And they, when they had testified... — The statement involves a stay of some duration, long enough to found and organise a community of disciples. And this was followed, not by an immediate return to Jerusalem, but, as the Greek tense shows, by one with many halts, at each of which the glad tidings of “the word of the Lord” were proclaimed, and a Church founded. Did the Apostles enter on this journey into the village on which one of them had sought to call down fire from heaven (Luke 9:54)? Now, at least, he had learnt to know what manner of Spirit claimed him as his own.
The curtain falls at the close of this drama on the Christians of Samaria, and we know but little of their after history. The one glimpse of them which we get is, however, of very special interest. When Paul and Barnabas after their first missionary journey went up to Jerusalem, they passed “through Phenico and Samaria” (Acts 15:3). St. Paul also had conquered the antagonism that divided the Jew, and, above all, the Pharisee, from the Samaritan. The Samaritans heard with joy of that conversion of the Gentiles which showed that old barriers and walls of partition were broken down. Many, we may believe, would elect to take their stand on the ground of the freedom of the gospel rather than on any claim to Jewish descent or the observance of the Jewish Law. Others, however, we know, adhered to that Law with a rigorous tenacity, and left their creed and ritual, their Gerizim worship and their sacred Books, as an inheritance to be handed down from century to century, even to the present day. The whole nation suffered severely in the wars with Rome under Vespasian, and Sychem was taken and destroyed, a new city being built by the emperor on the ruins — a Roman city with Temples dedicated to Roman gods — to which, as perpetuating the name of his house and lineage, he gave the name of Flavia Neapolis (= New Town), which survives in the modern Nablous. In the early history of the Church there attaches to that city the interest of having been the birthplace of the martyr Justin, and of the heretic Dositheus. In one of the Simon legends, as stated above, the latter appears as the instructor of the sorcerer, but this is probably a distortion of his real history.