Atlas and John 4

I was doing some research on John 4 and ancient cities as part of a paper. I used the atlas tool and other resources. . It says Jesus had some necessity to travel through Samaria. It is noted that the all Jews avoided Samaria since they considered the Samaritans as hypocritical and not clean. Nestle-Aland 28th edition: John 4:4 　Ἔδει δὲ αὐτὸν διέρχεσθαι διὰ τῆς Σαμαρείας. What kind of necessity is involved here?

"It was the custom of the Galileans, when they came to the holy city at the festivals, to take their journeys through the country of the Samaritans"

Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987).

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Comments

MJ. Smith

If the Bible doesn't say, we don't know. Use midrashic interpretative techniques.

GregW

I’d start with a search in Logos of how the word is used elsewhere in the Johannine writings, as well as looking it up in BDAG and NIDNTTE. By search, I mean a lemma search ( lemma.g:δεῖ) setting the range as all Johannine writings. See how John uses this word elsewhere in context, and you will get a better idea of what kind of necessity he’s referring to. I got seventeen results which give a fairly good idea of what John meant by using the word.