The Pentecostal Church, thrilled by the Spirit of the Risen Christ, is said to have awakened early to her duty to Samaria. The dispersion which followed the death of Stephen brought many preachers ' to the regions of . . . Samaria ' (Ac 8'- ■■). While Philip, and afterwards Peter and John, prob- ably laboured in the city of Samaria — now called Sebaste — itself (8°), others evangelized in ' many villages of the Samaritans' (8-*), and their efforts were not without success. The church in Sam.aria, enjoying, like those in Jud;oa and Galilee, a time of peace, was built up and multiplied (9^'). St. Paul and Barnabas, going up to Jerusalem at the end of their first missionary tour, gave a com- plete account (iK5i.r]-fovixevoi) of the conversion of the Gentiles as they went through Samaria (15"). But from this moment Samaria passes out of view. After Christ's own work there — if Jn 4^'*- is a reflexion of facts — and the primitive mission of His apostles, history has nothing more to say of the evangelization of Samaria. In the Roman wars the Samaritans made common cause with the Jews and eiulured great suilerings. Gathered on the top of Gerizim, a company of them preferred death to surrender, and 11,600 are said to have been cut to pieces by Vespasian's fifth legion (BJ ill. vii. 32). In later times they seem to have become as
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SAMARIA
SAMOTHRACE
fanatical as the Jews, and under the Byzantine Eni|ierois Zeno and Justinian they were punished for their cruelty to tlie Cliristian Cluirch. In tlie Middle Aj;es there were colonies of them in Nablus, Cii'sarea, Damascus, and Cairo. They are now reduced to a little coiiinuinity — ' forty families,' it is always said — who still sacrilice on Mt. Gerizim, 'the oldest and the smallest sect in the world' (A. P. Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, p. 240).
2. The city.— The city of Samaria, ratlier than the territory, appears to be meant in Ac 8'- '• '■', the best MSS having the article before t6\ij' ttj^ ^a/iaplas in 8°, and the genitive being probably that of apposition. This is the view of Weiss, Wendt, Blass, Knowling, and others, and, if they are right, the character of the city chosen by Philip for a Christian mission is a matter of interest. The royal city of Omri occupied a strong position on a round and isolated hill in a broad and fertile vale, about 6 miles N.W. of Shechem, commanding a splendid view (as its name Sliomron, i.e. ' Wart- bur"' or ' Watch Tower,' would indicate) across the Plain of Sharon to the Western Sea, 23 miles distant. Already partly paganized {2 K 17''''') after its capture by the Assyrians (722 B.C.), it began to he Hellenized by Alexander the Great (331). He avenged the cruel death of Andromachus, his governor in Cocle-Syria, by killing many of tlie in- habitants of Samaria, deporting others to Shechem, and substituting Macedonian colonists, who con- tinued to occupy the city till the time of John Hyrcanus. It was 'a very strong city ' (Jos. ^7i<. XIII. .\. 2) in the time of this victorious Maccab;ean prince and high priest, whose sons destroyed it after a year's siege, and took possession of the whole district for the Jews {BJ I. ii. 7). Being afterwards sepaiated from Judaea by Pompey, and made a free city {Ant. XIV. iv. 4, ',BJ I. vii. 7), it was rebuilt by Gabinius {Ant. xiv. v. 3, BJ I. viii. 4). Its second period of royal splendour began when Augustus presented it to Herod the Great, who made it an impregnable fortress with a wall 2J miles in circumference, built in it a magnificent temple to Divus Csesar, adorned it with public buildings, colonnades and gateways, settled in it thousands of his veterans along with people from the neighbourhood, and renamed it ' Sebaste ' ( = Augusta) in honour of his Imperial patron {Ant. XV. vii. 3, viii. 5, BJ I. xx. 3, xxi. 2 ; Strabo, xvi. ii. 34). That the populace was now non-Jewish — 'chiefly heathen' (Schiirer, HJP II. i. 126), 'half Greek, half Samaritan' (G. A. Smith, HGHD, p. 348) — is proved by their taking the side of the Romans, first in the conflicts that followed the death of Herod, and again in the great war which sealed the fate of the Jewish nation.
If this was the city which Philip went to evan- gelize, and in which he was joined by Peter and John (Ac 8"), it is probable that their gospel was heard chiefly, if not solely, by members of the Samaritan race, whose faith did not essentially differ from that of the Jews by whom they were counted heretical. The time was not yet come for 'turning unto the Gentiles'; that was first done in the purely Gentile city of Antioch. But the apostles obeyed their marching orders : beginning at Jerusalem, they went to Judaea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth (Ac 1*).
Herod's Hellenistic city, which he stained with the blood of his own family (Jos. BJ I. xxvii. 6), was re-created as a Roman colony under Septimius Severus ; but when the need for a fortified ' Watch- tower' was past, the tide of prosperity returned to the ancient town of Shechem (re-named Neapolis, now Nablus), and Samaria fell into decay.