WHEN a Bible text is almost too familiar, it may help to read something new, to stimulate fresh insight. Or so I hoped. The writer I turned to was Augustine. He read the Good Samaritan parable in a way that was common in his time. Might this help us to see the parable anew?

If I explained the parable without reading other approaches (perhaps because I had to preach on it at short notice, as occasionally happens in ministry), I would say something like this: the good Samaritan stands for the person that all of us should be, a human being who treats others humanely. In contrast with the priest and the Levite, the Samaritan sees past human boundaries to the individual person, and shows compassion.

That Samaritan recognises what binds us together in common humanity. He treats the half-dead traveller with generosity. His kindness is not based on a quid pro quo bargain, but on a perception that he and the other are part of one human family. In contrast, the priest and the Levite, when they sidestep the traveller, sidestep that truth, too. The robbers trample it. Jesus tells the parable to show us how to be good neighbours, by showing the love that God shows.

Now for Augustine’s reading of the parable. The man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho is Adam, because Adam stands for the whole human race. Since the name “Jerusalem” means “heavenly peace”, the traveller is leaving peace behind. He heads towards Jericho. “Jericho” can be translated as “moon”, so the traveller is approaching mortality: this is because the moon waxes then wanes, which thereby signifies decay.

Augustine goes on with this ingenious creativity. The thieves are the devil and his angels, who strip the traveller of immortality. When they leave him “half-dead”, this fact stands for his ability to know God (the alive bit of him) and his being consumed by sin (the dead bit). The priest and the Levite, meanwhile, are there to represent the old covenant which could not achieve salvation.

As for the Samaritan himself, because the name means “guard”, Augustine says, he is to be identified as Christ. By now, his allegorical reading is gathering momentum, touching on every aspect of the parable. The bandages stand for Christ’s containment of sin. The oil stands for hope. The wine, for fervency. Most awkward of all? The horse stands for the incarnate flesh in which Christ came to us, because being set upon it meant = believing in incarnation. At least the inn, standing for the Church where pilgrims find shelter, was a comparison of like with like (two buildings).

The interpretation continues, but we have heard more than enough. That way of reading scripture was routine in Augustine’s time: whenever a text contained a surface meaning that was unpalatable, people resorted to allegory to make sense of it. We do not read the Bible like that any more, and a good thing, too.

I can see why, in past centuries, people tried all sorts of reading strategies to help detect meaning in texts that may have felt irredeemably obscure. But to apply such strategies to the parables feels almost like wilful misinterpretation. Look how directly, how plainly they speak to us! Christians really are better off not turning parabolic horses into metaphors for the incarnation.

I have deliberately highlighted some of the more gratuitous aspects of Augustine’s reading of the Good Samaritan parable. We could draw the lesson that this is where logic takes you once you have decided, as Augustine and his contemporaries believed, that the scriptures cannot be “wrong” — that they are “inerrant”, to use the language of fundamentalist Christianity.

Tastes change. Where people like Augustine saw every word of scripture as being saturated with significance, a world of possible interpretations opened up: readings which we would not think of in the first place, never mind consider before discarding. We are more at home with plainer fare. But not every aspect of his verse-by-verse explanation is equally unhelpful. Yes, his reading is imaginative, not historical. But when he takes the two denarii given by the Samaritan to the innkeeper as standing for the double commandment — love of God, and love of neighbour — I see more than dodgy exegesis. Hard cash is often a good indicator of what we love. Finally, we may be reaching common ground.