《Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scriptures – John (Ch. 4~Ch. 8》(Johann P. Lange) 04 Chapter 4

For the (Holy) Ghost was not yet [οὔπωγάρἦνπνεῦμα (ἄγιον).^[FN53]—For the reasons above given we keep the ἅγιον. The Spirit was already always present; the Spirit of God had evidenced Himself even in the Old Testament; but the revelation of God as Holy Ghost was not yet given. In the glorification of Christ the Spirit of God first came to view as the Holy in the specific New Testament sense. The ἦν is therefore emphatic; He was not yet present and manifest upon earth to men. The addition [δεδομένον, given, in the E. V.] in cod. B. (Lachmann) seems to be a gloss explanatory of the difficult term. Christ was conceived, in deed, by the Holy Ghost, and anointed with the fulness of the Spirit; but this was as yet a mystery to the world; the Holy Ghost could not come into the world till after the ascension of Christ, John 16:7. Hofmann (Schriftbeweis I, p196): “The outpouring of the Spirit was the demonstration of His super-mundane nature”—and of His intra-mundane existence; the appropriation of His perfect form of life and vital operation to the world (comp. Acts 19:2).—“The Macedonians were unwarranted in applying this passage against the personality of the Holy Ghost. It is metonymia causæ pro effectu.” Heubner. (Or also: metonymia existentiæ pro revelatione),

[Because Jesus was not yet glorified (ἐδοξάσθη).—By the atoning death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God the Father, from whence He promised to send and did send the Spirit, as the Spirit of the gospel redemption. In promising this Spirit, Christ expressly said that He must withdraw His visible presence from the disciples and return to the Father before the Comforter could come ( John 16:7). The previous working of the Spirit under the old dispensation was preparatory, prophetic, fragmentary and transitory, like the manifestations of the Logos before the Incarnation. On the day of Pentecost the Spirit took up His abode in the Church and in individual believers, as an immanent and permanent principle, as the Spirit of the God-Man and Saviour, as the Spirit of adoption, as the Spirit of truth and holiness, who reveals and glorifies Christ in the hearts of believers, as Christ revealed and glorified the Father, and abides with them forever.—P. S.]

John 7:40-41. When they heard the sayings [instead of this saying].—The reading: “heard the sayings,” has the weight of authorities. The total impression of Christ’s utterances at the feast is therefore intended. The “heard” is emphatic: those of the people who listened to Him with earnestness (ἀκούσαντες τῶν λόγων), said, etc.—Of a truth this is the Prophet.—Meyer groundlessly says, this means the prophet who was to precede the Messiah, not the Messiah Himself; and yet it means the person promised in Deuteronomy 18:15. That Isaiah, these people are all agreed that Jesus is the Prophet in general. After this, however, they divide. Some are decided, others are not. The ἀκούσαντες separate into ἄλλοι, ἄλλοι. The former declare outright, that He is the Prophet of Deuteronomy 18:15; He is the Messiah. The latter, who would admit Him to be the Prophet, the forerunner of the Messiah according to the Jewish theology, have a difficulty—the supposed Galilean origin of Christ. The birth of Christ in Bethlehem was unknown to them. John considers it superfluous to show up their error, and hence De Wette has gratuitously inferred that John himself did not know that Christ was born in Bethlehem.^[FN54] John well knew that the conditions of faith had to lie higher and deeper than such a circumstance. Minds which sincerely yield themselves to the impression of Christ, could easily learn His origin, and so be delivered from their error.

John 7:42. Hath not the scripture.— Isaiah 11:1; Jeremiah 23:5; Micah 5:1.—Where David was.— 1 Samuel 16.

John 7:43. So there was a division.—This division or violent split among those who accorded recognition to the Lord in different degrees, must be distinguished from the division between all those who were friendly to Him and the enemies, of whom John 7:44 at once goes on to speak, or the analogous divisions in John 9:16; John 10:18. There were at first but a few among the people, who made common cause with the hostile Pharisees. See below.

John 7:44. And some of them.—That Isaiah, not of the two preceding classes, but of the people who heard His words. As ἐξ αὐτῶν stands after ἔθελον, it is even a question whether the words should not be ἐξ ἑαυτῶν: would have taken Him of themselves, on their own responsibility. De Wette thinks they might have wished to rally the intimidated officers. But the probability is that the officers, as a secret police, as under-sheriffs, had mingled with the people; for no point is mentioned, at which they showed themselves openly; and such an arrangement would correspond with the scrupulous caution of the Sanhedrists. These hostile people, therefore, felt an impulse to open the summary process of zealotism against Jesus.—But no man laid hands on him.—They were still fettered by the counsel of God, on the one hand, the fear of the adherents of Jesus, on the other, an involuntary awe. And that the servants of the Sanhedrin did not venture to seize the Lord, we first learn in the next section.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. It yields an incongruous conception, to suppose (with Tholuck and the older expositors,) that Jesus stood and proclaimed aloud the words of John 7:37-38, while the priest was carrying that holy water through the fore-court, and the people were giving themselves up entirely to their jubilations over this symbol. Just then He would have announced that in Him was offered in reality what was there signified in symbol. So public an assault upon the temple-worship, as should assume even the appearance of a vehement rivalry, cannot be expected of the Lord. On the contrary, the eighth day, with its lack of the festal water-drawing, must have brought with it to the attendant people a sense of want, to which Jesus addressed His call with good effect. At that moment, when the symbolical lights of a legally inefficient religion were burning low and going out, the evangelical substance of the symbols appears. The points which determine the symbolical utterance of the Lord are these: (1) The water-drawing was a symbol of spiritual blessing. The redeemed of Israel, on their second return to Canaan, were to draw water on the way with joy out of the wells of salvation, Isaiah 11:12; Isaiah 12:3. (2) Siloam was situated, indeed, on the temple-hill, but it rose not in the temple itself, but outside of it, at the foot of the holy mountain. So the true spirit of life was lacking in the sacerdotal worship of the temple; it appeared most in the prophetic office, symbolized by the fountain of Siloam in Isaiah 8:6. (3) Hence the prophets foretold the future priest-hood and worship of the Spirit under the figure of a stream issuing from the temple, Ezekiel 47; Joel 3:18. All Jerusalem was to become full of fountains, Zechariah 14:8; in fact the whole people was to be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, Isaiah 58:11. (4) The eighth day of the feast of tabernacles, in its symbolical place, denoted the time of this gushing life of the Spirit; hence it was primarily a day of expectation, of longing, of prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Ghost (see Leben Jesu, II. p942). This is the Lord’s opportunity. In Him the miraculous fountain of the eighth day, for the breaking forth of which from the temple they hoped, was given to the people.

2. Out of his belly. Tholuck: “Luthardt’s observation, that ‘even the corporeal nature was to be an abode of the Holy Ghost,’—is irrelevant.” Yet this Isaiah, in fact, involved in the idea of regeneration, of the inner Prayer of Manasseh, of the members made instruments of righteousness (see Leben Jesu, II. John 945: “Their new human nature itself will become the ground whence these springs of water shall issue”). Rivers of living water. While in John 4:14, the self-replenishing of the inner life is promised, here the impartation of new life appears in its tendency to issue into the world as a stream for the refreshing of others. Comp. Tholuck, p224.

3. On the relation between the Holy Ghost and eternal life, comp. the Exegetical and Critical remarks on John 7:39.

4. For the Holy Ghost was not yet (given). In what sense? since even in the Old Testament the Spirit of God, as the Holy Spirit, inspired the prophets, 2 Peter 1:21, and was the principle of life in the devout, Isaiah 63:10-11; Psalm 51:12; Psalm 143:10. That the prophets of the Old Testament were conscious of a difference between the measure of the Spirit vouchsafed to them and the New Testament revelation of the Spirit, is shown just by the Old Testament predictions of the streams of living water (see above); of the effusion of the Spirit ( Joel 3:1); of the anointing of the Messiah with the sevenfold Spirit of God ( Isaiah 11:2; Isaiah 61:1); and of the Spirit of the inward law, or of regeneration ( Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:26). Tholuck: “The majority of ancient and modern commentators consider the difference only quantitative (one of degree). Chrysostom: Ἤμελλε τὸ πνεῦμα ἐκχεῖσθαι δαψιλῶς, etc. Chrysostom, however, gives a qualitative difference (difference in kind(?) not in the πνεῦμα itself, but in the aim of its operations: Εἶ χον μὲν οἱ παλαιοὶ πνεῦμα αὐτοί, ἄλλοις δὲ οὐ παρεῖχον. Such a difference in the πνεῦμα itself Augustine points out, in the fact that the Christian impartation of the Spirit was connected with miraculous gifts; so Maldonatus, the Lutheran expositors Tarnow, Hunnius, Gerhard, Loci, I, 308, Lyser, Calovius, Meyer.” Evidently this would not prove much; for the Old Testament prophets also wrought miracles. Brenz, in singularly arbitrary style: “Not till after Pentecost did the preaching de remissione peccatorum go forth, which was in the strict sense the opus Spiritus.”—This Isaiah, after all, of the centre of the thing, though not the whole thing. On the contrary Luthardt regards as the qualitative difference that which is indicated in Romans 8:15 and 2 Timothy 1:7 : “The Holy Ghost was not yet in His office; the old preaching and law were still in force.” That Isaiah, correctly, it was not yet the economy of the Holy Ghost. “Cocceius also, in opposition to the identification of the economies which was current in his time, presses this distinction of the tempus promissionis et consummationis. Equidem puto, hic evidentissime dici, adeo multum interesse inter tempus, quod antecessit glorificationem Christi et id, quod consecutum Esther,” etc. P226.—The complete exhibition of Christ and His work in history was the objective condition precedent of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost; the complete spiritual susceptibility of the disciples, as matter of history, and in them the susceptibility of the world, was the subjective condition.” Not until all the elements of the life of Christ and of His redeeming agency had appeared in objective and subjective reality, could the Spirit of the life of Christ enter into believers, and become the Spirit of believers. And not till then could it become manifest and begin an economy of its own as the Holy Ghost, who has His life personally in Himself (Leben Jesu, II:2, 946). The absolute exaltation of Christ above the world was the condition of His absolute sinking within the world, which made Him the principle of the new life in believers; this first brought into full manifestation that glory of the Holy Ghost which is a new form, and the third form of the personality of God, and at the same time a wholly gracious operation (gratia applicatrix). Yet this blessing of the life of Jesus must be distinguished from His personality itself, and the Spirit imparted to believers is not to be considered, as it is by Tholuck, “the Son of man Himself transfigured into Spirit.”

5. Important as it is that the dispensation of the Spirit he duly appreciated, it is wrong to talk, as the Montanists, the Franciscan Spiritualists, the Anabaptists, and Hegel do, of a separate age or kingdom of the Holy Ghost, supposed to lie beyond the kingdom of the Son.

6. The divisions among the disciples of Jesus themselves, of which the Evangelist tells us, are intimated also in Matthew ( John 16:14). In them is reflected the much larger division which was germinating between the friends and the enemies of Christ, and which is the main thing in the section before us. Lücke’s supposition that the ostensible objection that Jesus was not from Bethlehem, whence the Messiah ought to come, was made in particular by the scribes among the people, is gratuitous. But it could not enter into the Lord’s plan, to work upon the people with the testimony of His birth in Bethlehem; because His way was, to leave the popular notion of the Messiah quite aside, and to have His Messiahship recognized from His spirit and His work.

7. Here at last a knot of fanatical enemies of Jesus, who would fain seize Him, comes to light in a marked manner among the people themselves. It was the murderous intent of which Jesus had before testified: “Ye seek to kill Me.” They fain would, they well might; but involuntary reverence for the Lord, fear from above, and fear of the people, still restrained them.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

Jesus at the feast of His people: 1. At the beginning: staying out of sight2. In the middle: appearing and teaching3. At the close: standing and calling aloud.—The last day of the feast, the most glorious.—As the hours of grace decline, Christ sounds His gracious call the louder.—How majestically Christ will stand at the last day of the feast of the world, and how loud His call will be then.—Christ the true end of all feasts.—Christ the truth and substance of every sacred feast.—Even of that feast.—As the need of salvation is a thirst, so faith is a drinking (a refreshment) in the highest and holiest sense.—Thirst, as a prophetical pointing: (1) to spiritual thirst; (2) to the spiritual refreshment of salvation; (3) to the destination of the man to be a fountain of life to others.—The call of Christ at the feast of water-pouring: 1. His invitation2. His promise.—The measure of the supply which Christ gives to the believer’s thirst: 1. The believer himself shall drink2. Out of his belly shall flow streams of living water (he shall give drink to many).—As Christians are to be lights through the light of Christ, and shepherds through the staff of Christ, so they are to be fountains of life through Christ, the fountain of salvation.—“Out of his belly (body):” Even our bodily nature is to be sanctified as a vessel of the Spirit (from mouth and hand, eye and footsteps, it should trickle and stream with blessing).—The promise of the new life a promise of the Spirit.—“The Holy Ghost was not yet:” 1. The declaration2. Its import for us.—How the outpouring of the Holy Ghost was dependent on the exaltation of Christ: 1. The world must first be perfectly reconciled, before it can be sanctified2. Christ must first transcend sensuous limitation in time and space, before He can communicate Himself to all everywhere according to His essential life3. Christ must first be fully the Lord of glory, before He can glorify Himself through the Spirit in all hearts.—In Him the world was offered up to God; therefore through Him God could enter into the world.—All parts of His redemptive manifestation were completed; therefore the Spirit of the whole could come forth.—When the manifestation of the Father was completed, it was followed by the manifestation of the Son. “When the manifestation of the Son was finished, it was followed by the manifestation of the Holy Ghost; while yet this itself was a glorifying of the Song of Solomon, and of the Father through the Son.—The glory of the dispensation of the Holy Ghost.—The different effects of the words of Christ.—The division over the words of Christ.—The division between the friends and enemies of Christ shades off among His adherents themselves ( John 7:41), and among His enemies ( John 7:44).—The hand of God overruling the hands of the enemies of Christ: 1. A hand of omnipotence (they can do nothing, so long as He restrains). 2. A hand of wisdom (they can do no harm, when He lets them loose). 3. A hand of faithfulness (they must serve His people, when He lets them prevail). 4. A hand of triumph (they must destroy their own work, and judge themselves).

Starke: What it is to thirst. To long after righteousness and salvation, Matthew 5:3; Revelation 22:17, etc.—Nova Bibl. Tub.: We can most nobly keep our feast-days by coming to Jesus.—Majus: The wells of salvation are open to all men who are like dry ground.—Quesnel: In vain do we seek to satisfy our desires and quench our thirst among created things; we only thirst the more, with a thirst unquenchable, till we come to Christ.—According to the breadth and depth of the vessel of our faith will be our portion of the water.—“Rivers,” a type of overflow, Isaiah 48:18; Isaiah 66:12.—Majus: True faith is like a copious fountain; it cannot restrain itself from gushing forth in holy love.—Hedinger: Christianity spreads; it is fain to communicate itself by holy conversation, testimonies of disapproval, patience, etc.—Cramer: The world will never be of one mind concerning Christ; and yet amid a multitude of divisions the true church and the true

religion can easily be maintained.—He who loves and seeks the truth, finds it. But he who contemptuously asks, What is truth? falls into error.—Quesnel: We have not so much to fear from the evil will of men, as from our own.—Ibid.: Blessed is he who is in the hand of God, whom no fleshly arm of man can hurt.—It is the method of antichrist always to use force.—Osiander: God upholds those who follow their calling in spite of all the rage and bluster of enemies, till they have finished their course.

Braune: “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” Faith has three constituents: Longing for the satisfaction of the most stringent wants; turning of the heart to the Saviour who helps; and reception of that which He offers, and which exactly meets the longing.—From Him, from His personality as sanctified by faith, rivers of living water, active, vigorous quickenings in rich abundance overflow to others. The believer came with thirst, with the feeling of want; and he sends forth rivers.

Gerlach: While John records the grand words of the yearning invitation and mighty promise, he feels how far they were from being fulfilled to any disciple who came to the Lord at he time he spoke them; and that the day of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost was but the beginning of their true fulfilment.

Heubner: Pfenninger: Every good thing in the world must be longed for, thirsted for; else it is not a good.—Bengel: Nothing but thirst, yet sincere thirst, is needed. To him who has a true thirst, nothing is of so great account as the satisfaction of it. Without Christ everything is dry and barren: everything should drive and draw us to Him.—The believer is not only to receive vital force for himself, but also to become a fountain of life for others.—The Spirit of God is a fulness, out of which we are to impart to others.—When Christians can give but little, they prove thereby that they themselves have not much of the Spirit.—What comes from the Spirit tastes, so to speak, like fresh spring-water, not flat like water which has grown stale in a vessel.—We lack in faith, therefore lack in the spirit.—Discord commonly arises wherever Jesus and the gospel attack men.—Thorough inquiry and thorough knowledge would have solved the doubt and discord. The authors of divisions and schisms are swelling smatterers, who have no true knowledge of the Scriptures.

Schleiermacher: We see everywhere, that the Redeemer of the old, to which His people ever persist in adhering, points them at every opportunity to the new.—But what else was the fruit which the life of the Lord was to bring forth, than just this: that the fulness of the Godhead which dwelt in Him, should pass thence to the community of believers, the whole congregation of the Lord.—Besser: There is a doubleness in the nature of the church [and of every believer]: like Abraham, she is blessed and she is a blessing ( Genesis 12:2).—She is both at once: a garden and a “fountain of gardens” ( Song of Solomon 4:15-16).

Footnotes:

FN#39 - John 7:37.—[The δέ after ἐν is not without force, and should not have been omitted in the E. V.—P. S.]

FN#40 - John 7:38.—[ἐκ τῆς κοιλίας αὐτοῦ. Alford and Conant retain the strong term of the A. V. Noyes translates: from within him; Luther and Lange: body. Κοιλιά properly means belly, abdomen, bowels, stomach, as the receptacle of food, but tropically also, in Hellenistic usage, the inward parts, the inner man, the heart (καρδία comp. the Lat. viscera), and so it is taken here by Chrysostom and others. The LXX. often interchange κοιλία and καρδία. See the Exeg.—P. S.]

FN#41 - John 7:39.—Lachmann [Alford] reads πιστεύσαντες [those who believed] instead of πιστεύοντες on the authority of B. L. T. [א. D. rel. Tischend.: πιστεύοντες.—P. S.]

FN#42 - John 7:39.—Ἄγιον [Holy before Spirit] is omitted by Lachmann and Tischendorf, after the Vulgate, Itala, most versions K. T. As B. D. and others have the word, we may suppose the omission of ἅγιον to have been occasioned by doctrinal considerations, which, however, have rather made the passage more difficult than easier. Δεδομένον [given] which Lachmann, after Cod. B, retains, stands less firm. [Both ἅγιον and δεδομένον are wanting in Cod. Sin. which simply reads οὕπω γᾶρ ἥν πνεῦμα (without the article). So Tischendorf in the 8 th ed. Alford omits δεδομένον and retains ἅγιον, but puts it in brackets. Westcott and Hort put [ἅγιον] δεδομένον on the margin.—P. S.]

FN#43 - John 7:40.—Ἐκ τοῦ ὅχλου ἁκουσαντες. The πολλοί [text. rec.] or τινὲς [explanatory] are dropped, according to B. D. L. T. &c.

FN#44 - John 7:40.—Τῶν λόγων Lachmann, Tischendorf, according to [א] B. D. E. G. &c. [Cod. Sin, Tischend, Alf.: τῶν λόγων τούτων, Lat. hos sermones, verba illa, hæc verba. The text. rec. reads τὸν λόγον—P. S.]

FN#45 - John 7:41.—Instead of ἅλλοι δὲ Lachmann has οἱ δέ after B. L, etc. [Tischend. after Cod. Sin.: ἄλλοι—ἄλλοι without δέ—P. S.]

FN#46 - John 7:42.—[This is the position of the Greek, ἀπὸ Βηθλ. τῆς κώμης ὅπου—P. S.]

FN#47 - Meyer: The μεγαλότης of the eighth day consisted just in this, that it brought the great feast to a solemn close.]

FN#48 - Ὁ πιστεύ ων is an emphatic absolute nominative. The predicate is not expressed, but implied in the words ποταμοί … ῥεύσουσιν. Such irregularity is not unfrequent in the best Greek classics. It is intended to give greater prominence to the noun, hence to the necessity of faith. Similar instances John 6:39 (πᾶν); John 17:2; Acts 7:40; Revelation 2:26 (ὁ νικῶν–δώσω αὐτῷ); John 3:12; John 3:21; comp. Buttmann, Neutestamentl. Grammatik, p325.—P. S.]

FN#49 - The most remarkable and appropriate of these passages are Ezekiel 47:1-12, where rivers are prophetically described as issuing from under the threshold of the temple eastward ( John 7:1), and making alive and healing all that is touched by them ( John 7:9); Zechariah 14:8 : “And it shall be in that day, that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem” (ἐξελεύσεται ὕδωρ ζῶν ἐξ Ἰερουσαλήμ); and Isaiah 58:11, where Jehovah promises the thirsty to satisfy his soul in drought and to make him “like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” To these prophetic words the quotation applies in a free and comprehensive way, and the characteristic ἐκ τῆς κοιλίας αὐτοῦ is an interpretation in application to the individual believer. Compare here also the remarks on p 182 in regard to the fact made almost certain by recent researches that there was a living spring beneath the altar of the temple, from which all the fountains of Jerusalem were fed, the source of the “Brook that flowed hard by the oracles of God,”—the “perennial river the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God” ( Psalm 46:1).—P. S.]

FN#50 - So also Olshausen: The believer is here represented as a living temple. Alford: The temple was symbolic of the Body of the Lord (see John 2:21); and the Spirit which dwells in and flows forth from His people also, who are made like unto Him, Galatians 4:6; Romans 8:9; 1 Corinthians 3:6.—P. S.]

FN#51 - This interpretation seems rather far-fetched. The cavity of a small vessel is hardly designated by belly. Besides the Christian is not only an instrument, but a living member, of Christ, and Christ Himself is in him. Godet’s reference to the rock in the wilderness, which Moses smote, so that ἐκ τ. κοιλί ας αὐτοῦ corresponds to מִמֶּנּוּ, Exodus 17:6, is still mere artificial.—P. S.]

FN#52 - Alford justly remarks that it is lamentable to see such an able and generally right-minded commentator as Lücke carping at the interpretation of an apostle, especially John, who of all men bad the deepest insight into the wonderful analogies of spiritual things. The difficulties raised by Lücke rest in his own misapprehension. John does not say that the promise of our Lord was a prophecy of what happened on the day of Pentecost, but of the Spirit which the believers were about to receive. The water of life after all is the life of the Spirit, for the “Spirit is life” and “the mind of the Spirit is life.” Romans 8:6; Romans 8:10. The communication of eternal life always implies the gift of the Spirit of Christ.—P. S.]

FN#53 - The ἦν can, of course, not refer to the essential or personal existence and previous operation of the Spirit, who is coëternal with the Father and the Song of Solomon, who manifested Himself in the creation ( Genesis 1:3; Psalm 33:6) and through the whole O. T. economy, as the organizing, preserving, enlightening, regenerating and sanctifying principle ( Genesis 6:3; Exodus 31:3; Psalm 51; Psalm 104, etc.), who inspired Moses and the prophets ( Numbers 11:25; 1 Samuel 10:19; 1 Samuel 10:26; Isaiah 61:1; 2 Peter 1:21), who overshadowed Mary at the conception of Christ ( Matthew 1:20; Luke 1:35), who descended upon Him without measure at the baptism in Jordan ( John 1:32-33; John 3:35), but to the presence and working of the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ with the fulness of the accomplished redemption in the Christian Church, or to the dispensation of the Spirit, which, according to the promise of Christ ( John 14-16), commenced after His resurrection and ascension, on the day of Pentecost.

The readings δεδομένον, δοθέν, ἐπ’ αὐτοῖς, are all superfluous glosses to guard against a misunderstanding. If anything is to be supplied to ἦν, it should rather be present (aderat), or working (ἐνεργοῦν), or in the believers (ἐν πιστεύουσι) from the preceding.—P. S.]

FN#54 - Alford: “The mention of the question about Bethlehem seems to me rather to corroborate our belief that the Evangelist was well aware how the fact stood, than (De Wette) to ismply that he was ignorant of it. That no more remarks are appended, is natural. John had one great design in writing his Gospel, and does not allow it to be interfered with by explanations of matters otherwise known. Besides… if John knew nothing of the birth at Bethlehem, and yet the mother of the Lord lived with him, the inference must be that she knew nothing of it,—in other words, that it never happened.” Owen argues from this passage in favor of the importance of the genealogical tables of Matthew and Luke to answer Jewish objections like these against the acknowledgment of Jesus as the Messiah.—P. S.]

Verses 45-53

II

Fermentation And Pmarties In The High Council

John 7:45-53

45Then came the officers [The officers therefore came] to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, Why have ye not brought [did ye not bring] 46, 47him? The officers answered, Never man spake [spoke] like this man.^[FN55] Then^[FN56] answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived [led astray]? 48Have any of the rulers, or of the Pharisees believed on [in] him?^[FN57] 49But this people [this multitude, rabble]^[FN58] who knoweth not the law^[FN59] are cursed.^[FN60]

50Nicodemus saith unto them (he that [formerly]^[FN61] came to Jesus by night [omit by night],^[FN62] being one of them,) 51Doth our law judge any [a] man before it hear him [unless it first hear from him], and know [learn] what he doeth? 52They answered and said unto him, Art thou also of [from] Galilee? Search, and look [see]: for out of Galilee ariseth^[FN63] no prophet.

53And every man went^[FN64] unto his own house.^[FN65]