CE (Knowles, 2004, p. 150). As we know from Josephus, when venturing outside their own communities, the Essenes took with them nothing but their white garments, more valuable than weaponry (Knowles, 2004, p.155). Luke specifies only that the man is beaten and robbed of his garments before being left for dead (Knowles, 2004, p. 155). The man’s clothing may have

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