John 8 - The New International Commentary
3 The incident begins when “the scribes and Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and stood her in the center” (v. 3). While the mention of the Pharisees seems appropriate after the Pharisees’ attempt to arrest Jesus in the preceding chapter (see 7:32, 45–52), “the scribes” appear nowhere else in John’s Gospel. The operative phrase is either just “the Pharisees” (7:32, 47, 48 and frequently), or else “the chief priests and the Pharisees” (7:32, 45; see also 11:47, 57; 18:3).* More to the point, the reader would have expected the Pharisees to try again to arrest Jesus (see 7:30, 32, 44) instead of merely inviting his judgment as to the fate of another fugitive. The notice that they did this “so that they might have [reason] to accuse him” (v. 6) seems to forget that they already had ample reason to accuse him (see 5:16, 18), and that they were in fact already seeking his life (see 7:1, 11, 19, 21–23, 25). Instead the woman takes “center” stage (
4–5 The woman has been “caught in the act of committing adultery” (v. 4), presumably by at least two witnesses who are present and ready to testify against her (see Deut 17:6; 19:15). “Teacher,” her accusers ask Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of committing adultery, and in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” Their use of the title “Teacher”* is more characteristic of synoptic controversy narratives* than of John’s Gospel, where everywhere else (except for Nicodemus in 3:2), “Teacher” occurs only on the lips of Jesus’ disciples (see 1:38; 11:28; 13:13, 14; 20:16). Their question, “So what do you say?” is intended to test whether or not Jesus is willing to affirm the law of Moses. Despite being charged with breaking the Sabbath (5:16, 18), he has already appealed to the law in his own defense (7:19, 21–23), and will do so again (8:17–18), and they would like very much to trap him into contradicting or disregarding the law on a specific point other than the Sabbath.
Some have argued that affirming the law would also have been a trap for him because the Romans at the time did not allow the Jewish people to carry out the death sentence.* This is unlikely in view of Pilate’s two explicit statements to the Jewish leaders regarding Jesus himself after his arrest, “Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law” (18:31), and “Take him yourselves and crucify” (19:6). If the Gospel writer represents Pilate as commanding them to carry out the death penalty, he must have believed they had the right to do so.* Thus the intent of the scribes and Pharisees could not have been to put Jesus in a dilemma between the conflicting demands of Jewish and Roman law, but rather to trap him purely on the basis of Jewish law. As far as they were concerned, there could be only one “right” answer to their question: that the stoning should proceed as the law required. Clearly, their intention was flawed because according to biblical law in such cases both the man and the woman who had committed adultery should have been stoned, and if the woman was indeed “caught in the act,” her partner must have been present and should have been arrested as well.* Yet Jesus ignores their error. It only confirms, after all, his judgment that they “judge according to the flesh” (see v. 15). Instead, he adopts a very different strategy.
6 At this point, a narrative aside informs the reader, “This they said testing him, so that they might have [reason] to accuse him.” Such narrative asides are, as we have seen, very characteristic of this Gospel writer,* and are frequently introduced with the expression, “This he said,” or something similar (see 6:6; 7:39; 11:51; 12:33; 21:19; also 2:21; 12:6). The parallel to Jesus’ own words to Philip in 6:6 is particularly striking: “This he said testing him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.” But here (uniquely in John’s Gospel) Jesus is the one being tested: “This they said, testing him.” They too knew (or thought they knew) what they were going to do, and were “testing” Jesus to see if he was on board with their plans. The closer kinship of the reference is to a number of incidents in the other Gospels in which Jesus’ opponents “tested” him either by asking for a sign (Mt 16:1; Mk 8:11; Lk 11:16; compare Jn 2:18; 6:30), or questioning him (as here) about his interpretation of the law (see Mt 19:3; 22:35–36; Mk 10:2; Lk 10:25, 29), or in one instance about the payment of taxes to Caesar (see Mt 22:18, “Why are you testing me?”). In contrast to 6:6, where the notice is intended only to underscore Jesus’ total control of the situation, the purpose here (as in the synoptic Gospels) is to alert the reader that “the scribes and Pharisees” asked the question not to learn wisdom from their respected “Teacher,” but solely “that they might have [reason] to accuse him.”
Jesus’ response is surprising. Nothing in any of the stories in Matthew, Mark, or Luke quite prepares us for it. He “stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” Much has been written about what words Jesus may or may not have written, but it is all speculative.* Essentially his response is a non-answer, equivalent to silence, as is clear from the comment to follow that “they kept on questioning him” (v. 7). His body language is, if anything, even more striking than the reference to writing on the ground. The account is punctuated by notices that he “stooped down” and wrote (v. 6), “straightened up” and spoke to the gathered crowd (v. 7),* again “stooped down” and wrote (v. 8), and finally “straightened up” and spoke again, this time to the woman (v. 10).* While it cannot be proven that the story rests on the testimony of an eyewitness (Who would it be? The woman?), details of this kind, even if they had no apparent meaning, would not have been easily forgotten by anyone on the scene. If not attributable to an eyewitness, they point to a storyteller eminently skilled at creating a dramatic effect.*
7 In the face of Jesus’ silence and apparent disregard for their question, the scribes and Pharisees “kept on questioning him,” presumably asking the same question again. Finally “he straightened up and said to them, ‘The one without fault among you, let him first throw a stone on her’ ” (v. 7). His words seem to presuppose that the woman has already been tried and convicted, for according to Scripture, when a person has been convicted on the testimony of at least two witnesses, “The hands of the witnesses must be the first* in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people” (Deut 17:7, NIV). If the woman has indeed been “caught in the act of committing adultery” by the requisite two witnesses (see v. 3), and if the witnesses are indeed present (as would seem to be the case), then Jesus is inviting one of them to do what the law requires. If for any reason the actual witnesses were not present, then anyone who picked up a stone in response to Jesus’ words would in effect be taking on himself the role of witness against the woman. The law required that such witnesses not be “malicious” or “lying” witnesses (see Deut 19:16–18). Jesus’ version of that requirement is that this person be “without fault,”* a term denoting not so much abstract “sinlessness” (in the sense in which later Christian theology has believed Jesus himself to be sinless), as simply personal integrity before God in the matter at hand.* That is, whoever takes on himself the role of witness-executioner must be confident before God that he is doing the right thing—hardly an unreasonable demand.*
8 This time Jesus’ body language, as “again he stooped down and wrote on the ground” (v. 8), signals that he has said all he is going to say. The next move is up to the woman’s (and his) accusers. Either they will question him further or they will not. Either they will take up stones to stone the woman or they will not. In contrast to the first time he stooped down (vv. 6–7), they are silent. There are no more questions. A reader familiar with the other Gospels might have expected a notice that “No one could answer him a word, nor did anyone dare question him any more from that day on” (Mt 22:46; see also Mk 12:34; Lk 20:40). In John’s Gospel, there are of course many more questions to come (see vv. 12–59), but within the present story the “testing” is over, almost as soon as it began (see v. 6).
9 The actions of “the scribes and Pharisees” speak more loudly than anything they could have said, as “those who had heard went out one by one, beginning from the elders” (v. 9). Again, the scene is one that would have caught the attention of an eyewitness.* “One by one, beginning from the elders” is both dramatic and ceremonious, not soon forgotten. At the same time, the phrase “beginning from the elders”* evokes Ezekiel’s image of judgment on Israel to “begin from my sanctuary” (that is, from the Jerusalem temple, the scene of the present story), so that the agents of judgment “began from the men who were elders, who were inside in the house” (Ezek 9:6, LXX).* Instead of condemning the woman, Jesus’ words have in effect condemned the temple and the Jewish religious establishment, scribes, Pharisees, chief priests, and elders alike. In this sense the story of the woman caught in adultery mirrors the longer account in which it is embedded, Jesus’ temple discourse at the Tent festival, in which similarly the accused becomes the agent of God’s judgment on the accusers. For the moment, Jesus is “left alone,” still bent over, preoccupied with what he is writing, with the woman still standing “in the center” (as in v. 3).*
10–11 As before, “Jesus straightened up,” and only then spoke. His words are gentler than those to her accusers (v. 7). He asks her two simple questions, as if he did not already know the answers: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “Woman” is his characteristic way of addressing women in this Gospel (4:21; 20:15; see also Mt 15:28; Lk 13:12), even his own mother (2:4; 19:26). While the address implies no disrespect, it does put her at a certain distance, just as in Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, and she replies in the same vein, “No one, sir,”* There is no hint that the woman caught in adultery has by this time come to believe in Jesus, or indeed that she ever did. It may be so, but it is not the point of the story. When she acknowledges that no one has condemned her, and Jesus replies, “Nor do I condemn you,” he is not so much pronouncing on her eternal salvation as simply confirming that she does not deserve to die. He does not say, as he says in certain other Gospel stories, “O woman, great is your faith” (Mt 15:28), or “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace” (Lk 8:48). He says only, “Go, and from now on sin no more” (v. 11), recalling his words to the sick man he had healed at the Bethsaida pool, “Don’t sin any more, or something worse may happen to you” (5:14). The implication there was that the sick man did not believe in Jesus, and that he did sin again, almost immediately in fact (see 5:15–16). No such implication is left in the case of the woman, as the story is left open-ended.
When the story is read as part of the Gospel of John, regardless of when it may have been added to the Gospel, it becomes a kind of subtext to Jesus’ temple discourse at the Tent festival (that is, to 7:14–8:59). Instead of Jesus being judged and vindicated, the woman is judged and vindicated, and her accusers are judged, just as Jesus’ accusers are judged and found wanting in the temple discourse as a whole. And just as her story ends with a stoning that never materialized, so too does the temple discourse itself (see 8:59). Hers is a story within a story, accenting the same truth within a more concise and limited sphere.
8:12 Surprisingly, the Pharisees will now proceed to do almost what Nicodemus recommended! Whether they choose to or not, they will now “hear” from Jesus and to some degree “learn what he is doing.” As the narrative continues,* we are told, “So again Jesus spoke to them” (8:12). “To them” can only mean “to the Pharisees,” for the Pharisees are identified as those who answered (v. 13). “Again” implies that he had spoken to them before—probably not directly but by what he said to the officers representing them, when they came to arrest him (7:32–34). “No man ever spoke like that” was the reaction then (7:46), and the reader will echo those sentiments about what he adds now: “I am the Light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”*
The pronouncement evokes for the reader the description of Jesus as “the Word” in the Gospel’s preamble, “In him was life, and that life was the light of humans” (1:4), with the further explanation that “The light was the true [Light] that illumines every human being who comes into the world” (1:9). Now “the Word” speaks with his own voice, telling “the world” (represented by the Pharisees) what the readers of the Gospel already know, that he is the world’s “Light” whether so recognized or not. Earlier, he had pronounced a negative verdict on “the world” and on “human beings” in general, who “loved the dark and not the Light, because their works were evil” (3:19), but now he offers hope.* The form of the pronouncement—with “I am” and a predicate, followed by an invitation and/or promise—recalls 6:35 (“I am the Bread of life. The person who comes to me will never go hungry, and the person who believes in me will never ever thirst”), and 6:51 (“I am the living Bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eat of this bread, he will live forever”).* As we have seen, Jesus’ invitation and promise in 7:37 (“If anyone thirst,” and “Whoever believes in me”) looked as if it should have been preceded, or was once preceded, by just such an “I am” declaration.
What does it mean for Jesus to be “the Light of the world”? The world has no light of its own, but rather “the Light has come into the world” from without (3:19), from God, who is Light and the Giver of light (see 1 Jn 1:5). The natural point of comparison is the sun, yet Jesus never explicitly mentions the sun in connection with the metaphor of light.* In another Gospel, when he told his disciples, “You are the light of the world,” he compared them to stationary light sources other than the sun: “a city set on a hill” (Mt 5:14), or a lamp “on the lampstand” (5:15). Here, by contrast, he himself is “the Light of the world” (in keeping with 1:4, 5, 7, 9, 10; 3:19–21), but not a fixed or stationary light source like a lampstand or a city, or even like the sun. Rather, he is on the move, for his implied invitation is to “follow,” and his promise is to “not walk in darkness” (my italics).* He had told the Pharisees before (through their messengers) that they could not follow him (“where I am you cannot come,” 7:34), but now he promises that those who do “follow” him will “not walk in the darkness, but will have the light of life.” The promise goes right over the heads of the Pharisees, for just like the earlier promise of “living water” (7:38), it is not for them but for those who believe (see 7:39), and specifically for the readers of the Gospel. “The Light of the world” is a moving light,* for as Jesus has said, “Yet a short time I am with you, and I go to the One who sent me” (7:33). He returns to this thought each time he returns to the subject of light: “when I am in the world, I am the Light of the world” (9:5); “Yet a short time the Light is among you; walk while you have the Light, so that the darkness will not overtake you.… While you have the Light, believe in the Light, that you might become sons of light” (12:35, 36, my italics; see also 11:9–10). Jesus is “the Light of the world” in that he offers salvation to those who believe and are ready to join him on his journey back to “the One who sent him.” The metaphorical expression, “the Light of the world,” is functionally equivalent to what the Samaritans acknowledged him to be three chapters earlier (“the Savior of the world,” 4:42), or to what John called him even before that (“the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” 1:29). The metaphor of light contributes to the imagery the notion of a journey soon to begin, and the assurance of knowing where the journey leads (see 12:35, where anyone who “walks in that darkness does not know where he is going”; also 1 Jn 2:11). The “light of life” (v. 12b) is light for that journey, light that gives eternal life and salvation to those who follow “the Light of the world.”
13 The Pharisees’ response to Jesus’ words signals a notable turning point in the Gospel (a turning point easily overlooked), not because of what they say, but because they answer him at all. Not once have “the Pharisees” (except for Nicodemus) or “the chief priests” spoken even one word to Jesus in this Gospel, and not since chapter 2, when he drove the money changers from the temple, have “the Jews” done so (see 2:18 and 2:20). Everywhere else in the Gospel up to this point, they have either plotted against him silently (5:16, 18; 7:30, 32), or spoken about him to each other (7:11, 45–49), even in his very presence (see 6:41–42, 52; 7:15, 35–36).*
Now for the first time “the Pharisees” confront him directly and speak to him face to face: “You are testifying about yourself. Your testimony is not true” (v. 13). On the face of it, their objection is unremarkable. It is quite explicit in the Mishnah,* and Jesus himself said virtually the same thing in the course of a long monologue that “the Jews” seem not to have heard: “If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true” (5:31). On Jesus’ lips the pronouncement was purely rhetorical, for he went on to adduce a whole series of witnesses on his behalf (5:32–40). Here the objection is quite serious. Like Jesus’ earlier pronouncement, it has in mind a biblical principle, which Jesus himself will shortly make explicit (v. 17), that “One witness is not enough to convict a man accused of any crime or offense he may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses” (Deut 19:15, NIV; see also Deut 17:6, where it is more specifically a question of a capital offense). The flaw in the Pharisees’ argument is that at least two witnesses were required for the conviction of an offender, not for his acquittal. Because it has long been established that they are seeking Jesus’ life, and that he is a wanted man (see 5:18; 7:1, 25, 32), they are putting the burden of proof precisely where it does not belong.* They are at least now willing to speak to him directly, but they are still not quite ready to do what Nicodemus urged, that is, “hear from him first and learn what he is doing” (7:51). They want a corroborating witness. The reader knows that he has not one but several such witnesses (see 5:32–40). This time he will present only One (vv. 16–18), and will do so in his own time and on his own terms. Quite predictably, they will not be satisfied.
14 Jesus could have answered (in keeping with 5:31), “If in fact I am testifying about myself, you are right. My testimony is not true.” Instead, he says just the opposite: “Even if I testify about myself, my testimony is true” (v. 14a). He does not leave it at that, however, but adds significantly, “because I know where I came from and where I am going. But you do not know where I come from or where I am going” (v. 14b). Without the added words, he would have flatly contradicted what he said in 5:31. They supply the needed qualification and clarification, reminding the reader that although Jesus is testifying about himself, he is not testifying by himself, on “on his own.”* Those who hear him, he says, must take account of “where I came from and where I am going.” This is consistent with the notion that as “the Light of the world” (v. 12), he is on his way somewhere, inviting those who will to “follow” in his steps. For the moment, he leaves unanswered the questions, “Where has he come from?” and “Where is he going?” There are not two answers but one. Jesus’ origin and his destination are the same, whether viewed as a Place or as a Person. He has come “from above” (3:31) or “from heaven” (3:13, 31; 6:33, 38, 51, 58), and he will return there (3:13, 6:62), or, to put it another way, God the Father is both “the One who sent him” (see 4:34; 5:24, 30, 37; 6:38, 39–40, 57; 7:16, 28–29), and the One to whom he will return (7:33). The heart of the pronouncement is Jesus’ claim that “I know” this, and that “you do not know.”* It is virtually the same claim he made to the crowd earlier, that “the One who sent me is True, whom you do not know. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me” (7:28b–29). The only difference is that there he also said “You know me, and you know where I am from” (7:28a), admitting that they knew he was a Galilean (see also 7:41). Here it is a matter of his divine origin, and this they do not know, any more than they know his destination (see 7:33–36).
15–16 Jesus’ next comment, “You judge according to the flesh; ‘I’ judge no one” (v. 15, italics added), is puzzling, in that he abruptly speaks of “judging” instead of “testifying” (as in vv. 13–14).* At first glance, the pronouncement seems to follow more appropriately the story of the woman caught in adultery (7:53–8:11) than the preceding dialogues in chapters 7 and 8.* Yet it does reinforce Nicodemus’s rhetorical question to his fellow Pharisees, “Does our law judge the man unless it hear from him first and learn what he is doing?” (7:51). In failing to do that, and requiring of Jesus a corroborating witness, they are judging “according to the flesh,” and therefore unjustly (compare 7:24, “Don’t judge by appearance, but judge the right judgment!”).
By contrast, Jesus claims not that he judges wisely or fairly, but that “ ‘I’ judge no one.” While this claim was borne out in the story of the woman caught in adultery (vv. 10–11), it comes as a surprise to the reader in view of earlier pronouncements that “the Father … has given all the judgment to the Son” (5:22; also 5:26), and “Just as I hear I judge, and my judgment is right” (5:30; see also 8:26). On the other hand, Jesus also stated that “God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that the world might be saved through him” (3:17; also 12:47). The matter is further complicated when Jesus adds, “And yet if I judge, my judgment is true, because I am not alone, but I and the Father who sent me” (v. 16, my italics). Jesus “judges no one,” yet in the same breath looks at the possibility that he might in fact do so! This is not as strange as it appears because in this Gospel sweeping generalizations are from time to time immediately followed by significant exceptions.* The likely point here is that “I” means “I by myself” (as in 5:30; 7:17). That is why “I” is placed in quotation marks in our translation. When the “I” is not “alone,”* so that it is no longer just “I” but “I and the Father* who sent me” (v. 16), then Jesus as “the Son” does not hesitate to judge, nor does he hesitate to claim that “my judgment is true” (again, see 5:30).* While Jesus has spoken freely of “the One who sent me” (see 7:16, 28, 33), and has even implied that “the One who sent him” was God (7:17), he has only once used the more concrete expression, “the Father who sent me” (see 5:37), and that in a discourse which the religious leaders in Jerusalem seemed not to hear. The expression will puzzle his hearers (see v. 19, and later v. 27), and their confusion will only be heightened by what he will say next.
17–18 Jesus now repeats what he has said about “judging” (vv. 15–16) with regard to “testimony” and “testifying.” This time he states explicitly the biblical principle the Pharisees had in mind when they said, “You are testifying about yourself. Your testimony is not true” (v. 13). Drawing on Deuteronomy 17:6 and 19:15, he acknowledges that “in your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true” (v. 17).* The phrase “in your law” stands in noticeable contrast to Nicodemus’s expression, “our law” (7:51). The implication is that while Nicodemus was still “one of them” (7:50), Jesus was not (see above, n.
The principle in view here is one to which Jesus assents, and on which he is quite willing to build his argument (see also Mt 18:16). The testimonies “of two men” are needed to establish truth, and Jesus flatly claims, “I am the one who testifies* about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me” (v. 18). To the reader this is nothing new (see 5:37), but the Pharisees seem not to have heard anything like it before (see v. 19). What does surprise the reader is the wording of the citation, to the effect that it is a matter of “two men,”* for “the Father who sent me” is obviously not a man but “God” (see 7:16–17). Unless Jesus is being deliberately ironic and therefore misleading,* he is using an argument from the lesser to the greater: if the testimony of “two men” is valid in a court of law, how much more the testimony of one man, plus God his Father in heaven—particularly if God the Father has sent him to act on God’s behalf?
19 The Pharisees respond by asking, “Where is your father?” (v. 19a). The translator must decide whether to capitalize “father” or leave it lowercase.* The custom of capitalizing it on Jesus’ lips (in v. 18, as elsewhere) argues for the former, yet the dynamics of the conversation (particularly Jesus’ expression, “two men,” in v. 17) are decisive in favor of the latter. The Pharisees can only assume that Jesus is speaking of human witnesses, and therefore of his human father. In asking “Where is your father?” they are not questioning the legitimacy of his birth,* but simply demanding to hear from his second witness. Their distant cousins in Galilee claimed to know both his father and mother (6:42), and he was known publicly as “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth” (see 1:45).* Even the people of Jerusalem claimed to know where he was from (7:27, 41), and Jesus agreed that they did (7:28). The Pharisees’ intention here is simply to remind him that his “father” is far away, possibly deceased, and certainly not available to testify on his behalf. Even if he were available, it would not be enough, for to them Jesus is the accused, and therefore according to Jewish law two additional witnesses are required to prove his innocence.*
To Jesus himself, of course, it is a matter of establishing not his own innocence, but the guilt of his accusers, and for this purpose two witnesses are quite sufficient. He sees himself not as defendant but (alongside the Father) as Judge (see v. 16), and he hands down an immediate verdict: “You know neither me nor my Father; if you knew me, you would know my Father” (v. 19b). He is telling the Pharisees just what he told the Jerusalemites a chapter earlier: that they do not know God (see 7:28–29).* Beyond that, he is telling them that the two testimonies of which he has just spoken, his own and his Father’s, are both wrapped up in his own testimony—in short, that his testimony is self-authenticating. He is simply repeating what he said a few verses earlier, that “Even if I testify about myself, my testimony is true, because I know where I came from and where I am going” (v. 14), and before that when he told “the Jews” in Jerusalem who first accused him that “you do not have [the Father’s] word dwelling in you, because he whom that One sent, him you do not believe” (5:38). Not Jesus, but his accusers, stand condemned.
20 Belatedly, the Gospel writer reveals just where this spirited exchange took place: “These words he spoke in the treasury, teaching in the temple, and no one arrested him because his hour had not yet come” (v. 20). The notice recalls 6:59, where, in similarly belated fashion, he told the readers, “These things he said teaching in synagogue in Capernaum” (6:59). There, it was already clear that Jesus was in Capernaum (see 6:17, 24), and it was left unclear at precisely what point his synagogue discourse began. Here too, Jesus has been “teaching in the temple” all along (see 7:14, 28), but this time the specific exchange with the Pharisees in the temple “treasury”* seems to have had a definite beginning at verse 12, with the solemn pronouncement, “I am the Light of the world.” The “treasury” was simply a storage place for contributions and other valuables,* on the face of it an odd setting for either a debate or any kind of formal teaching. The “treasuries” (plural) were probably the thirteen trumpet-shaped receptacles adjoining the so-called Court of the Women, between the inner sanctuary and the outer Court of the Gentiles (see
Quite possibly the point of the reference is that the temple treasury was a very public place, making it all the more remarkable that “no one arrested him.” The situation recalls the surprised question of “some of the Jerusalemites” midway through the festival, “Is not this the one they are seeking to kill? And look, he is speaking publicly, and they are saying nothing to him” (7:25). Superficially, the closer parallel is the notice five verses later, “So they sought to arrest him, and no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come” (7:30). Yet despite the repetition of both the verb, “arrest,” and the key phrase, “his hour had not yet come,” the difference here is that they did not try and fail, but that no one even tried to arrest Jesus. The Pharisees are now as baffled and helpless on meeting Jesus in person as the officers they sent to arrest him were a chapter earlier (see 7:32–34, 45–46). “Why didn’t you bring him in?” they had asked those officers (7:45), and “Are you also deceived?” (7:47), but they themselves have done no better. Once again, the Gospel writer’s explanation is that Jesus’ “hour had not yet come.”
21 In contrast to the notice locating the synagogue discourse at Capernaum (6:59), the notice locating this part of the temple discourse in the treasury (v. 20) does not end the discourse, nor does it signal a change of audience (as in 6:60). Rather, Jesus continues to speak “to them,” that is, to the Pharisees, just as in verses 12–20. But instead of “So again Jesus spoke to them, saying …” (as in v. 12), the Gospel writer now tells us, “So again he said to them”* (v. 21). The difference is subtle but important. This time the point is not simply that Jesus “again said to them,” but that he said “again” something he had said to the same audience before—that is, “I am going and you will seek me, and you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come” (v. 21b, italics added). The reader may remember that Jesus did in fact say something like this in the preceding chapter: “Yet a short time I am with you, and I go to the One who sent me. You will seek me and you will not find, and where I am you cannot come” (7:33–34; the italics indicate the extent of the parallelism). But was the audience the same? In a sense, Yes, as we have seen. In 7:33–34 Jesus was speaking to the officers that “the chief priests and the Pharisees” had sent to arrest him (7:32), and thus in effect to “the Jews” themselves (7:35, seen as interchangeable with “the chief priests and the Pharisees”). These were the words they had in mind when they came back with the report, “No man ever spoke like that” (7:46). Here too “the Pharisees” and “the Jews” are interchangeable, for the Pharisees are Jesus’ audience in verses 12–20 (see v. 13) and by default also in verse 21, yet the response to Jesus’ words comes from “the Jews” (v. 22), just as in 7:35. The main difference between the two pronouncements (or two versions of the pronouncement) lies in the grim prediction added here, “you will die in your sin.” Oddly, however, it is not what captures the attention of Jesus’ hearers. He will in fact have to repeat it two more times (see v. 24). What does capture their attention are the same words that did so before, “Where I am going, you cannot come” (compare 7:34).
22 The Pharisees, now designated simply as “the Jews,” are as baffled by the pronouncement as the officers they sent earlier (see 7:35–36), and their theory about its meaning is just as absurd. Instead of asking, “Will he go to the dispersion of the Greeks and teach the Greeks?” (7:35), they now ask, “Will he kill himself, because he said, ‘Where I am going you cannot come?’ ” (v. 22). Again they speak to each other instead of to Jesus (reverting to their old ways), again they totally misunderstand what Jesus has said, and again their absurd conclusion has an ironic element of truth. Jesus will not, of course, “kill himself” (killing him is rather their plan; see 7:19, 25), but he will say two chapters later, “I lay down my soul that I might receive it back. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to receive it back” (10:17–18). His life is in his own hands, regardless of their intent.* What they have not grasped is that the death of which Jesus has spoken is their death: “you will die in your sin” (v. 21).
23 “You are from below,”* Jesus replies, “I am from above.* You are from this world, I am not from this world.” With this, he echoes John’s testimony, “The One coming from above is above all. He who is from the earth is from the earth and speaks from the earth” (3:31), except that it is now not a matter of their being “from the earth” as John was, but of being “from this world.”* This is Johannine dualism in its starkest form. The difference is that “the world” or “this world” in John’s Gospel is defined by its rejection of “the Light” that comes from God (see 1:10; 3:19). Jesus has come to “testify about it that its works are evil” (7:7). “The earth,” by contrast, has no such connotation, for it is merely the place where human beings live, as distinct from heaven, the dwelling place of God. Yet the juxtaposition in this verse of “from below” and “from this world” indicates that “below” does not refer to an underworld or nether region below the earth. Rather, it refers to the earth itself and its inhabitants, viewed as “the world” and therefore as resistant to God and to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.* It is “from below” in relation to the region above, that is, “from heaven” (see 3:13, 31; 6:41, 42, 50).
24 The implication of all this is to reinforce the warning that “you will die in your sin” (v. 21), a warning the Pharisees seem not to have heard. Jesus therefore now repeats it almost verbatim,* not once but twice: “I just told you that you will die in your sins. For unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins” (v. 24). At one level, this is simply the negative corollary of his claim to be “the Light of the world” (v. 12). If those who follow him “will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (v. 12), the implication is that those who do not follow will not have life, but will instead “die in their sins.” For the time being, their sins are not specified, but appear to be simply a corollary of belonging to “the world” (v. 23). Jesus makes the grim prediction three times in all, but the third time he adds a qualification: “For unless* you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.” The conditional clause offers a glimmer of hope, as the form of the pronouncement recalls such other sayings in John’s Gospel as “unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (3:3) or “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves” (6:53). While Jesus is not exactly issuing an invitation (he has done that already in v. 12), he is saying that there is one thing “the Jews” can do so as not to “die in their sins,” and that is to “believe that I am.”
The expression “I am,” standing by itself as it does here without a predicate, is ambiguous. They must believe that “I am,” he says, but what, or who, is he? Must they believe that he is “the Light of the world” (v. 12), or that he is “from above” (v. 23), or both? Jesus has used the expression “I am” by itself twice before, once to the Samaritan woman (4:26), and once to the disciples in a boat on the Sea of Galilee (6:20).* In both instances “I” was the predicate, not the subject, yielding the translation, “It is I,” and in both instances Jesus was identifying himself with someone known to the hearer. First it was the Messiah as visualized by the Samaritan woman (see 4:25), and later Jesus was simply announcing his presence to his fearful disciples that it was he and not someone else. There is less certainty here. A prevailing modern interpretation, going back at least to C. H. Dodd,* sees the expression as one derived from the God of Israel’s self-predication “I am” or “I am He,”* especially according to Isaiah, as if to say, “I am the
25–26 Given this ambiguity, the question, “Who are you?” (v. 25), is a natural one. If they must “believe that I am” in order not to “die in their sins,” it is important to know just who, or what, Jesus is claiming to be.* He replies with a fairly lengthy speech (vv. 25–29), interrupted only by a brief narrative aside (v. 27). For the reader, this speech is the perfect opportunity for Jesus to say, “I am the Word” (see 1:1, 14), or “I am the Son of God” (see 1:24, 49; 5:25), or “I am God” (see 1:1, 18), but he does not. His opening words,* in fact, are virtually untranslatable.* They are usually rendered either quite literally as “What I am telling you from the beginning,”* or else as a question: “[How is it] that I even speak to you at all [or “to begin with”]?”* This seems unlikely if it is taken to imply that Jesus finds it useless to talk to these people,* but if it is read as a serious question answered immediately by what follows, it makes better sense.* That is, “What can I even begin to say to you?* I have many things to say about you and to judge, but the One who sent me is True, and the things I heard from him are the things I say to the world.”
If this, or something like it, is the correct translation, then Jesus is not directly answering the question, “Who are you?”—at least not immediately. On the contrary, he turns attention away from himself to the Father. There is much that he could say, and would say if he were speaking on his own initiative,* but in fact he is not.* Rather, he claims, “the One who sent me is True,”* and consequently he says only what he has been told to say. The focus of his reply, then, is not the solitary expression “I am” which caught his hearers’ attention, but rather the whole pronouncement (v. 24), of which it is only a part. Having already stated clearly that “ ‘I’ judge no one” (v. 15, my italics), he now wants it just as clearly understood that in saying “unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins” (v. 24), he is not speaking on his own authority but is issuing a warning from the Father. He has repeated it three times by now (vv. 21, 24), but “the Jews” have persistently refused to hear it. It is something that he says, “I heard from him” v. 26), whether before coming into the world, or in his present personal relationship with God the Father (see v. 40; also 3:32; 5:30; 15:15), and consequently it is the Father’s judgment, not his own. The Father has decreed that those who do not believe in Jesus his Son will “die in their sins.”
As for the unanswered question, “Who are you?” the reader knows the answer even if Jesus’ audience does not. The reader knows that he is indeed “from above” (v. 23), and “the Light of the world” (v. 12), and (looking further afield) “the Bread of life” (6:35, 48), and the “Messiah” (4:25–26). It is clear by this time that he is all that and more (see 1:1–18; 5:19–30), and it will become clear to “the Jews” as well if they listen to what the Father is telling them. Until they do, the grim prediction, “You will die in your sins,” still hangs over their heads. Yet, as Jesus will tell them momentarily, a day will come when their question, “Who are you?” will be answered once and for all (see v. 28, “When you lift up the Son of man, then you will know that I am”).
27 Jesus has not used the expression “the Father,” or “my Father,” in any of this, yet the Gospel writer and the readers of the Gospel all know that “the One who sent me” (v. 26) is in fact God the Father (see 5:37; 6:39, 40, 57; 8:16, 18). “The Jews” to whom Jesus is speaking say nothing, and the writer pauses to explain in a narrative aside that they do not share this knowledge: “They did not know that he was telling them of the Father” (v. 27).* As we have noted, Jesus has mentioned “the Father” only sparingly in this discourse, and when he did (vv. 16 and 18), his use of the term invited only confusion (see v. 19a, “Where is your father?”). The comment here confirms the earlier charge against them that “You know neither me nor my Father; if you knew me, you would know my Father” (v. 19b). They seem to have forgotten that the reason they were seeking his life in the first place was not simply that he broke the Sabbath (see 7:21–23), but that he was “claiming God as his own Father, making himself equal to God” (5:18), and that his relationship to “the Father” was the major theme of a lengthy earlier discourse (see 5:19–47). With this brief notice, the Gospel writer signals that the question of who Jesus’ “Father” is will soon move front and center once again, so as to press home the two related questions of who Jesus is, and whether or not his Father is also Father to “the Jews” themselves (see vv. 37–59).
28 After the interruption Jesus continues his speech seamlessly: “When you lift up the Son of man, then you will come to know that I am, and [that]* on my own I do nothing, but just as the Father taught me, these things I speak” (v. 28). The clause, “When you lift up* the Son of man,” is startling, given the implication five chapters earlier that to be “lifted up” (3:14) meant to be put to death by crucifixion (see 12:33 and 18:32, where this becomes explicit). Given the conventional wisdom that crucifixion was a Roman, not a Jewish, method of execution,* and given the fact that when Jesus’ life is threatened by Jews it is always by stoning, not crucifixion (see v. 59; also 10:31), it is all the more startling that those who will “lift him up” in this way are those specifically identified as “the Jews” (see v. 22).* Even so, the tone of Jesus’ pronouncement is not accusatory. It is as if he had said, “When the Son of man is lifted up,” rather than “When you lift up the Son of man.” The accent is not on the guilt of “the Jews,” but on the promise that “then you will come to know* that I am”—in sharp contrast to their present situation, in which “They did not know that he was telling them of the Father” (v. 27).* Each time the “lifting up” of Jesus on the cross is mentioned in this Gospel, something good comes of it, whether the prospect “that everyone who believes might have eternal life in him” (see 3:14–15) or that, as Jesus says, “I will draw them all to myself” (12:32). Here it is the knowledge of who Jesus is, and what his relationship is to the Father. He has told these same people earlier, “You know neither me nor my Father; if you knew me, you would know my Father” (v. 19). Now he promises that this will change, but only when they “lift him up.” Still, despite their present ignorance, he does not hesitate to speak of “the Father” explicitly: “just as the Father taught me, these things I speak.” The lofty announcement, “I am,” cannot mean “I am the Son of man” (as if that title finishes an otherwise unfinished sentence).* Nor does it mean that Jesus acts on his own authority. On the contrary, to know Jesus as the one who says “I am” is to know him as the One sent from the Father, and thus finally to know his Father as well.
The accent here on a future time when Jesus will be “lifted up” recalls his promise of the Spirit earlier in the day* at the Tent festival (7:37–38), with its accompanying caution that “the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (7:39). In this Gospel, certain events cannot happen, and certain things cannot be known, until Jesus is “lifted up” or “glorified” on the cross. The promise given here adds a new dimension to what he said when he first came to the temple and began to teach: “If anyone chooses to do his will, he will know about the teaching, whether it is from God, or whether I speak on my own” (7:17). There, as we saw, he implied that those who faithfully did the will of God as prescribed by their Jewish faith would thereby come to “know” that his teaching was from God. By now it is apparent that these “Jews” have not done so, yet they can still come to “know” (v. 28) these things by virtue of his death and resurrection—this even though they are themselves instrumental in his death! The promise is of course conditional, just as it was from the start. When Jesus has been “lifted up” and “glorified,” they must still “choose to do the will of God” (see 7:17), by faith in the Crucified One whom they have pierced.*
29 Having introduced (or rather reintroduced) the explicit term “the Father” (v. 28), Jesus now reverts to the phrase that has mostly characterized the discourse up to now, “the One who sent me” (see 7:16, 28, 33; 8:26; also 4:34; 5:24, 30; 6:38, 39), on the assumption that “the One who sent me” is in fact “the Father” (see 5:37; 6:40, 44; 8:16, 18). “He has not left me alone,” Jesus adds, echoing his earlier claim that “I am not alone, but I and the Father who sent me” (v. 16; see also 16:32).* Now he supplies the reason why he is not alone: “for I always do the things that please him.”* “Always” signals that his relationship to the Father is unbroken (see 11:42, “I know that you always hear me”), and the pronouncement is another way of saying, “My food is that I might do the will of the One who sent me, and finish his work” (4:34; also 5:30; 6:38).* Its main thrust is that Jesus is a man not only of speech (vv. 25–28) but of actions pleasing to God, not least that he has pleased the Father with regard to the Sabbath (see 5:17).* In due course he will challenge his hearers to prove him wrong (see vv. 46, 49; 10:25, 37–38; 18:23).
30 There could have been a number of possible reactions to Jesus’ speech that began, “When you lift up the Son of man” (v. 28) and ended with the claim that “I always do the things that please him” (v. 29). If his hearers had focused on the implication that they would “lift him up” by crucifixion, they might have repeated the words of the crowd, “You have a demon. Who is seeking to kill you?” (7:20). Or, they might have challenged his assertion that “I always do the things that please him” by pressing the charge that he had in fact broken the Sabbath. Their response instead is quite unexpected: “As he was speaking these things, many believed in him”* (v. 30). We have heard this expression before, when Jesus first came to Jerusalem and “many believed in his name,” and Jesus “would not entrust himself to them” (2:23–24), and again at this same Tent festival, when “many from the crowd believed in him” (7:31), yet nothing much came of it, as their faith was dismissed as mere “murmuring” (7:32).*
Here, too, the faith of the “many” who “believed in him” will quickly turn out to be inadequate. This is not apparent at once, but the reader has reason to suspect right from the start that this “belief” is premature. Jesus has just said, “When you lift up the Son of man, then you will know that I am” (v. 28, my italics), and this of course has not yet happened. Just as the Spirit will not come until Jesus has been “glorified” (7:39), so perhaps true belief in him is not possible (at least for these “Jews”) until he has been “lifted up.” Even his first disciples, after all, who genuinely “believed in him,” did so only because he “revealed his glory” to them (2:11), and even their faith did not come to full maturity until he “rose from the dead” (see 2:22). Another subtle hint, perhaps, that the belief is premature is the genitive absolute with a present participle, “As he was speaking these things.”* This is a common way in John’s Gospel of marking divisions and endings in Jesus’ discourses,* but more often the Gospel writer uses “these things” with the aorist tense for this purpose, indicating that the discourse, or a significant portion of it, is over.* The use of the present tense here could suggest, by contrast, that in this instance Jesus had not finished what he had to say, but that his hearers “believed in him” before he had even finished speaking.* This would suggest, at the very least, that they needed further instruction, and further instruction is precisely what he tries to provide.
L. The Last Day of the Festival: Jesus and the Jews Who Believed (8:30–59)
As he was speaking these things, many believed in him. So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you dwell on my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are Abraham’s seed, and have never been in slavery to anyone. How do you say that ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, that everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. But the slave does not remain in the household forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will really be free. I know that you are Abraham’s seed, but you are seeking to kill me, because my word is not getting through to you. The things I have seen in the Father’s presence I speak, and you therefore must do what you have heard from the Father.”
They answered and said to him, “Our father is Abraham.” Jesus said to them, “If you are Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are seeking to kill me, a man who has spoken to you the truth which I heard from God. This Abraham did not do. You are doing the works of your father.” So they said to him, “We are not born of unlawful intercourse. We have one Father, God.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came forth from God, and here I am. For I have not come on my own, but that One sent me. Why do you not know my speech? Because you cannot hear my word. You are from the father [who is] the devil, and you choose to do the desires of your father. That one was homicidal from the beginning, and was not standing in the truth, because truth is not in him. When he speaks the lie, he speaks from his own, because he is the liar and the father of it. But I, because I speak the truth, you do not believe me. Who among you convicts me of sin? If I speak truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is from God hears the words of God. This is why you do not hear, because you are not from God.”
The Jews answered and said to him, “Do we not say well that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. And I am not seeking my glory. There is One who seeks and judges. Amen, amen, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never ever see death.” So the Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets, and you say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never ever taste of death.’ Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died, and the prophets died? Who do you make yourself to be?” Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, him whom you say that ‘He is our God.’ And you have not known him, but I know him. And if I say that I do not know him, I will be a liar like you. But I know him, and I keep his word. Abraham, your father, rejoiced that he would see my day, and he saw and was glad.” So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am.” So they took up stones that they might throw on him. But Jesus was hidden, and went out of the temple.
Even though some (most notably Rudolf Bultmann) have viewed Jesus’ “temple discourse” at the Tent festival (that is, 7:14–8:59) as a compilation (and not without reason), it is in its present form more like a seamless robe, especially “the last day of the festival,” from 7:37 on. In the preceding section, despite notices such as “So again Jesus spoke to them” (8:12), and “These words he spoke in the treasury” (8:20), and “So again he said to them” (8:21), it was difficult to find an excuse to begin a new section. I have begun one here only because of a partial but significant change of audience—like the shifts in chapter 6 from “the crowd” to “the Jews” (6:41), and from “the Jews” to “many of his disciples” (6:60). As we have seen, Jesus’ audience (at least in the first half of the Gospel) is in one sense always the same, and almost always hostile (in varying degrees) to his claims. Yet the changes in how the audience is named are worth noticing, and are as useful as anything else in dividing up the discourses. In the present discourse, there were terminological changes back and forth between “the Jews” (7:11, 13, 15, 35; 8:22) and either “the Pharisees” (7:32; 8:13) or “the chief priests and the Pharisees” (7:32, 45), but these were insignificant because the parties were pretty much interchangeable.* Now the shift is from “the Jews” (v. 22) to “the Jews who had believed him”* (v. 31), a shift that is, on the face of it, far more noteworthy. “The Jews who had believed him” signals quite clearly to the readers of the Gospels that Jesus is now addressing believers, not unbelievers, and more specifically Jewish believers in Christ.* While many interpreters have tried to avoid this conclusion because of the harsh words Jesus later speaks to this audience (see, for example, vv. 37–46),* the Gospel writer’s words (“the Jews who had believed him”) are open to no other interpretation. The section to follow details a progressive unraveling of the “faith” of these “believing Jews,” first over the issue of slavery and freedom (see vv. 32–33), but eventually over the issue of eternal life (see vv. 51–52) and Jesus’ power to confer life. At the end of the day, the question on which these “believers” stumble is christological: “Who do you make yourself to be?” (v. 53), ending in Jesus’ magisterial self-revelation, “I am” (v. 58).
31–32 Jesus now explicitly addresses “the Jews who had believed him,” that is, the “many” who were said to have “believed in him” in the preceding verse.* “If you dwell on my word,” he begins, “you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” This often-quoted promise, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (v. 32), repeats and builds on what he said in verse 28, “When you lift up the Son of man, then you will know* that I am,” only now with a condition attached.* “The truth” that these believing Jews “will know” consists of all that he has just promised them they would know: “that I am, and [that] on my own I do nothing, but just as the Father taught me, these things I speak” (v. 28), perhaps with its corollary, “And the One who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that please him” (v. 29).* The condition he now attaches is that they must “dwell on my word.” To “dwell on” Jesus’ word presupposes that they have in fact “believed him” (that is, believed in him on the basis of his spoken words, v. 31).* Jesus is asking them, now that they have believed, to “follow” him (see v. 12) or “walk with him” (see 6:60) in the sense of giving him their allegiance, finally even to “dwell in him” (6:56) or become united to him in their very being. To be “truly my disciples,” he insists, requires nothing less.*
The result of such ongoing faith is that “the truth” they have come to know “will set you free” (v. 32).* Ironically, it is this additional promise beyond what he said earlier that offends Jesus’ hearers and causes them to stumble (see v. 33). “Set free from what?” is the question in their minds, and to that question there can be only one answer. They need to be “set free” from the threat still hanging over their heads that “You will die in your sin” (v. 21), or “your sins” (v. 24). As we saw, “the Jews” never acknowledged that death threat, and these “Jews who had believed him” are still not ready to acknowledge it. Consequently, the question, “Set free from what?” baffles them, and more than that, offends them. Like the false “disciples” of 6:60, they will slip away, and their apostasy begins almost immediately.
33 “We are Abraham’s seed,”* they reply, “and have never been in slavery to anyone. How do you say that ‘You will become free’?” Their answer conspicuously ignores Moses’ repeated commands in Deuteronomy to “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt” (Deut 5:15, NIV; also 15:15; 16:12; 24:18, 22), and therefore in the present context calls into question their faithfulness to their own covenant. Any reader familiar with the synoptic Gospels will notice that they are also ignoring John the Baptist’s warning, “And do not begin to say among yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Lk 3:8; see also Mt 3:9).
Yet obviously, these “believing Jews” knew that what they were saying was not literally true. They did remember that their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt, despite being descended from Abraham, and effectively so in Babylon as well, and in their own country at the hands of the Persians, the Greeks, and now the Romans. They are simply expressing a kind of national pride as those who (in Schnackenburg’s words) are “free sons of Abraham, who have never inwardly bowed to foreign rule.”* Even so, their disclaimer misses the point. Foreign rule is not the issue, and Jesus promptly says as much.*
34 For the twelfth time in the Gospel, Jesus introduces an answer with his characteristic “Amen, amen” formula, the first time since 6:53 and the first of three within the temple discourse (see vv. 51 and 58): “Amen, amen, I say to you, that everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin” (v. 34). While the “Amen, amen” formula is Johannine, the pronouncement itself evokes a world of thought more often associated with the Apostle Paul, who wrote, “Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (Rom 6:16–18, NIV).* John’s Gospel differs from Paul only in that the law is not implicated in the Jews’ slavery to sin and death, as it is in Paul (see Rom 5:13; 6:14; 7:7–11; Gal 4:21–26).
Jesus’ main point here is simply that the actual enslavement of these “believing Jews” was not to Rome, but (in common with the whole world) to sin, and therefore finally to death.* Yet this viewpoint (that Israel’s problem was not foreign rule but her own sin) was not distinctive to Paul and the Gospel of John alone, or even to early Christianity. It was an authentic strain within Judaism itself from the biblical prophets (notably Jeremiah), through Second Maccabees, to the Jewish apocalypse of 4 Ezra even after the Gospel of John.* Here in the temple discourse, Jesus first introduced it with the warning, “You will die in your sin” (v. 21); the theme of sin and death, in particular the overcoming of death, will be his theme from here on to the end of the chapter. His reference to “committing sin,” and especially the phrase “a slave of sin,” now makes it clear that he was using the noun “slave”* (v. 34), and consequently the verb “set free”* (v. 32), metaphorically and not literally.
35 The “Amen, amen” pronouncement is not limited to verse 34, but encompasses the next two verses as well. The single metaphor of the “slave” leads into a more complex metaphor or mini-parable about a household, comparable to one he introduced earlier about a son apprenticed to his father (5:19).* “But the slave,” he continues, “does not remain in the household forever; the son remains forever” (v. 35).* That was self-evident. Slaves had no permanent place in the households to which they belonged,* unlike family members, and above all in contrast to a firstborn son and heir. Slaves did not stand to inherit wealth, and, having been bought, could just as easily be sold. But the metaphor has a theological edge to it, in the stark contrast between “remains forever” and “does not remain … forever.” The former suggests that some will “live forever” (6:51, 58) or have “eternal life” (see 3:15, 16, 36; 4:14, 36; 5:24, 39; 6:27, 40, 47, 54, 68), while the latter implies just the opposite—that others will die, or, more specifically, “die in their sins” (v. 24). It is a matter of life or death, not just slavery or freedom.
36 Jesus now draws his conclusion from brief parable, a conclusion still governed by the introductory words, “Amen, amen, I say to you.” “So,” he concludes, “if the Son sets you free, you will really be free” (v. 36). In effect, he renews the invitation and promise that “If you dwell on my word, … you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (v. 32). It now becomes clear, if it was not before, that “The truth will set you free” actually means “The Son will set you free.” Jesus has not called himself “the Son” in their presence,* and when he has spoken of his “Father” they have not understood (see vv. 19 and 27), yet the reader knows exactly what he means: Jesus himself is “the truth.”* The door to knowledge, and therefore to freedom and salvation from sin and death, is still open to these Jewish “believers” if only they will, as he said, “dwell on my word” (v. 32). What their new status as “freed slaves” would be he does not define—evidently not “sons,” as in Paul (see Gal 4:7 and n.
37–38 The note of invitation continues, right alongside a darker note of accusation.* Jesus cannot and does not deny the claim of these “believing Jews” that they are “Abraham’s seed,” or descendants* (just as they claimed in v. 33), but he does implicitly deny that they are Abraham’s “children,”* that is, that their character is anything like Abraham’s (he will make this explicit in v. 39). He does this by bluntly repeating the accusation he made earlier to the crowd, that “you are seeking to kill me” (see 7:19). Back then the charge was denied because Jesus’ identity was not even known, but this time it is known, and he adds a reason why they are seeking his life: “because my word is not getting through* to you” (v. 37). Having warned them that they must “dwell on my word” (v. 31), he now signals that they are not doing so. His accusation echoes what he said in Jerusalem three chapters earlier, that “the Jews” did not have the Father’s word “dwelling in you, because he whom that One sent, him you do not believe” (5:38).
The damning charge is not leveled here for its own sake, however, but in order to lay the basis for one last invitation: “The things I have seen in the Father’s presence I speak, and you therefore must do what you have heard from the Father” (v. 38).* The pronouncement is difficult, both textually and grammatically, and is not always read in this way. Another possible reading is, “The things I have seen in my Father’s presence I speak, and you then are doing the things you have heard from your father,” with the implication that theirs is a different “father,” presumably the devil (anticipating vv. 41 and 44).* A number of textual variants contribute to this very different reading of the text. Some manuscripts add “my” after “Father” in the first clause, and a number of manuscripts correspondingly add “your” after “father” in the second clause, introducing a sharp distinction between two opposed “fathers.”* But the reading adopted here is supported by the most important ancient witnesses to the text of John’s Gospel.* It appears that the variations were introduced by scribes who were in a hurry to get to the controversy that surfaces in verses 41–44 between having God and having the devil as “father.”*
Adoption of this shorter reading opens the door to translating the last verb in the sentence* as a present imperative, “do” or “you must do,” rather than as a present indicative, “you are doing.” But this too is disputed, for most commentators who accept this reading still manage to find two “fathers” implied in the text.* They still want to read the verb as indicative, pointing to verse 41, where Jesus will say, “You are doing* the works of your father,” with the clear implication there that they have a different “father” (who turns out to be the devil, v. 44). But two arguments are decisive in favor of reading the verb as imperative. First, the particle “therefore”* implies that Jesus is drawing a conclusion from what he has just said.* That is, because his words represent what he has seen in the Father’s presence, his hearers had better listen and “do” what they now hear the Father telling them,* that is, through Jesus the Son.* Second, the closest parallel in John’s Gospel to the language used here is 6:45–46, where Jesus (explaining the biblical text, “And they all will be taught by God”) told a group of “Jews” in Galilee that “Every person who has heard from the Father and learned comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God, he has seen the Father.”* That passage, as we saw, was an implied, if somewhat backhanded, invitation to believe (that is, to “learn” and “come to me,” 6:45). Here the invitation becomes explicit (with an imperative), even though there is by this time little expectation of a positive response.* Jesus’ authority to issue such invitations (in both instances) rests on his preexistence as the Word who was “with God in the beginning” (1:2), or as “God the One and Only … right beside the Father,” who now reveals the God “no one has ever seen” (1:18; see also 3:11, 32).* Because “No one has seen God, ever” (1:18), human salvation depends on hearing and obeying “the One and Only,” who is able to tell what he has “seen in the Father’s presence” (v. 38).
39 If “do” is read as an imperative, what exactly did Jesus expect his hearers to “do”? He had already urged them to “dwell on my word” (v. 31). The analogy with his earlier pronouncement now suggests that he expected them to “learn” from the Father through him, and thereby “come to me” (6:45), that is, give Jesus their full allegiance. This they will not do, nor will they even acknowledge that the One whom he calls “the Father” is father to them. His use of the term “Father” is still problematic as far as they are concerned (see above, vv. 19 and 27). They still seem not to have grasped that when he speaks of “the Father” he is referring to God. This is all the more remarkable in light of 5:18, where they—or their cohorts—first began to seek his life because he was “claiming God as his own Father, making himself equal to God.” Later, when challenged, they will say without hesitation, “We have one Father, God” (v. 41), but here instead they say only, “Our father is Abraham” (v. 39a), doggedly repeating their claim to be “Abraham’s seed” (see v. 33). Jesus has already acknowledged that claim and agreed with it (v. 37), but now he makes a crucial distinction: “If you are Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham” (v. 39b). They may be Abraham’s “seed” or “descendants,” but “children” implies more.* They are not Abraham’s “children” unless their character and behavior show at least a family resemblance to his, and Jesus claims that it does not.
The conditional sentence, “If you are Abraham’s children, you would be doing* the works of Abraham,” must be read as a contrary-to-fact condition. Again (as in v. 38), the manuscript tradition is murky, this time because the sentence is less than perfect grammatically. Strictly speaking, a contrary-to-fact conditional sentence should read, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing* the works of Abraham,” and a number of ancient manuscripts have tried to improve the text in just that way.* On the other hand, “If you are” leads one to expect a simple conditional sentence, contemplating a reality: “If you really are Abraham’s children, then do* the works of Abraham.” Not surprisingly, there are manuscripts that move in that direction as well.* But the reading, “If you [really] are Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham,” is supported by the overwhelming weight of textual evidence,* and is to be followed.* Jesus’ point is that even though these “believing Jews” are (as they claim) “Abraham’s seed,” they are not “Abraham’s children” because they do not behave as Abraham behaved. Their actions deny the paternity they claim for themselves, for they are not doing “the works of Abraham.” Jewish and Christian tradition had much to say about Abraham’s virtues and good works,* but Jesus does not go into detail, focusing instead on what Abraham did not do, and never would have done (v. 40).
40 “But now,” Jesus continues, bringing things back to reality and putting it beyond doubt that what preceded was indeed a condition contrary to fact. The reality, he says again (as in v. 37), is that “you are seeking to kill me, a man who has spoken to you the truth which I heard from God. This Abraham did not do” (v. 40). Jesus seems to have in mind Genesis 18:1–15, where Abraham showed gracious hospitality to “the
41 Jesus can add only one thing at this point, a kind of parody of that last invitation. Instead of pleading with them any longer to “do what you have heard from the Father” (v. 38), he now sadly acknowledges that “You are doing the works of your father” (v. 41a, italics added). The emphatic pronouns “You” and “your”* mutually reinforce each other, giving the impression that their “father” is not Jesus’ “Father.” Nor is Abraham their true father, even though they are Abraham’s descendants (see vv. 39–40). The reader senses that Jesus is implying something quite unpleasant, and so do his hearers. Without telling them in so many words who he thinks their spiritual father is, he has succeeded in putting them on the defensive. “We are not born of unlawful intercourse,” they quickly reply. “We have one Father, God” (v. 41b). The emphatic “we”* in the first clause has led interpreters as far back as Origen to conclude that they are “hinting in a veiled manner that the Savior was born of fornication. They assume this as probable because they do not accept his famous and widely discussed birth from the Virgin.”* That is, “We are not born of unlawful intercourse, but you are!” But this is unlikely because they are basically defending themselves at this point, not attacking Jesus. Their emphatic “we” merely echoes and responds to his own emphatic “you” and “your” in questioning their paternity.* And just as Jesus was questioning their spiritual paternity, not the legitimacy of anyone’s physical birth, so their reply, “We are not born of unlawful intercourse,” must be understood metaphorically and not literally.* Their added words, “We have one Father, God,” seem to make it clear that they are claiming to be legitimate, that is, faithful, children of God, not an unfaithful or adulterous people like Israel of old.*
In one sense, this represents progress. These “Jews” have now moved beyond merely claiming to be “Abraham’s seed” (v. 33), or to have Abraham as “father” (v. 39), to the point of being able to examine (however uncritically or smugly) their relationship to God. But it is possible to go a step further and ask whether these interlocutors are speaking to Jesus simply as “the Jews” (v. 22), or more specifically as “the Jews who had believed him” (v. 31). The phrase, “not born of unlawful intercourse,” evokes other expressions in this Gospel, such as “born not of blood lines, nor of fleshly desire, nor a husband’s desire, but of God” (1:13), “born from above” (3:3), “born of water and Spirit” (3:5), “born of the flesh” and “born of the Spirit” (3:6, 8), all with the construction “to be ‘born’ ” or “begotten” of, or from someone or something.* The use of such distinctly Johannine language here suggests that what these “believing Jews” are asserting is that because they have “believed” (vv. 30–31), they are “born of God,” just as Jesus said a person must be, and consequently have a right to claim God as their “one Father,”* transcending even their cherished descent from Abraham.
If this is the case, it heightens the probability that the Gospel writer, in recounting this harsh debate between Jesus and “the Jews who had believed him” (v. 31), has in mind not so much unbelieving Israel as rather certain factions within Jewish Christianity. In short, the issue is not Christian “anti-Semitism” or “anti-Judaism,” as is often assumed, but a clash between certain factions (possibly Jewish and Gentile factions) within the Christian community.* The author’s primary polemic is not against unbelieving Jews but against certain Jewish Christians whom he regards as heretics. His claim is that not everyone who claims to be “born of God” or “born from above” actually is. Just as in 1 John so here in the Gospel, certain tests can and must be applied to determine whether or not faith (or regeneration) is genuine,* and Jesus will now proceed to apply these tests.
42 The first such test is a test of love. We have not heard much of love in this first half of John’s Gospel. The only explicit examples of love have been God’s love for the world (3:16) and the Father’s love for the Son (3:35; see also 10:17). Elsewhere, love is mentioned only to notice its absence (see 3:19; 5:42; also 12:43), and that is the case here as well. Love in this setting means something very close to gracious acceptance of, or hospitality toward, a messenger, here specifically a messenger from God. At the very least, it is the polar opposite of seeking to kill someone (see vv. 37, 40). “If God were your Father,” Jesus continues, “you would love me.” Again (as in v. 39), he uses a contrary-to-fact conditional sentence: “If God were your Father”—which he is not—“you would love me”—which you do not.* With this, Jesus flatly denies their claim to be “born of God” (that is, “not born of unlawful intercourse,” v. 41). If God were truly their Father, they would love God’s messenger and welcome him into their world, but they have not done so. And Jesus is resolute in his claim to be God’s messenger: “I came forth from God, and here I am. For I have not come on my own, but that One sent me.” That he has not come “on his own” (see 5:30; 7:17, 28; 8:28), but as one “sent” (see 5:23, 24, 30, 36–38; 6:29, 38, 39, 44, 57; 7:16, 18, 28, 29, 33; 8:16, 18, 26, 29) is by now a familiar theme in his discourses, but one they have still not grasped. At the same time, the expression “here I am”* calls attention to his visible presence before them, as a god might appear,* but in this instance as a “man” (v. 40) asking to be received and welcomed as God’s messenger and therefore as God himself.* This they have not done.
43 If love is the first test of true faith, or being “born of God,” the second is knowledge or understanding. “Why do you not know my speech?” Jesus asks, and answering his own question concludes, “Because you cannot hear my word” (v. 43). “If anyone chooses to do his will,” he had promised earlier, “he will know about the teaching, whether it is from God, or whether I speak on my own” (7:17), and later, “When you lift up the Son of man, then you will know that I am” (8:28), and “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (v. 32). Yet they “know” none of these things, whether because they have not chosen to do his will or dwell on his word, or simply because he has not yet been “lifted up” on the cross. They still do not understand his “speech” when he speaks of “the Father” or “the One who sent me,” and the reason, he claims, is that “you cannot hear my word.”
The point is not that they are literally deaf. To “hear” Jesus’ word is to hear and obey (just as in v. 37, “you therefore must do what you have heard from the Father”). Nor is Jesus stating a mere tautology (as if to say they don’t understand because they don’t understand). The accent falls rather on “cannot.” True knowledge or understanding is impossible for them, just as surely as it is impossible for anyone not “born from above” to see or enter the kingdom of God (3:3, 5), or for anyone to “come to Jesus” without being drawn by the Father (6:44; see also 3:27; 6:65), or to go with Jesus where he is going (7:34; 8:21). “How can you believe,” he asked three chapters earlier, “when you receive glory from each other, but do not seek the glory that comes from the Only God?” (5:44), and the question lingers. Jesus has invited them to “do what you have heard from the Father” (v. 38), and they have not done it, he says, because “you cannot hear my word.” In short, they have failed the two tests of life, love and knowledge. Their “belief” (vv. 30–31) has left them unchanged, and is now unmasked as unbelief. They cannot call God their Father because they are not “born from above.” Jesus could have said to them again what he said before, “You are from below, I am from above,” and “You are from this world, I am not from this world” (v. 23), and “You will die in your sins” (v. 24). But instead he turns their attention to their real “father” (see v. 41), as yet unnamed.
44 Finally, Jesus identifies this different “father”: “You are from the father [who is] the devil, and you choose to do the desires of your father” (v. 44a). The emphatic “you” and “your” accents once again the contrast between these “Jews” and Jesus, and between their “father” and his. The expression “from the father the devil”* is ambiguous, for “the devil” (genitive case) could be either possessive (“from the father of the devil”),* or appositional (“from the father, the devil”). The former makes no sense, and is quickly set aside (rightly) by most commentators, beginning with Origen.* Another option (probably the best from a purely grammatical standpoint) is to take it as an adjective (thus “from the slanderous father”),* but as the following two clauses make clear, this “slanderous father” can hardly be other than the devil. This I have tried to capture in the translation, with the phrase, “from the father [who is] the devil” (that is, “the devil” characterizes or defines “the father” as diabolical or slanderous). The meaning is indistinguishable from that of the appositional genitive. It is wise not to lose sight of the etymology of “the devil” (as “the Slanderer” or “the Accuser,” for these “Jews” will almost immediately prove Jesus right about them by slandering him as “a Samaritan,” and demon-possessed (v. 48).*
In adding that “you choose to do* the desires of your father” (v. 44a), Jesus echoes, perhaps deliberately, his own opening words at the Tent festival, “If anyone chooses to do his will, he will know about the teaching, whether it is from God, or whether I speak on my own” (7:17). The stark choice is between the “will”* of “the One who sent me” (see 7:16), and the “desires”* of a far different “father,” the devil. The one is life; the other, death. Jesus drives home the point by expanding on who “the devil” was, and is. First, and more briefly, “homicidal” (v. 44b);* second, “the liar,” and the father of lies (vv. 44b–c). The reader will soon discover that these are not two indictments, but one. That the devil was “homicidal,” or murderous, “from the beginning” signals that Jesus is referring to the Genesis narrative of the serpent in the garden of Eden.* It was the serpent’s lie, “You will not surely die” (Gen 3:4, NIV), that first brought death into the world.* Consequently, the emphasis here is on the lie rather than on the “homicide” or murder it brought about. That same lie is still at work in the minds of Jesus’ hearers, ignoring or denying what he has now said three times, “You will die in your sins” (see vv. 21, 24). Jesus moves quickly from the devil’s “homicidal” character to the notion that he “was not standing in the truth, because truth is not in him” (v. 44b).
So far in the present discourse, “the truth”* has been understood as the message Jesus brings from God (v. 40), the message that sets people free from sin and death (v. 32). This “truth” is self-referencing, for its content is (in Jesus’ words), “that I am, and [that] on my own I do nothing, but just as the Father taught me, these things I speak” (v. 28). In short, “the truth” is that Jesus is the Truth.* Yet this same “truth” is very ancient in that it can also be defined as the plan of God in placing Adam and Eve in the garden in Genesis.* The present and the remote past come together in Jesus’ (and the Gospel writer’s) vision. That the devil (in the form of the serpent) “was not standing”* in the truth back then is evident “because truth is not in him” even now. And in the same way, Jesus’ hearers are not “dwelling” on his word (see v. 31), because their “father, the devil,” is still directing them. Jesus has told them, “You will die in your sins,” and the devil is telling them, “You will not surely die.” This is the lie* spoken of old, and when the devil “speaks the lie” again today, Jesus insists, “he speaks from his own,* because he is the liar* and the father of it” (v. 44c).* Just as “the truth” that sets people free and gives life is specifically the truth spoken about (and by) Jesus and his Father (see vv. 28, 32, 40), so “the lie” that the devil speaks today is the denial of that same truth. In the words of the author of 1 John, “Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ; this is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son” (1 Jn 2:22). Whoever the “liars” may have been in 1 John, in John’s Gospel they are these “Jews” who now confront Jesus—even though they were said to have “believed in him” (v. 30). Finally, Jesus will lay that illusion to rest.
45 Jesus has accused these Jewish “believers” of not being God’s children, of not loving God’s messenger (v. 42) or understanding him, and of being unable even to hear his word (v. 43). But now for the first time he explicitly denies that they “believe,” which had been the opening premise of the whole discourse (see vv. 30, 31): “But I, because I speak the truth, you do not believe me” (v. 45; this in explicit contrast to v. 31).* The emphatic “I” places Jesus as truth-teller over against the devil (v. 44b) as “the liar and the father of it” (v. 44c). The wording of his charge is noteworthy. He does not say, “Even though I speak the truth, you do not believe me,” but “Because I speak the truth, you do not believe me” (italics added). As the devil’s children (v. 44), they are predisposed to believe the devil’s lie and not the truth of God. Jesus said earlier to others like them, “I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me. If another comes in his own name, him you will accept” (5:43), and to his own brothers, “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify about it that its works are evil” (7:7). Later he will tell his disciples, “If you were from the world, the world would love its own, but because you are not from the world but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (15:19; italics added). The “truth” that liberates (v. 32) is also the truth that hurts (“For unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins,” v. 24), and consequently they choose not to believe it. They prefer to believe the ancient lie, “You will not surely die.”
46–47 Jesus is not finished with his indictment. He concludes with two rhetorical questions, “Who among you convicts me of sin?” and “If I speak truth, why do you not believe me?” (v. 46). As to the first, anyone reading a “longer” version of the Gospel (that is, with 7:53–8:11 included) will see and appreciate in it an implied argument from the lesser to the greater. If none of them could convict or condemn even a poor sinful woman caught in adultery, how could they ever hope to convict or condemn God’s One and Only Son? But even without that precedent, the question is no less telling. Its immediate setting is the stark contrast Jesus has just drawn between “the truth” and “the lie” (v. 44), and in asking “Who among you convicts me of sin?” Jesus is referring not so much to sin in the abstract as to the devil’s sin, the sin of lying.* He has already claimed to “speak the truth,” and in not believing him (v. 45), they are in effect calling him a liar. He challenges them to prove it, knowing that they cannot. The second question, “If I speak truth, why do you not believe me?” is not so obviously rhetorical, but Jesus demonstrates that it is by quickly supplying an answer: “Whoever is from God hears the words of God. This is why you do not hear, because you are not from God” (v. 47). He answers his own rhetorical question, “Why?”* with the explanation, “This is why.”*
Here as elsewhere in John’s Gospel the dualism is strongly evident.* The reason they do not believe is that they are not “from God.” In the larger Johannine context, this is simply another way of saying that they are not “born from above” (3:3), or “born of God,” or “children of God” (1:13) entitled to call God “Father” (8:42), but are, by contrast, “from below,” or “from this world” (8:23).* Because they are not “from God” they cannot hear “the words of God,” that is, they cannot recognize Jesus’ words as words from God. Jesus told his disciples earlier that “The words I have spoken to you are spirit, and they are life” (6:63), and Simon Peter, speaking for the Twelve, had agreed: “Lord, to whom shall we turn? You have words of eternal life” (6:68). But this, as we have seen, is a very different audience.
48 Jesus’ hearers now prove their descent from the “slanderous” devil by resorting to name-calling: “Do we not say well that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (v. 48). The expression, “Do we not say well?”* hints that “the Jews” are not saying this for the first time. In the two instances in which Jesus uses such an expression, it is in relation either to something someone has just said, or something said repeatedly or customarily.* Here the reader knows that “You have a demon” has in fact been said before (see 7:20), but that was in a setting in which it was by no means clear that those who said it even knew that they were speaking to Jesus. This time it is different. Not only are their words intentionally directed to Jesus, but the charge being leveled is more serious. They are claiming not merely that he is wildly mistaken or insane, but that he is genuinely demon-possessed. Yet their words “Do we not say well?” give the impression that this may have been a rather common opinion about Jesus among some (though not all) the religious authorities in Jerusalem (see 10:20–21); the other Gospels certainly do not contradict that impression (see Mk 3:22).
“Samaritan” is more surprising. Despite the long-standing hostility between Jew and Samaritan, there is no evidence that the mere ethnic epithet “Samaritan” (or “Jew” for that matter) was ever in itself a term of reproach. When the Samaritan woman asked Jesus, “How come you, a Jew, are asking drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (4:9), she was not calling names, but merely keeping her distance by pointing out facts. It is true that the legal scholar in Luke, when asked which character in a story was neighbor to the fallen man in the ditch, could not bring himself to say “the Samaritan,” but instead replied, “The one who showed mercy” (Lk 10:37). That too was a fact, but that Jesus was a Samaritan was not a fact, but a lie. As the Samaritan woman noticed at once, he was “a Jew” (4:9). Unlike Paul, who became “to the Jews as a Jew that I might gain the Jews” (see 1 Cor 9:20–22), Jesus in this Gospel comes as “a Jew” to the Samaritans and as “a Samaritan” to the Jews—a stranger to everyone, yet offering life and salvation to all.
Even though it is a lie, from the reader’s standpoint it is no insult for Jesus to be called “a Samaritan”—not after the story of the Samaritan woman and her village’s faithful response to Jesus’ mission. Yet the lie’s intent is slanderous, and therefore the work of the devil, not only because of the Jews’ hatred of the Samaritans but because of the explicit link between being “a Samaritan” and “having a demon.”* These are actually not two distinct charges but one, and Jesus will answer them as one (v. 49). Behind them is the supposition that Samaritans are, if not literally at least figuratively, demon-possessed, by virtue of their centuries-old reputation of worshiping many Gods (see 2 Kgs 17:24–41). Jesus himself, speaking as a Jew, had said of them, “You people worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” (4:22). Even down to John’s day and later, among Christians as well as Jews, Samaria was associated with heresies labeled as demonic.* At the very least, the epithets “Samaritan” and “having a demon” mutually reinforce each other in the minds of Jesus’ accusers.
49 Jesus responds quickly and directly to the charge of demon possession, just as he does in the other Gospels (see Mk 3:23–30). The emphatic pronouns are noteworthy in gauging the tone of his response. His accusers had said, “Do we not say well that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (v. 48), and Jesus now answers, “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me” (v. 49, italics added). His emphatic pronouns mimic and mock theirs, putting them back on the defensive.* Not content with simply denying the charge of demon possession, Jesus adds by way of contrast, “but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me.” His pronouncement revisits 5:23, when he was first accused of breaking the Sabbath and “claiming God as his own Father” (5:18). There he stated his Father’s intention “that all will honor the Son just as they honor the Father,” and that “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (5:23). Now, in charging that “you dishonor me,” he is implicitly accusing them of dishonoring God as well, the God they claim as their “one Father” (see v. 41).*
50 Lest he seem to be making grandiose claims for himself, Jesus is quick to add, “And I am not seeking my glory. There is one who seeks and judges” (v. 50). Again the “I” is emphatic, suggesting that his accusers are, by contrast, seeking their own glory.* The pronouncement itself is consistent with what he has said all along. When he was charged with “making himself equal to God” (5:18), he insisted he could do nothing “on his own” (5:19, 30), and later he explained that “He who speaks on his own seeks his own glory, but he who seeks the glory of the One who sent him is true” (7:18). Jesus seeks the Father’s glory, but as far as Jesus’ glory is concerned, it is the Father* who does the “seeking,”* and it is the Father who finally “judges” between Jesus and his accusers.* Jesus’ “glory,” therefore, is his eventual vindication against those who accuse and slander him.
51 Having stood his ground effectively against those who called him “a Samaritan” and demon-possessed (v. 48), Jesus is ready to make another promise. Oddly, in this discourse his promises of salvation are what provoke the bitterest controversy. It all started with the promise, “If you dwell on my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (vv. 31b–32), reinforced with an “Amen, amen” pronouncement (vv. 34–36), to the effect that “if the Son sets you free, you will really be free” (v. 36). This time the promise is introduced right from the start with the “Amen, amen” formula, the thirteenth occurrence of that formula in the Gospel: “Amen, amen, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never ever see death” (v. 51). Both promises are conditional on a person’s response to Jesus’ “word,” or message. In one instance it was a matter of “dwelling” on Jesus’ word (v. 32); in the other, of “keeping” it (v. 51). At the same time, having revisited 5:23 two verses earlier (with the saying about “honor” in v. 49), Jesus now revisits 5:24, where he had said, “Amen, amen, I say to you that the person who hears my word and believes the One who sent me, has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life” (italics added). The promise of “eternal life” has been common enough in the Gospel up to this point (see 3:15, 16, 36; 4:14, 36; 5:39; 6:27, 40, 47, 54, 68), but only rarely in its negative form of passing “from death into life” (as in 5:24).* Another rare exception was 6:50, where Jesus was identified as “the bread that comes down from heaven, so that anyone might eat of it and not die.”* This was followed shortly by the promise that “If anyone eat of this bread, he will live forever” (6:51).
When stated this way, such pronouncements lend themselves to the notion that Jesus is promising exemption from physical death, and therefore quite literally an endless life here on earth. In 6:52, “the Jews” who heard him did not pick up on this because they were offended above all by something else he said in the same breath: “and the bread I will give him is my flesh for the life of the world” (v. 51). “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” they demanded, ignoring the promise of “living forever.” This time Jesus repeats the same promise even more provocatively (if that is possible), calling attention to it with the “Amen, amen” formula. “If anyone keeps my word,” he announces, “he will never ever see death.” The translation “never ever” is deliberately redundant, for the expression “not see death” is already emphatic, as if to say “By no means!” or “Never!” and the added phrase (“forever”) simply adds to it the prospect of eternal duration (see 4:14; 6:35; 10:28; 11:26). Normally, to “not see death” means to be spared physical death, either forever (as Enoch was; see Heb 11:5), or for a certain period of time (as with Simeon, who was told he would “not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ,” Lk 2:26). Here, although the verb for “see” is different, there is no discernible difference in meaning. Both verbs refer to “seeing” in the sense of experiencing, that is, to “see” death is to die, no matter which verb is used.*
Despite all this, the reader of the Gospel knows by this time that Jesus is not using this kind of language in the “normal,” that is, literal, way. He is not promising exemption from physical death but from spiritual death, or eternal condemnation. This was evident already in chapter 3, where “eternal life in him” (3:15) was first mentioned in connection with being “born from above” (3:3, 5, 7) and was contrasted not with physical death but with judgement or condemnation (3:17–18), and in chapter 5, where to “have eternal life” or to “pass from death into life” meant to “not come into judgment,” that is, to be vindicated and free of condemnation. It was evident also in chapter 6, where Jesus twice stated explicitly that “eternal life” meant, “I will raise him up at the last day” (6:40, 54)—a promise that not only allowed for but actually assumed physical death (see also 5:25, 28–29). If there is any doubt in the reader’s mind, Jesus will clear it up in chapter 11, when he tells Martha, “Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, he will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die” (11:25–26, italics added). But Jesus’ audience here in chapter 8 does not have the benefit of such clarifications, and again (as in v. 33) finds his “words of eternal life” (see 6:68) not comforting but offensive.
52–53 Taking Jesus’ pronouncement literally, “the Jews” exclaim, “Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets, and you say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never ever taste of death’ ” (v. 52). Too much should not be made of the slight discrepancy between Jesus’ wording, “never ever see death,” and their citation of it as “never ever taste of death.”* It is no more significant than the discrepancy in Jesus’ own speech between “seeing” and “entering” the kingdom of God (see 3:3, 5). “Seeing” and “tasting” are used almost interchangeably in the New Testament for undergoing the experience of physical death, and carry that implication to about the same degree. The pronouncement as they paraphrase it calls to mind a saying of Jesus in all three synoptic Gospels (in two of them introduced by “Amen, I say to you”) that “There are some of those standing here who will never taste of death until they see the kingdom of God come with power” (Mk 9:1), or “until they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Mt 16:28), or “until they see the kingdom of God” (Lk 9:27). This well-known saying is comparable to the promise to Simeon that he would “not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ” (Lk 2:26), in that “seeing” or “tasting” death is simply a way of measuring the time remaining before some momentous event occurs. It is a way of saying, “It will happen in your lifetime,” or “You will live to see it.” Jesus’ pronouncement in John’s Gospel, by contrast, has “forever” attached: “You will not see, or taste, of death—ever!”* There is no “before” or “until” clause to tone it down. Consequently, it sounds to “the Jews” as if Jesus is promising endless life here on earth. Their misunderstanding arises not from confusing two Greek verbs, but from a failure all along to grasp what Jesus meant by “eternal life”—just as they have failed all along to grasp who he meant by “the One who sent me,” or “the Father” (vv. 19, 27), or what it meant to be “set free” (v. 33).
Offended by what they think Jesus means, they take it as confirmation of what they said before (in v. 48), “Now we know that you have a demon” (v. 52).* How can Jesus promise that those who obey his word will never “taste of death,” when not even Abraham, whom they call “father” (v. 39), or any of the prophets of Israel, were spared that common fate of all humanity?* The point is important enough to them that they repeat it: “Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died, and the prophets died? Who do you make yourself to be?” (v. 53). That it was difficult for some Jews to come to terms with Abraham’s mortality is evident from the Testament of Abraham, where Abraham negotiates at great length with the archangel Michael functioning as the angel of death, and at the end graciously accepts his inevitable fate.* As far as Jesus’ questioners are concerned, Abraham and the prophets are dead. The thrice-repeated “died”* says so with finality. The reader will recall Jesus’ own words to other “Jews” in Galilee, “Your fathers ate the manna in the desert, and they died” (6:49; also v. 58), but the circumstances here are somewhat different. Jesus’ point earlier was simply that the manna in the desert sustained that generation only for a time, not forever, like “the Bread of life.” This time it is not Jesus saying “Abraham died, and the prophets,” but his antagonists. But regardless of who said it, is it true? In one sense, obviously yes. Abraham did die, and so did all the prophets, just as surely as the desert generation died in the time of Moses.* Yet Jesus’ hearers, if they belonged to the Pharisees (see 7:32, 45; 8:13), would also have believed that Abraham and the prophets would rise from the dead, and Jesus himself in the other Gospels goes further, citing God’s self-revelation to Moses at the burning bush, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” (Exod 3:6), and concluding, “He is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Mt 22:32 and Mk 12:27; see also Lk 20:38, with the added words, “For they are all alive to him”).* To that extent, Jesus’ questioners are mistaken.* Jesus, as we will see, is not claiming any special advantage for those who “keep his word” over Abraham or the prophets of old (Isaiah, for example; see 12:41). Still, he is making extraordinary claims for himself, as his hearers understand. Their concluding question, “Who do you make yourself to be?”* (v. 53), recalls the original suspicion among the Jewish authorities that Jesus “was claiming God as his own Father, making himself equal to God” (5:18, my italics). Their question reveals that the issue is christological, as it has been all along. It cries out for an answer, and they will not have long to wait (see v. 58).
54–55 Ignoring for a moment the reference to Abraham’s death, Jesus speaks directly to the christological question, yet without adding anything new to what he has said before. His answer, in short, is that he is not “making himself” to be anything. “If I glorify myself,” he insists, “my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, him whom you say that ‘He is our God’ ” (v. 54, italics added). He is here basically repeating what he said in verse 50, using the verb “glorify” in place of the expression “to seek glory.” At the same time, he reminds his questioners that his “Father” is God, whom they themselves claimed to be their Father as well when they said, “We have one Father, God” (v. 41). Jesus paraphrases what they said as “He is our God,”* implying that if their God “glorifies” Jesus (or seeks his glory), they should as well. Because they have not done so, he draws the conclusion that “you have not known him, but I know him.” This is the third time he has told them that they do not know God (compare 7:28; 8:19), and he insists repeatedly that he, by contrast, does know God: “And if I say I do not know him, I will be a liar like you.* But I know him [compare 7:29], and I keep his word” (v. 55).
The most important claim here—more important than the striking repetition of “I know him,” more important than calling them liars—is the claim that “I keep his word,” echoing and qualifying his disputed claim that “if anyone keeps my word, he will never ever see death” (v. 51, italics added). It is necessary to “keep Jesus’ word,” not because he is “greater than Abraham” in and of himself, but because he keeps the Father’s word. Consequently, his word that gives eternal life is the Father’s word. This is no surprise to the reader, who has known from the start that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). “I” on Jesus’ lips, therefore, is not just “I,” but “I and the Father who sent me” (see 8:16).
56 To this point, Jesus himself has not weighed in explicitly on the question of Abraham’s mortality. He now does so, with the pronouncement, “Abraham, your father, rejoiced* that he would see my day,* and he saw and was glad.” The identification of Abraham as “your father,” is ironic, like the irony of referring to “him whom who say that ‘He is our God’ ” (v. 54). That Abraham is their father is their claim, not what Jesus thinks (v. 39), but if Abraham “rejoiced that he would see my day,” Jesus is saying, and if Abraham is their father as they say, then they should rejoice as well, just as they “chose to rejoice for a time” in John’s light (see 5:35). Beyond the irony, the pronouncement raises some difficult questions. First, what precisely does Jesus mean by “my day”?* Second, when did Abraham “rejoice” at the prospect of seeing Jesus’ “day”? Third, when and how did it finally come about that “he saw and was glad”? These questions need to be confronted one at a time, preferably in just that order (although the first two overlap to some degree).
On the face of it, Jesus’ “day” could simply refer to the present—his time on earth even as he speaks here at the Tent festival in Jerusalem. The notion that Abraham foresaw Christ’s coming seems to have been a familiar one to Christians well before the Gospel of John was written. Paul, for example, speaks of the “promises” that God made to Abraham, noticing that God did not say (in Gen 13:15), “ ‘and to the seeds,’ as to many, but as to one, ‘and to your seed,’ who is Christ” (Gal 3:16). But something more specific may be in view. “Day of the Lord” in the Hebrew Bible is characteristically a day of judgment or vindication, and the same is true in the New Testament, where “the Lord” is specifically Jesus (see, for example, 1 Thess 5:2; Mt 24:42; also Lk 17:30, “The day when the Son of man is revealed”).*
In John’s Gospel, the only “day” mentioned so far that might qualify as “my day” from Jesus’ standpoint is “the last day,” a time when, as he has said not once but four times, “I will raise him up” (referring to those whom the Father has given him and drawn to him, and who believe in him, or who “eat my flesh and drink my blood”; see 6:38, 39, 44, 54). Later we will learn that “the last day” is also a day of judgment (see 12:48).* This interpretation of the “day” that Jesus claimed Abraham saw is appealing, not only because it draws on sayings within John’s Gospel itself, but because of traces elsewhere in the New Testament of a belief that Abraham foresaw or somehow anticipated a future resurrection. Paul wrote of God’s promise to Abraham, and of Abraham’s calling “in the sight of God whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were” (Rom 4:17),* and the author of Hebrews claimed that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac because “he reasoned that God was able to raise from the dead—from which, in a manner of speaking,* he did receive him back” (Heb 11:19; my italics).
The striking feature of Abraham’s “joy” as Jesus describes it in John’s Gospel is that it comes in two stages, the joy of anticipation* and the joy of fulfillment.* This coincides with Abraham’s story in Genesis, where the promise that Abraham would have a son, and become the father of many nations (see Gen 17:15–17) was fulfilled (or at least began to be fulfilled) with the birth of Isaac (Gen 21:1–7).* It is natural to infer that it was at the promise that Abraham “rejoiced,”* and that he “saw and was glad” when the promise was fulfilled, whether at Isaac’s birth or at the child’s deliverance when Abraham was about to offer him up as a sacrifice (Gen 22:1–14). Those are the moments highlighted in Romans (4:17) and in Hebrews (11:19) respectively, where they are viewed as signs of the resurrection, and they are most likely the moments in view here as well.
Perhaps significantly, the resurrection of the dead in John’s Gospel can also be described as a two-stage affair, for Jesus had said, “an hour is coming and now is when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (5:25, italics added).* There too, as in the four instances in which he promised to raise the dead “at the last day” (6:39, 40, 44, and 54), the resurrection is Jesus’ work no less than the Father’s (see 5:21, “For just as the Father raises the dead and brings them to life, so too the Son brings to life those he wants”). Abraham, consequently, in anticipating and then experiencing (in his own fashion) the resurrection, “saw Jesus’ day” and became the beneficiary of the gift of eternal life. As Origen put it, “when Abraham saw the day of Jesus, at the same time that he saw it he also heard his word and kept it, and he no longer sees death.* The Jews were also incorrect when they said, ‘Abraham died,’ as if he were still among the dead.”* Far from promising anyone who “keeps my word” (v. 51) an advantage over Abraham, as “the Jews” charged, Jesus is classifying Abraham as just such a person, that is, as one who lives, and “will never ever see death.” Even though the audience is different (Pharisees, presumably, not Sadducees), this exchange stands as the Gospel of John’s nearest equivalent to the synoptic debate over future resurrection (see Mk 12:18–27 and par.).
57 To “the Jews,” Jesus’ pronouncement implies a claim to preexistence, which they are quick to question: “You are not yet fifty years old,* and you have seen Abraham?”* But Jesus has made no such claim. He has said that Abraham saw the future (that is, Jesus’ own “day”), and implied that Abraham still lives, but has said nothing to put himself back in Abraham’s time. Ironically, their misunderstanding anticipates what he will say next. They, not he, are bringing up the matter of his preexistence, but he, not they, will promptly turn it into an explicit claim (v. 58).
58 Jesus replies with yet another “Amen, amen” saying, the fourteenth in the Gospel and the third in the present discourse (see vv. 34–36, 51): “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am” (v. 58). It is also the third time in the temple discourse that Jesus has used the “I am”* formula without a predicate (see vv. 24, 28). Each time before, a predicate could be inferred from the context, whether “I am the Light of the world” (v. 12), or “I am from above” (v. 23), or even (mistakenly), “I am the Son of man” (v. 28), yet enough ambiguity remained to arouse the reader’s curiosity and hold “the Jews” at bay. This time the ambiguity dominates: “Before Abraham came to be, I am.” I am.… What, or Who? To the modern reader, the sentence appears unfinished. Who is Jesus claiming to be? The striking contrast between coming to be* and being recalls the Gospel’s opening verses, with their contrast between what “came to be” (1:3, 6, 10, 14, 17) and the “Word” or the “Light” that always “was” (1:1, 2, 4, 9, 10). Here too the imperfect “I was”* might have been expected, and would have been sufficient to establish preexistence, but instead Jesus uses the present:* not “Before Abraham came to be, I was,” but “Before Abraham came to be, I am.”
As has often been noticed, this saying of Jesus echoes a number of pronouncements by the God of Israel in the Old Testament (particularly in Isaiah), reminding Israel of who he is, what he has done, and what he will do. Such pronouncements are introduced by “I [am] He” in the Hebrew Bible,* and by “I am” in the Greek Old Testament.* Their purpose, most often, is to affirm continuity between God’s revelations and actions in the past and what he is doing, or will do, in the present and near future. For example, “See now that I myself am He! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand” (Deut 32:39); “Who has done this and carried it through, calling forth the generations from the beginning? I, the
From this brief summary, it is clear that the formula in the Greek Bible as in the Hebrew is interchangeable with “I am the
Jesus’ answer is unequivocal, and to his hearers deeply offensive. Instead of citing Exodus 3:6 as a word of Scripture, he boldly makes God’s pronouncement to Moses his own: “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am.” To the reader it sounds unfinished, but Jesus has no need to finish it. His hearers can finish it for themselves: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” with the implication that “I am not the God of the dead but of the living” (see Mk 12:27), and consequently that “If anyone keeps my word, he will never ever see death.” Because Jesus is Abraham’s God, and “before Abraham,” Abraham himself is numbered among those who “will never ever see death.” This is as close as the Gospel’s opening words, “and the Word was God,” come to being made explicit on Jesus’ own lips.*
59 At this the temple discourse at the Tent festival comes abruptly to an end. Without a word, Jesus’ hearers “took up stones that they might throw on him” (v. 59a). The reader who has the longer version of the Gospel (with 7:53–8:11) senses the irony of a narrative in which the religious authorities first ask Jesus’ sober judgment about an adulteress condemned to stoning (8:4–5), then are thwarted by his invitation to “The one without fault among you” to be the first to drop a stone (8:7), but now are finally emboldened to stone even Jesus himself. More than that, the reader senses a discrepancy between their carefully planned scenario in 8:3–5 (“This they said testing him, so that they might have [reason] to accuse him,” v. 6), and their spontaneity, even to the point of mob action, here at the end of the discourse. Will they stone Jesus right on the spot, one wonders, without arresting him or holding a trial? Would their leadership (to say nothing of the Roman authorities) permit such a thing?
Even to the reader who does not have the “benefit” of the story about the woman, the mention of stoning comes abruptly, yet not unexpectedly, given the plan of “the Jews” for three chapters now (see 5:18) to kill Jesus. No reason is given as to why they “took up stones” now and not before, or precisely what it was in Jesus’ final “Amen, amen” pronouncement (v. 58) that elicited such a reaction. But this is not the last we will hear of stoning (see 10:31, 39; 11:8), and when it is threatened again, the reason is given: “For a good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy, and because you, being a man, are making yourself God” (10:33). Here too, as we have seen, it is a matter of what Jesus is “making himself” to be (v. 53; see also 5:18). While he is not “making himself” God, he is acknowledging that he is God. His enemies understand his claim long before his own disciples do (see 20:28), and to them it is blasphemy indeed. The question of whether they are acting within or outside the parameters of what the law of Moses commanded, or what the Roman government might allow, is left unresolved, and the question becomes moot as “Jesus was hidden, and went out of the temple” (v. 59b).
The notice that Jesus “was hidden”* terminates his self-revelation. He began by going up to the festival “not openly but as it were in secret”* (7:10), and now he returns to secrecy again. How he did so, whether by natural or supernatural means, we are not told. The Gospel writer could have added, “because his hour had not yet come” (as in 7:30 and 8:20), but does not need to because by now the reader knows that this was the case. Having eluded those who would have stoned him to death, he then “went out of the temple.” The temple ministry that began when Jesus “went up to the temple and began teaching” (7:14; see also 7:28, 8:20) is now at an end. Where he went from there we are not told.*
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