Note 99 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

But in this narrative there is a peculiarity which distinguishes it from the former. Here there is no simple cure, nay, the cure does not properly form the main object of the narrative: this lies rather in the different conduct of the cured, and the question of Jesus, were there not ten cleansed, etc. (v. 17), forms the point of the whole, which thus closes altogether morally, and seems to have been narrated for the sake of the instruction conveyed.99 That the one who appears as a model of thankfulness happens to be a Samaritan, cannot pass without remark, in the narrative of the Evangelist who alone has the parable of the Good Samaritan. As there two Jews, a priest and a Levite, show themselves pitiless, while a Samaritan, on the contrary, proves exemplarily compassionate: so here, nine unthankful Jews stand contrasted with one thankful Samaritan. May it not be then (in so far as the sudden cure of these lepers cannot be historical) that we have here, as well as there, a parable pronounced by Jesus, in which he intended to represent gratitude, as in the other case compassion, in the example of a Samaritan? It would then be with the present narrative as some have maintained it to be with the history of the temptation. But in relation to this we have both shown, and given the reason, that Jesus never made himself immediately figure in a parable, and this he must have done if he had given a narrative of ten lepers once healed by him. If then we are not inclined to relinquish the idea that something originally parabolic is the germ of our present narrative, we must represent the case to ourselves thus: from the legends of cures performed by Jesus on lepers, on the one hand; and on the other, from parables in which Jesus (as in that of the compassionate Samaritan) presented individuals of this hated race as models of various virtues, the Christian legend wove this narrative, which is therefore partly an account of a miracle and partly a parable.