NOTES. JOHN VII. 25-36.

25.-[Then said some of...Jerusalem, etc.] It is likely that these speakers were some of the lower orders who lived at Jerusalem, and knew what the rulers wanted to do to our Lord. They can hardly be the same as "the people" at 20th verse. They, being probably strangers to the plans of the priests and Pharisees, said, who goeth about to kill thee?" These, on the other hand, say, "is not this He whom they seek to kill?"

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Tittman remarks that the argument of the preceding verses appears to have had great weight in the minds of our Lord's hearers."

26.-[But, lo, he speaketh boldly, and they say nothing, etc.] There appears to have been a restraining power put on our Lord's enemies at this juncture. (See verse 30.) It certainly seems to have struck the people before us as a remarkable thing, that our Lord should speak out so boldly, openly, and publicly, and yet no effort be made by the rulers to apprehend Him and stop His teaching. No wonder that they asked the question which immediately follows. "Have our rulers changed their mind? Are they convinced at last? Have they really found out that this is truly the Messiah, the Christ of God."

The Greek words would be more literally rendered, “Have the rulers truly learned that this man is truly the Christ?"

27.-[Howbeit we know this man whence he is.] This means that they knew that our Lord was from Nazareth of Galilee. This, we must remember, was the universal belief of all the Jews. When our Lord rode into Jerusalem, just before His crucifixion, the multitude said, "This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee." (Matt. xxi. 11.) When an inscription was put over His head on the cross, in the letters of the three languages, it was "Jesus of Nazareth the king of the Jews." (John xix. 19. See also Matt. xiii. 55; Mark vi. 3; Luke iv. 22.) Yet we know all this time that the Jews were mistaken, and that our Lord was in reality born at Bethlehem, according to prophecy. (Micah v. 2.) We can hardly doubt that the Jews might have found out this, if they had taken the pains to inquire narrowly into the early history of our Lord's life. In a nation so strict about pedigrees and birth places, such a thing could not be hid. But it seems as if they would not take the pains to inquire, and satisfied themselves with the common story of His origin, as it gave them an additional excuse for not receiving Him as the Messiah.

The entire ignorance which appears to have prevailed among the Jews, about all the circumstances of our Lord's miraculous conception, and His birth at Bethlehem, is certainly rather remarkable. Yet it should be remembered that thirty years had passed away between our Lord's birth and His public ministry,-that His mother and Joseph were evidently in a very humble position and might easily be overlooked, as well as all that happened to them,-and that living quietly at Nazareth, their journey to Bethlehem at the time of "the taxing" would soon be forgotten by others.

After all we must not forget that it is part of God's dealings with man, not to force conviction and belief on any one. The obscurity purposely left over our Lord's birth-place was a part of the moral probation of the Jewish nation. If, in their pride and indolence and self-righteousness, they would not receive the abundant evidence which our Lord gave of His Messiahship, it could not be expected that God would make unbelief impossible, by placing His birth of a virgin at Bethlehem beyond the reach of doubt. In this, as in everything else, if the Jews had honestly desired to find out the truth, they might have found it.

[When Christ cometh, no man knoweth, etc.] It is rather difficult to see what the Jews meant by these words. Most writers think that they referred to the mysterious language of Isaiah about Messiah," Who shall declare his generation " (Isa. liii. 8); or to Micah's words,- "Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting" (Micah v. 2); and that they had in view the Divine and heavenly origin of Messiah, which all Jews allowed would be a mystery. Yet it is hard to understand why they did not say, "when Christ cometh, He shall be born in Bethlehem,' and why they should be supposed to speak of our Lord's earthly origin in the beginning of the verse, and of Messiah's Divine origin in the end. There seems no explanation except to suppose that these speakers were singularly ignorant Jews, who did not know that Messiah was to be born at Bethlehem, and only knew that His birth was to be a mysterious thing. This is a possible view, if not a very probable one.-The argument of the speakers before us would then be as follows:- "When Messiah comes, He is to come suddenly, as Malachi foretold, saying, 'the Lord shall suddenly come to His temple' (Mal. iii. 1), unexpectedly, mysteriously, and taking people by surprise. This man therefore, who is sitting in the temple among us, cannot be the Messiah, because we know that He came from Nazareth in Galilee, and has been living there for more than thirty years."-The prophecy about Messiah being born at Bethlehem, they conveniently dropped out of sight, and

in fact never dreamed that it was fulfilled by our Lord. The only prophecy they chose to look at was the one in Malachi (Mal. iii. 1), and as the Lord did not appear to fulfil that, they concluded that He could not be the Christ.-In religious matters people are easily satisfied with very imperfect and superficial reasoning, when they want to be satisfied and to be spared further trouble. Men never want reasons to confirm their will. This seems to have been the case with the Jews.

Rupertus mentions a common tradition of the Jews,-that when Christ came, He would come at midnight, as the angel came at midnight, when the first-born were destroyed in Egypt, and he thinks it may have been in their minds here.

Hutcheson observes that "not comparing of Scripture with Scripture, but taking any single sentence that seems to plead for that we would be at, is a very great nursery and cause of error. Such is the Jews' reasoning here. They catch at one thing, speaking of Messiah's Divinity, and take no notice of other places."

Besser quotes a saying of Luther's, "The Jews are poor scholars. They have caught the sound of the prophet's clock (Micah v. 2), but they have not noted the stroke aright. He who does not hear well, imagines well. They heard that Christ was so to come, that none should know whence He came. But they understood not right, that coming from God He was to be born of a virgin, and come secretly into the world."

28.-[Then cried Jesus...temple.. taught.] This is a remarkable expression. We find our Lord departing from His usual practice, when we read that He "cried," or raised His voice to a high pitch. Generally speaking, the words in St. Matthew apply strictly, quoted from Isa. xlvii. 1,—“ He shall not strive nor cry, neither shall any man hear His voice in the street." (Matt. xii. 19.) Yet we see there were occasions when He did see it right to cry aloud and lift up His voice, and this is one. The perverse ignorance of the Jews, their persistence in blindness to all evidence, and the great opportunity afforded by the crowds around Him in the temple courts, were probably reasons why He "cried."

Our Lord is only said to have "cried" or lifted up His voice in four other passages in the Gospels,-viz., Matt. xxvii. 50; Mark xv. 39; John vii. 37, and xii. 44. The Greek for "cried" in Matt. xxvii. 46 is even a stronger word than that before us.

[Ye both know me, and...whence I am.] This is an undeniably difficult expression: partly because it is hard to reconcile with

John viii. 14, and partly because it is not clear how the Jews could be said to "know our Lord" and "whence He was." The explanations suggested are various.

(1) Some, as Grotius, Lampe, Doddridge, Bloomfield, Tittman, and A. Clarke, would have the sentence read as a question :-" Do you both know me, and do ye know whence I am? Are you quite sure that you are correct in saying this?"-In this view it would be rather like the mode of expression used by our Lord in John xvi. 31, —“Do ye now believe?" where the interrogative forms the beginning of the sentence.

(2) Some, as Calvin, Ecolampadius, Beza, Flacius, Gualter, Rollock, Toletus, Glassius, Olshausen, Tholuck, Stier, and Webster, think that the sentence is spoken ironically :—“Truly you do know me and whence I am, and poor miserable knowledge it is, worth nothing at all."-Bengel and others object to this view, that our Lord never spoke ironically. Yet it would be hard to show that there is no irony in John x. 32, if not in Matt. xxvi. 45, and Mark vii. 9.

(3) Some think, as Chrysostom, Cocceius, Jansenius, Diodati, Bengel, Henry, Burkitt, Hengstenberg, Alford, Wordsworth, and Burgon, that the sentence is a simple affirmation :—' "It is true that you know me and whence I am. I grant that in a certain sense you are right. You know where I have been brought up, and who my relatives according to the flesh are. And yet in reality you know very little of me. Of my Divine nature and my unity with my Father ye know nothing at all.”—On the whole I prefer this last view to either of the other two.

[And I am not come of myself, etc.] This sentence and the rest of the verse are evidently elliptical, and must be paraphrased to give a full idea of the sense :-" And yet ye do not really and thoroughly know me; for I am not come of myself, independent of God the Father, and without commission, but sent by the Father into the world. And He that sent me has proved Himself true to His promises by sending me, and is indeed a real true Person, the true and faithful God of Israel, whom ye, with all your profession, do not know."

Here, as elsewhere, our Lord's expression, "not come of myself," points directly to that intimate union between Himself and God the Father, which is so constantly referred to in the Gospel of John.

Here too, as elsewhere, our Lord charges on the unbelieving Jews ignorance of the God whom they professed to serve, and for whose

honour they professed to be jealous. With all their boasted zeal for true religion and the true God, they did not really know God. The word "true," here, is of doubtful interpretation. It means "truthful," according to Cyril, Chrysostom, Theophylact, Lampe, Tholuck. But it is not clear that this is so. Alford maintains that it must mean 66 'really existent." Trench takes the same view in his "New Testament Synonyms."

29.-[But I know him, etc.] The knowledge of which our Lord here speaks, is that peculiar and intimate knowledge which is necessarily implied in the unity of the three Persons of the Trinity, in the Godhead. There is a high and deep sense in which the Son knows the Father, and the Father knows the Son, which we cannot pretend to explain, because it is far above our capacities. (John x. 15.) The Jews knew nothing rightly of God the Father. Jesus on the contrary could say, "I know Him," as no one else could. "Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." (Matt. xi. 27.)

The expression "I am from Him," must not be confined and cramped down to mean only that our Lord had come like any prophet of old, with a message and commission from God. It declares the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. "I am from Him by eternal generations, —always one with Him,—always equal with Him,—but always a distinct person;— always the only begotten Son,-always from Him.

The expression "He hath sent me," is, like the preceding one, something far more than the mere assertion of a prophet's commission. It is a declaration that He was the Sent One,-the Messiah, the Prophet greater than Moses, whom the Father had always promised to send :-"I am the Seed of the woman sent to bruise the serpent's head. I am He whom the Father covenanted and engaged to send for the redemption of a lost world. I am He whom the Father hath sent to be the Saviour of lost man. I proclaim myself the Sent One,-the Christ of God."

Bishop Hall paraphrases the two verses thus, " Ye mutter secretly that ye know me, and the place of my birth and parentage; but ye are utterly mistaken, for I have a Father in heaven whom ye know not. I came not of myself, but my Father is He that sent me, who is the God of truth; of whom ye, after all your pretences of knowledge, are utterly ignorant. But I do perfectly know Him, as I have good reason; for both I am from Him by eternal generation, and am by Him sent into the world to do the great work of redemption.'