Thing
Parable of the Good Samaritan
A parable told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, in which a despised Samaritan rescues a beaten stranger — read for centuries as a teaching on neighbour-love and, allegorically, on Christ.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a short story attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, where it answers a lawyer’s question — “And who is my neighbour?” A man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho is stripped, beaten, and left half-dead by robbers. A priest passes him; so does a Levite. The one who stops is a Samaritan, a member of a people the parable’s first audience held in contempt: he binds the wounds, carries the man to an inn, and pays for his care. The story closes by turning the lawyer’s question around — not who counts as a neighbour, but who acted as one.
The parable appears only in Luke, among the body of teaching the Gospel sets on the road to Jerusalem; it has no parallel in Matthew, Mark, or John. Its force depended on a contrast now easily lost: Samaritans and Judeans shared scripture and ancestry but were divided by centuries of religious and political enmity, so that the figure expected to help — the temple priest — fails, and the figure expected to be the enemy is the one who shows mercy. Scholarship treats the text as a deliberately disorienting example story, built to unsettle the boundary between insider and outsider rather than to illustrate a settled rule.
In Christian reading the parable has carried two lives. At the plain level it became, across virtually every tradition, the central image of charity owed to anyone in need, lending its name to hospitals, laws, and the ordinary phrase “a good Samaritan.” Alongside this ran an allegorical reading, developed by writers such as Origen and Augustine and widespread through the medieval centuries, in which the wounded man is humanity fallen on the road from paradise, the robbers the powers that strip the soul, the failed priest and Levite the old law unable to save, and the Samaritan Christ himself, who lifts the injured nature and carries it to the inn of the Church. On this account the inn-keeper is given charge until the rescuer returns. Such figural exegesis treated the surface narrative as the outer shell of a hidden teaching about descent, loss, and redemption — a habit of reading the same impulse that, elsewhere in late antiquity, found concealed doctrine beneath the letter of sacred text.
The two readings have an uneasy relationship. The allegory turns a story about acting toward a stranger into a drama of cosmic rescue, and modern interpreters have often argued that it overwrites the plainer ethical sting of the original. Both readings are real parts of the parable’s history, and the tension between them — moral instruction against mystical figure — is itself part of what the text has meant to those who kept returning to it.
→ Related: Gospel Of James