Matthew 10:5

εἰς ὁδὸν ἐθνῶν μὴ�. For the expression ‘way of the Gentiles,’ cp. ch. Matthew 4:15, ‘the way of the sea.’

This prohibition is not laid on the Seventy (St Luke 10:1-16), they are expressly commissioned to carry tidings of the gospel to cities and places which our Lord Himself proposed to visit.

εἰς πόλιν Σαμαρειτῶν. The Samaritans were foreigners descended from the alien population introduced by the Assyrian king (probably Sargon), 2 Kings 17:24, to supply the place of the exiled Israelites. In Luke 17:18, our Lord calls a Samaritan ‘this stranger,’ i.e. this man of alien or foreign race. The bitterest hostility existed between Jew and Samaritan, which has not died out to this day. The origin of this international ill-feeling is related Ezra 4:2-3. Their religion was a corrupt form of Judaism. For being plagued with lions, the Samaritans summoned a priest to instruct them in the religion of the Jews. Soon, however, they lapsed from a pure worship, and in consequence of their hatred to the Jews, purposely introduced certain innovations. Their rival temple on Mount Gerizim was destroyed by John Hyrcanus about 129 B.C. See Nutt’s Sketch of the Samaritans, p. 19.

About twenty years previous to our Lord’s ministry the Samaritans had intensified the national antipathy by a gross act of profanation. During the celebration of the Passover they stole into the Temple Courts when the doors were opened after midnight and strewed the sacred enclosure with dead men’s bones (Jos. Ant. XVIII. 2, 2). Even after the siege of Jerusalem, when the relations between Jews and Samaritans were a little less hostile, the latter were still designated by the Jews as the ‘Proselytes of the lions,’ from the circumstance mentioned above.

Samaria was the stepping stone to the Gentile world. After the Ascension the charge to the Apostles was to be witnesses, ἔν τε Ἱερουσαλὴμ καὶ πάσῃ Ἰουδαίᾳ καὶ Σαμαρείᾳ καὶ ἕως ἐσχάτου τῆς γῆς, Acts 1:8. The Acts of the Apostles contain the history of this successive widening of the gospel.