Rick Van Vliet

The Untold Story of the Samaritans, Jews, & Jesus

Introduction:

No one has been so systematically persecuted over the last 3000 years as the Samaritans. About the only one that spoke kindly of them was Jesus, who did so repeatedly, as strongly as he could, and was even accused of being one of them.

They claim to be the lost tribes of Israel that split with the current Jews 3000 years ago, with an older more genuine Written Law. Turns out, they're probably right. It's the biggest coverup in all biblical scholarship, and probably explains the censorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls for decades by the Jews and Christians as they deteriorated. The further you go back in time, such as to the Dead Sea Scrolls, or LXX, the more it is like the Samaritan version, and less like the current official Masoretic Jewish version, or Christian version. Some of the DSS are Samaritan. And there's one scroll, in possession of the few remaining Samaritans, the Nablus Roll, that may be even older than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And recently, genetic evidence has shown up that not only did the Samaritans split with the current Jews around 800BCE, (with the destruction of Israel being in 722 BCE), but that genetically at least with that same common Cohen Y-Chromosome gene, they are noticably more Jewish than the Jews.

The Jewish/Christian and Samaritan Versions of their History

Sometime around 1000BCE, the Hebrews split in two, with Israel in the north, and Judea in the south, with very bitter hatred on both sides. The kind of bitter rivalry and sheer hatred only seen in civil wars. In 722BCE, the Assyrians conquer Israel and carry off some of them to Assyria. Everyone agrees on that. But then the paths diverge.

The Samaritans say the original home of the Ark, and the center of Hebrew religion was Mt. Gerizim, not Jerusalem, that the Temple of Solomon was just a copy of their more important version at the mountain. As for David and Solomon being important, history takes the side of the Samaritans, with some even claiming they didn't exist, because of the shortage of evidence. One wonders what would show up on Mt. Gerizim if 1% of the effort had been made digging there. (For what it's worth, the three Muslim Hadiths that describe where the Ark is hidden say in general that it's near or on a mountain in the northern Israel/southern Syria-Lebanon area. That's definitely where the Samaritans would hide it. They wanted it bad, said it was stolen from them, and they were there when it disappeared.)

The Jews and Christians have virtually always claimed that few of the original Israelis remained, and those that did remain, converted to paganism, and that the Assyrians imported lots of Assyrians to replace them. The Samaritans say the Assyrians left some alive, and they survived and kept their more accurate version of the religion. The Assyrians records support the Samaritan version, by dragging away only 27,000, a tiny percentage. Did some Assyrians repopulate there? No doubt some.

In 586BCE, Babylon conqured Judea, and the Jews were sent into captivity in Babylon. Putting aside how many of those Judean Jews also remained, Cyrus the Great, who really was, set them free in 539BCE, and they returned to Judea. The Jewish story is told by those that returned from Babylon, and they claim the Samaritans weren't genetically Jewish, and got their ideas about the Written Law from them. The Samaritans say they soldiered on, keeping the Law as good Hebrews all along.

The Jews that returned from Babylon and the Samaritans were bitter enemies, with seething hatred and wars up to and after the time of Jesus. The New Testament talks about the blind hatred of the Samaritans, with Jesus always saying the most complimentary things about the Samaritans possible, usually at the expense of the Jews. Worth noting, that Israel included Galilee, and what was to become the little town of Nazareth. At the time of Jesus, the Jews had control of that part of old Israel, but Samaria and the Samaritans were closer to Galilee than Jerusalem. Not that Christians took his lead. The Samaritans had a rather different story of most of the Old Testament, and refused to convert to Christianity, so Justinian, the Christian Emperor, slaughtered almost all of them. With the Muslim conquest, many of the survivors converted to Islam. By 1900, only about 150 remained, and now it's about 700. They are finally accepted as Jews, serve in the Israeli army, and live mostly in Israel, near their reveared mountain. Genetically very inbred, with strict intermarrying laws, they don't seem to have a bright future.

Here is a neutral and Jewish version of the history, and more...
http://www.bible-history.com/Samaritans/index.html
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/vi...d=110&letter=S

Modern Evidence of Samaritan and Jewish Genetics:

A sensitive subject, the Jewish Encyclopedia says...

"For example, the Samaritans are the tallest people in Syria...Both the facial and upper facial indexes of the Samaritans are far greater than those of any other group...in thickness of lips they again head the list...The length of second finger is greatest in the Samaritans....

the Samaritans are by no means an exclusively brunette type. As seen by the presence of blue eyes and light hair or beards in a considerable percentage of the individuals examined, there is, on the contrary, a distinct blond type noticeable in the group.

The general type of physiognomy of the Samaritans is distinctly Jewish, the nose markedly so...

...The Samaritans have thus preserved the ancient type in its purity; and they are to-day the sole, though degenerate, representatives of the ancient Hebrews."

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=110=S

Recent analysis of the Y-Chromosome genetics shows that the Samaritans split from the Jews around 800BCE, just like they said all along. They were right and everyone else was wrong. No only that, but in three of the four remaining groups, an amazing 100.00% have the ancient Cohen gene, making them far more Jewish than the Jews, and apparantly all the decendents of priests...

"The Samaritan community, which numbered more than a million in late Roman times and only 146 in 1917, numbers today about 640 people representing four large families....Principal component analysis suggests a common ancestry of Samaritan and Jewish patrilineages. Most of the former may be traced back to a common ancestor in the paternally-inherited Jewish high priesthood (Cohanim) at the time of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel...

...the Samaritan and Jewish Y-chromosomes have a much greater affinity than do those of the Samaritans and their longtime geographical neighbors, the Palestinians. However, this is not the case for the mtDNA haplotypes...distances of Samaritans to Jews and Palestinians for mtDNA are about the same...the low mitochondrial haplotype diversity suggests that the rate of maternal gene flow into the Samaritan community has not been very high...

...This six-microsatellite haplotype, together with its one-mutation neighbors, form a cluster that is found at frequencies of 69.4 and 61.4% in Ashkenazi and Sephardic Cohanim, while its frequency in the general Jewish population is about 14%...To our surprise, all non-Cohen [one of the four remaining groups is called Cohen] Samaritan Y-chromosomes belonged to the Cohen modal cluster...

we speculate that the Samaritan M304 Y-chromosome lineages present a subgroup of the original Jewish Cohanim priesthood that did not go into exile when the Assyrians ...conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 BC, but married Assyrian and female exiles relocated from other conquered lands"...

Ok, so the Samaritans were right, and the Jews, Christians, Historians and Biblical Scholars were wrong. What else were they wrong about? Perhaps they are wrong that a group of Hebrew priests that kept their genetics intact without a single solitary non Hebrew male for 3,400 years, didn't keep their original Written Law intact too...

Continued in following post...

Rick Van Vliet

Continued from first post...

Which Written Law is Older and More Genuine?:

The longer you got back in time the closer the Jewish version gets to the Samaritan version. The Samaritan version is much closer to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the LXX than to the current Masoretic. Some of the DSS are Samaritan. The oldest Samaritanphysical document is the Nablus Roll, which is probably about 200 BCE, but uses a script the Jews used between around 550 to 700BCE, apparantly because the Samaritans chose to keep the older script and the Judean Jews didn't. It's evidence other than the script that tends to pin it to a few centuries before the common era.

But what's important, is that the evidence is, the Samaritan version spilt with the Jewish version, at approximately 700BCE. Matching the genetics, the history of the Assyrian invasion, and the story the Samaritans have been telling all these years.

One big material difference between the two is the Samaritan version has Mt. Gerizim as the center of the religion. Another big difference is that the God of the Samaritans (and they can use the word) is less
anthropomorphic, more abstract, and a shortage of other supernatural beings. Very similar to the abstract Living Father of the Gospel of Thomas and it's total lack of angels, demons, satans etc.

"Some of the philosophical differences are a little less central. For example, the Samaritan version shows much less anthropomorphism than the Masoretic version. Exodus 15:3 in the Masoretic version reads "The LORD is a warrior," or more literally the Hebrew says "the LORD is a man of war," whereas the Samaritan version does not call God a "man," but says that God is "a hero of war" or "mighty in war." Perhaps this is also the reason behind the difference of reading in Genesis 48:16, which reads in the Masoretic version äîìàê äâàì àúé ("the angel who redeemed me"), while the Samaritan version has äîìê instead ("the king who redeemed me"), thus putting the focus on God and not an angel."
http://web.meson.org/religion/torahcompare.php

And an excellent source, with all the facts...

Pentateuch, The Samaritan
(From International Standard Bible Encyclopedia)

"The reader on opening one of the codices of the Samaritan Pentateuch recognizes at once the difference of the writing from the characters in an ordinary Hebrew Bible. The Jews admit that the character in which the Samaritan Pentateuch is written is older than their square character...When Jewish hatred of the Samaritans, and the contempt of the Pharisees for them are remembered, this admission amounts to a demonstration. The Samaritan script resembles that on the Maccabean [~150BCE] coins, but is not identical with it. It may be regarded as between the square character and the angular, the latter as is seen in the manuscript and the Siloam inscription [~700BCE]...The study of these alphabets. will confirm the statement above made that the Samaritan alphabet is, in evolution, between the square character and the angular, nearer the latter than the former, while the characters of the Assouan papyri [~550BCE] are nearer the former than the latter...

Only visual blunders are of real importance, and they point to a date about the days of Hezekiah [~700BCE] as the time at which the two recensions began to diverge. One thing is obvious, that the Samaritan, at least as often as the Massoretic Text, represents the primitive text...

It ought to be observed that the cases in which the Septuagint differs from the Massoretic Text are much more numerous than those in which the Samaritan differs from it. One has only to compare the Samaritan, Septuagint and Massoretic Text of any half a dozen consecutive chapters in the Pentateuch to prove this. Thus neither is dependent on the others...

It follows that the Massoretic Text is the result of a process which stopped somewhere about the end of the 5th century AD. The origin of the Massoretic Text appears to have been somewhat the result of accident. A manuscript which had acquired a special sanctity as belonging to a famous rabbi is copied with fastidious accuracy, so that even its blunders are perpetuated...

If our hypothesis as to the age of the Nablus roll is correct, it is older than the Massoretic Text by more than half a millennium, and the manuscript from which the Septuagint was translated was nearly a couple of centuries older still...

The result of investigation of the Samaritan Pentateuch is to throw very considerable doubt on the validity of the critical opinions as to the date, origin and structure of the Pentateuch...

In the case of the Nablus roll this tarikh occurs in Deuteronomy and occupies three columns. In this it is said, "I Abishua, son of Pinhas (Phinehas), son of Eleazar, son of Aharun (Aaron) the priest, have written this holy book in the door of the tabernacle of the congregation in Mt. Gerizim in the 13th year of the rule of the children of Israel in the land of Canaan."...Dr. Mills seems almost inclined to believe the authenticity of the tarikh..."
http://bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuse...-Samaritan.htm

Godless Raven

Is there some reason you decided to spam all this shit word for word, directly from this website??

http://www.religiousforums.com/forum...ews-jesus.html

Rick Van Vliet

I wrote it.

Got any questions?

Rick Van Vliet

And thank you for the compliment.

Godless Raven

Oh, you wrote it? Great. So you got banned from that website (according to your status over there). Are you making the rounds Rick/Kurt/Whatever?

Godless Raven

Oh look! Maybe this is why you got banned over there...here you are re-posting this same steaming pile on the same website.

http://www.religiousforums.com/forum...-original.html

Rick Van Vliet

What are you on about?

Yes, it's a sensitive subject, the Samaritan version of things, is different than the Christians and Jews. Rubs some people the wrong way.

That's why the Dead Sea Scrolls were kept secret for decades. They're as much like the Samaritan version of things, as the Jewish/Christian.

Godless Raven

No, I'm talking about the part where you start telling everyone that Samaritans are the real Jews and get banned from the website for ad hominem attacks. I'm referring to your modus operandi.

Nevermind. Anyone that wants to see how this dicussion plays out can take a look at those two links (particularly the second one) to see how you flood the same post and eventually lead to the Jews are not the real Jews - while ignoring and flinging ad hominems at actual scholars (one of which I am not on the subject).

Rick Van Vliet

Well, I'm flattered by your fascination with me personally.