Critique of the Gospel of John
by Bruno Bauer

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396

§ 17. Concluding remark.

We can now bear it with a calm conscience, since we can easily show the refutation in our work, if the apologist, instead of grasping the possibility of criticism, in holy zeal reviles the critic, insults him, and brands him in the eyes of those to whom the feeling of holy disgust is more accessible than the effort of comprehension. But by taking these vituperations calmly upon us, the apologist must not blame us if we also once more overlook his last general arguments, and by criticizing them finally prepare the solution of the question as to the author of the fourth Gospel.

“One is not mistaken, says Hemsen *), if one thinks that the main reason for these different judgments can be found partly in the nature and character of the Gospel and partly in the individuality of each critic. For the critic has a “narrow and common view” **) and not everyone can grasp the “love” of the fourth gospel like the Christian apologist. As we said, we think that our work speaks loud enough that we cannot remain silent on the accusation of meanness. We can also listen to it with all peace of mind. We can also hear with all composure when Lücke exclaims in moral zeal ***): “it takes a great eccentricity and partiality of heart and mind to misjudge the peculiar charm of the Johannine Gospel.”

*) The Authenticity of the Writings of John the Evangelist p. 117.

**) Ibid. p. 194.

***) Comm. I, 113.

397

The critical free view has the prejudice against itself that it must misjudge the essence of the gospel: but we refer to our work and only ask: who recognizes the innermost determination of the fourth gospel and who misjudges, screws and twists it, the critic or the apologist? Finally, we are not frightened by the religious hyperbole, when Τholuck zealously says *): “the sanctuary of religious feelings had to be touched in the most disdainful way”, as soon as the critics wanted to look at the fourth gospel with unbiased freedom. The critic has become accustomed to religious condemnation, moral suspicion and civil proscription, he will perhaps become even more so, and he must only regret the point of view for which the free investigation of the truth and the restoration of the true view of the person of the Savior has become an irreligious outrage.

*) The Credibility of Evangelical History 1837, p. 271.

But let us only weigh the condemnation over which the love of truth raises us too surely, and let us rather consider in those apologetic turns what is still worthy of consideration at all.

Thus the “depth” of the fourth gospel is, as Hemsen thinks, what must be closed to the critic. We hope, however, that the philosophically educated critic will no longer be reproached for this; on the contrary, we think that it should be credited to him as cautious abstinence if he refrains from hearing speculative determinations confirmed by the mouth of the Lord. What of really deep determinations is contained in the fourth Gospel is probably recognized by no one more and more unrestrictedly than by the critic as the archetype of the entire ecclesiastical speculative theory, and the only question at issue is whether the Lord has always allegorized and speculated only about his person – a question, therefore, from which the critic must always answer only with the most decided “No!” as long as the immediate certainty and certainty of Jesus’ self-consciousness is of value to him.

398

“The fact that John *) sometimes becomes obscure cannot be remarkable, since he endeavored to present to his readers the divine in Christ **).” As if the divine in the Redeemer could only be represented darkly! But it does not even occur to the true critics to accuse the fourth gospel of obscurity. The sayings of this gospel are in themselves very understandable, they are not more incomprehensible than any simple abstraction like unity, spirit, flesh, light, darkness, above, below. Criticism claims only that the Lord could not always speak only in abstraction and could not bring the infinite content of his self-consciousness merely to abstract expression. Also in the Synoptics the Lord speaks of his person and of the divine of it, but how clearly, strikingly, determinedly and how removed from all abstract attitude he did it by presenting his person as the living center of a living, historical and all times encompassing world! The ambiguity of the Lord’s discourses in the fourth Gospel lies only in the fact that the most abstract determinations are heaped together without receiving their proper and natural mediation, that the form of the later reflecting spirit is confused with the standpoint of Jesus, that both presuppositions, namely that the Lord speaks and the presupposition of the later standpoint of the congregation, become confused. The reasonable conclusions (ουν), the theological consideration (ενα) and the antitheses and contrasts (αλλα), which all have a given, generally known content as their premise, inappropriately cross the premise that the Lord unlocks heavenly mysteries, and this and only this confusion produces the appearance of darkness or rather of obscurity.

*) Incidentally! Why doesn’t the apologist say: Christ? This substitution of the subject, which is so often found in apologetic commentaries and treatises, is in itself an inconsistency, but a proof of how much criticism has penetrated even into the flesh of its sworn enemies. It is only bad that the apologist is so sure about this stake in the flesh, does not feel it and cannot think about it.

**) Hemsen ibid. p. 127.

399

” A spirit that exercised its power not only over the simply practical natures, but also over the deeply searching speculative Paul, must have originally scattered elements that were related to such a direction *)”.

*) Thus Neander, das Leben Jesu Christi, (1837.) p. 208.

Yes, the elements, i.e. the general content, were essentially speculative and had to stimulate the deepest spirits to development, but this content, which Jesus would bring into the world of consciousness, was not presented by him in the abstract form which the fourth gospel gave him. Criticism, therefore, cannot be condemned by that appeal to the speculative nature of the Christian elements.

“Something purely metaphysical, Neander continues, does not occur in John, but here too everything has its practical relation to the inner life, the divine community of life to be established through Christ **).”

**) Ibid. p. 209.

Of course! Because the fourth evangelist would bring the content of Christian consciousness to an abstract form, he could not ignore the relation to self-consciousness, to the inner life and to Christ, because of the nature of the subject. But does criticism have to claim that the fourth evangelist wrote only a metaphysics of understanding, does it really claim that? To be sure, the apologist must attribute a meaningless assertion to his opponent if he wants to gain even a momentary and apparent success against him.

400

About the personal character of the fourth evangelist, as far as it can be seen from his writing, the apologists are very divided. Tholuck *) sentimentally exclaims: “that sensual and intimate, gentle and mild man!” Lücke thinks **), “the gentleness and tenderness, which one is accustomed to praise in him, without being able to prove any particular traits of it, lay more in the general principle of Christian love, which he had grasped with special depth and truth, than in his individual temperament. It was rather fierce and angry.” And did he deny this vehemence in his so “thoroughly individual ***)” representation of Christ? Neander says: “Not a gentle and soft love, but a love that grasped and held on to the object it was directed at with all its strength, and thus abruptly repelled everything that dared to revile this object or to interfere with its possession, that was the predominant thing in his mind ****) “. Neander thinks that this original disposition of John was later “transfigured” in the service of the gospel, so he also assumes that it could no longer emerge in the evangelical writing of the same, but since he himself says that the influence of the Holy Spirit could not have torn the apostle out of his earlier idiosyncrasy *), he will not impute it to others as a crime if they find this oxymoron of harsh love in the gospel itself. It is true that he, like Lücke, denies that the “gentle, soft, mild” which, for example, Tholuck praises in the fourth evangelist, was preferably peculiar to him; but the style of the gospel, the blurred transitions, the matte in the connection of sentences and thoughts, the tautologies that revolve around themselves, the complaint about the insensitivity of the world – if in all this there is not the sign of softness, in what else should it betray itself? Admittedly, we must not, like Tholuck, consider the fourth evangelist to be only a mild, gentle man, nor, like Lücke, describe his character only as a violent one, nor, like Neander, deny him soft gentleness, as if it were incompatible with ruggedly repulsive love: but this ruggedness and that softness and gentleness of spirit are essentially related, the latter is the complement of the former, indeed, both are a whole, are one and the same. The rugged violence is the only weapon with which the gentle character can preserve itself and its own, and it is characteristic of the soft character to go out strictly against the opposition, while the strong, masculine character not only holds on to its content with all its strength, but penetrates it down to the individual and definite and no longer behaves only repulsively toward the opposition, but calmly and surely dissolves it. The manly, strong character never loses his calm and patience in the struggle, he does not threaten from beginning to end, but he works – look at the apostle Paul – he certainly labors with the enemy power in the most detailed and determined way and one can be sure that his polemic never overshoots its target, but hits it. But precisely that softness with which the fourth evangelist complains about the resistance of the world and now feels driven to salvation with all the more touched love, precisely this elegiac mildness is at the same time the greatest harshness. For now he presents the matter so hyperbolically, with such an overflowing polemic, that he always says: No one received the Savior, now the historical ground of the Lord has become an abstract contrast for him, the Jews appear as an utterly rejected, hostile mass, accessible only to murderous thoughts, which no longer knows how to understand anything, not even the clearest, simplest word of the Lord, and for which only the thunder of judgment is kept at last, when nothing more can be done with it. Contrasts and nothing but contrasts, opposites and antitheses are the element in which this gentle gruffness, this gruff mildness, this hard softness can move.

*) Glaudw. etc. p. 294.

**) Comm. I, 13.

***) Ibid. p. 67,

****) History of planting -c. p. 317.

*) History of planting etc, p. 324.

402

It was a correct understanding of this character, when the ecclesiastical view in the first times, when it became acquainted with the fourth gospel, drew that picture of the author, which is already found in Irenaeus *): when John went to Ephesus into a bathhouse, but saw that also Cerinthus, the heretic, was in it, he immediately rushed out full of disgust and said, he must fear that the house would collapse over the enemy of truth. One will also find that the softest characters in church history were the harshest and hardest, if only one does not confuse harshness and brusqueness with a comprehensive struggle that penetrates the individual and the specific. It may be that the fourth evangelist meant to fight certain opposites when he wrote his scripture, but he himself did not bring these opposites to a definite conception and always has to do only with the general opposition of unbelief and misunderstanding in general. Our time, as far as it is devoted to apologetics, bears the same character of soft indeterminacy and hardness; no apologist has been able to bring it to a definite conception of the opponent, and he always creates for himself only in the image of unbelief and unchristianity or of the Antichrist a self-made opponent, not to be found in reality, over whom he now all the more impudently summons the thunder of worldly and heavenly judgment. Of course – it goes without saying – this newer unclear and indefinite apologetics and polemics is only the brusque softness, the impotent *) power of the dying, while the polemical apologetics of the fourth evangelist had caught the creative power of a new world and had created the basis of an essential view of the church.

*) advers. haer. III, 3

*) although in the secular for the moment still quite palpable.

403

If the matter were thus settled on both sides, when the apologists speak of a “not insignificant influence of the apostle’s subjectivity on the presentation of the speeches in his Gospel” **) or of a “reflex of the Johannine language and way of thinking” ***) in the speeches of the Gospel and then speak to each other of the “faithfulness and credibility in essence and in spirit ****)”: then the matter would be very easy and would not need the effort and care that criticism devotes to it.

**) Lücke, Comm. I, 201.

***) Ibid. p. 103.

****) Ibid. p. 201.

404

But it is something else when the matter is taken seriously, when the influence of the author’s subjectivity is traced in detail, i.e., when what the apologists only speak of, what they only speak of before the explanation of the work and what they completely forget when they explain the gospel itself, happens in reality. If they then remembered their concessions, with which they were so liberal before, if they sought out the influence of the author’s subjectivity on his representation, if they really took hold of the “hand” that the evangelist “has everywhere – as they say, at least – in the longer and more difficult speeches between them *)” and if they only determined more closely in what “the individuality of the representation **)” is expressed in the fourth gospel: then they would see how nothing at all is said with vague words like “faithfulness in substance and in spirit. For in fact, one could then no longer call the “Johannine Gospel absolutely individual in its conception and presentation of Christ” and yet still claim that the agreement with the Synoptic Gospels “in all essentials is unmistakable, so that what is different and peculiar appears only as a supplement, even as a correction ***). The idiosyncrasy, which is supposed to “absolutely” determine the fourth Gospel, to permeate the conception and presentation of Christ throughout, itself forms an essential point, turns into content like form in general – the criticism proves it in detail – and the agreement in the essentials now rather becomes a significant contradiction, at least as we have learned.

*) loc. cit. ibid.

**) Ibid. p. 108.

***) Ibid. p. 67.

As soon as the reflective standpoint of the fourth Evangelist has betrayed itself and the individuality of the presentation is also recognized as a continuous one, we are not sure, even with so-called smaller speeches, whether the “author” did not have his hand in them as well, and we have actually found his hand in them too, since they differ from the larger ones in nothing but their extent. For some point of view we would be speaking incomprehensibly if we said the historical material according to its formation, arrangement, grouping and even development is intrinsically connected with the discourses and, if these are reflections, are no less shaped and originated by the author’s reflection. We shall therefore content ourselves with referring to the critical and experientially mediated proof which we have provided above, and merely reminding us that we have not found an atom that would have eluded the work of reflection of the fourth evangelist.

405

And yet would the fourth ” be regarded as a canon of the first three Gospels?” *) Not for all eternity! In the synoptic gospels the reflection was not absent either, but in the speeches themselves, it was the most abstinent and far from the idea that “we have subjective relations of the speeches of Jesus, only different and from a more distant and lower standpoint **)”, rather the subjective of the means through which they passed was mostly eliminated since they passed through the general spirit of the community. The synoptic relations of the speeches of the Lord stand higher, if we look at the free infinity of the content, the speeches in the fourth gospel stand lower, in so far as they have descended into the entanglements of reflection.

*) As Lücke thinks, Comm. I, 108.

**) Ibid. p. 103.

406

The fourth gospel brings Lücke together with the weakest point of the synoptics, especially of Matthew, when he says *): “the three first gospels contain no fewer samples of the faithful, partly literal retention of longer speeches of Jesus”. These supposedly longer speeches are, after all, only mechanical accumulations of particular pieces of speech, but even in this, their weakest point, the Synoptics still triumph, since they have preserved the individual pieces at least in their original independence, while the fourth evangelist has substantially changed and edited the basic materials.

*) Ibid. p. 103.

To remind us of one such change! That does not apply to us or any critic when Lücke says, “Whoever completely misses the naive, simple, parabolic, and gnomic in John, must not have read it attentively**).” Who would react so strongly! And now, mixing such different things, from the naive and gnomic! As far as we know, no critic has claimed that the figurative language – because that is what the apologist can only mean – is completely absent in the fourth Gospel, but it has been found that the discourse of parables does not continue here until the completion of the parable, of which the Lord was such a master according to the synoptic accounts. And with this finding, it will remain so forever. Of course, when Lücke says, “entire speeches in the fourth Gospel move in figurative, parabolic language,” he proves that he does not understand what the criticism means. A speech can be figurative without being held in a parabolic manner. On the other hand – one can hear the Talmudic rabbis – a saying can be gnomic without being naive “in an artistic sense of being simple. The parable of the shepherd, as given in the fourth Gospel, is neither simple nor naive nor a parable, but a simile that is extended too far, kept unclear and finally sometimes very nakedly traversed by the reflection that shaped the whole. The speech about living water or bread of life, as Lücke thinks, is also not parabolic but rather simile speeches that are also accompanied by a very painful prosaic contrast and, like the latter, spin on from it.

**) Ibid. p. 100.

407

If the reflection of the fourth evangelist is already active in the smallest homonymous speech, it is no more proof against the free composition of the speeches that “John does not intersperse longer speeches more often *)”, one would have to think that someone had not been absent at all, if he had not been absent quite often or not always, as soon as there was opportunity.

*) Ibid. p 199.

The apologist finally believes to have a great support for the credibility of the fourth gospel in the ecclesiastical tradition, according to which John almost or really lived into the second century, thus was Jesus’ companion in his younger years. For “the impressions of youth are the most lasting **)”. We do not want to deny or assert the Johannine origin of the Gospel, but this much is certain, the impressions of the youth, although the most vivid, are the most uncertain. They are vivid only in the sense that the youthful spirit moves in vibrations which are boundless outwardly and extend into the innermost, but do not yet encounter a firmly formed world, so that all impressions which fall into this boundless, infinite sea now find the widest scope. But for the very reason that individuality is neither completed nor has gained a firm, inner core, impressions also blur and merge with the indeterminacy of the spirit. Only the finished man, who is something and for whom an objective world exists, knows how to preserve the impression of an appearance purely and to reproduce it as such in a clear, plastic form. The vividness of youthful impressions is actually based only on the infinite indeterminacy; therefore, if we leave youth this kind of lively excitement, we must first ascribe the thorough receptivity to the man, because he is at the same time the most active and the independent is more deeply seized and overwhelmed by the independent and by the shaped infinity.

**Ibid. p. 195.

408

Tholuck attempted again to step out of the vagueness of the usual apologetics and to give the diversity of the evangelical presentations an objective point of support and agreement. But the way in which he poses the question and looks at his opponent—Criticism—does not promise his attempt any particular success and only proves that he, too, had to pay the unavoidable tribute to apologetics. For the view of criticism he holds that it is “precisely another Christ, that of the fourth Gospel and that of the first three – an Alexandrian mystic the former, a Palestinian rabbi the latter *)”. Can the apologist, then, never conceive his opposition correctly? Does not criticism say that the former Christ is the Saviour in the reflection of a later church member as such, and the latter the Lord in the finitude of his historical self-consciousness? The contrast is also not that of the “manufactured and unpopular” and the “natural and popular,” but it is the contrast of the limitedness created by the reflection and the original infinity. The fourth gospel, too, is no stranger to a kind of infinity/universality, but it is the infinity of reflection, which is always at the same time finite, since it needs the opposition for its support. Only in the Synoptics is the infinity/universality of Christ the true one, i.e., the one that carries and holds itself with certainty and does not first need to be reflected in limited opposites in order to grasp itself.

*) Glaubw. etc., p. 312.

409

Tholuck admits a difference of the evangelical representations – how he thinks of it in a more definite way, we will soon see – but, he asks *), “does not already the richness of Christ give a sufficient explanation for this difference?” Certainly, if there were a tenable difference, which is not the case and had to be examined first before all other questions. The infinite richness reproduced by the Synoptics testifies against the narrowness of the representation in the fourth gospel, for as soon as the individual is examined in detail in the fourth gospel, it dissolves itself, just as it breaks down against the power of the Synoptic figure.

*) Ibid. p. 317.

Tholuck further refers to the “wealth” of Socrates, to which antiquity traced back ten schools **). But first of all we are dealing with biographical works, which those ten schools did not devote to the master Socrates. The real schools that formed after him did not want to reproduce Socrates’ system either, but through their studies they knew quite well that they developed earlier principles like the eleatic, atomistic, pythagorean, that of Anaxagoras in a more comprehensive self-consciousness and that they had not inherited a system as such from Socrates. The inner richness and real definite content of these schools therefore did not come to them from Socrates, but they took it from the treasure of the entire previous development of the Greek spirit, and that several directions, which took their starting point from Socrates, diverge so easily, was purely and solely due to the indefiniteness and lack of content of the Socratic principle. What does it mean, if the evangelists as historians of Jesus are put together with Plato and Aristotle, in so far as they “drew the basis of their views” from Socrates? Aristotle is, after all, infinitely far from giving his philosophy as that of Socrates, and when Plato in his dialogues lets the son of Sophroniskos develop the deepest dialectical principles or the most difficult positive determinations, he does not mean to say that Socrates taught in this way, any more than Sophocles meant to say that Oedipus spoke exactly as he portrays him speaking. In fact, if this sober and bland fidelity could be discussed further, Sophocles could more easily claim to be in agreement with history, as he portrayed a character with this specific content, in this specific conflict, while Plato knew that he was describing Socrates in situations and with a content that were completely foreign to him.

**) Ibid. p. 319.

410

So, what is the purpose of these equations of value, since the evangelists wanted to represent this certain historical personality as such, that is, not only to develop views whose basis they would have drawn from their master?

It seems to be more related to the matter when Tholuck *) comes to speak about Leibnitz and exclaims: “where will one find the biographer who represented the whole man? He has not yet stood up for Leibnitz! But appearance remains appearance, i.e. remains the appearance, which is what apologetics always comes to nowadays. Should the evangelists remain in the dark, into which this whole speech ends, and wait with their quarrels until that which is the only important thing here can be demonstrated, namely until different and yet apt descriptions of Leibnitz’s personality have been written?

*) Ibid p. 322.

411

But the synoptics can be dismissed sooner. “No, it does not belong here at all, because the Synoptics are by no means such people, to whom one side of the historical personality of the Lord was absolutely closed, but they give us just the whole glory of this personality. Anyway, here is not even a field for literary parallels – not only because, as Tholuck thinks, next to Wolf no Leibnitzian Johannes stood up or “in so far Wolf always used the Leibnitzian expressions for those truths whose innermost sense was not open to him *)” – but therefore here is no opportunity for literary finery, because Wolf was the only and necessary consequence of the uncritical dogmatism of Leibnitz. And if Tholuck now places the faithful Wolf above the synoptics already because he at least used the expressions of his master for the deeper truths that he did not understand, then he would have to place him still infinitely higher, because he was the only possible consequence of his master. But we would gladly leave these parallels where they belong, in the realm of idle thoughts, if we did not have to follow the apologist to the limit of his wit.

*) So the synoptics, who are paralleled with Wolf, are not even supposed to be equal to him, nor to Tholuck, in so far as they do not, like the latter, use the expressions of Christ for those truths, whose innermost meaning is to them, etc.?

412

Tholuck, in fact, returns to Socrates and parallelizes with the Synoptics and the fourth evangelist, Xenophon and Plato, inasmuch as the latter gave “accounts” of their master, “in which a similar relation is unmistakably expressed as in the Synoptic Gospels and in the Johannine *)”.

*) Ibid. p. 323.

But it is impossible to call Xenophon a counter-image of the Synoptics, inasmuch as he is an example **) “that the ideal side of his master can remain so closed to a writer of thoroughly practical direction that he hardly knows how to include a few speculative elements.” The poor Synoptics! But they will easily get over the neglect they have received so far, since the time of their recognition is dawning, and it will be more and more generally recognized that only in them can the ideal be found in its true form. So long as it is not proved that Plato intends to give historical notes of Socrates’ views in his dialogues, so long as other history still proves that in the development of philosophical thought the stages which must really be regarded as such, differ essentially by the distinctness of the philosophy, and that even after an indefinite stimulation by the teacher the pupil can still be regarded as such, while he has gone infinitely beyond the standpoint of his predecessor, so long will the judgment of modern philosophy *) on Xenophon, that he has portrayed the historical Socrates, remain valid. Hegel still says much too much when he says “that in respect of the personal and the method, of the exterior in Plato’s conversation, we can obtain a more faithful, perhaps more educated picture of Socrates!” On the contrary, the personal aspect of Socrates in Plato, because it is connected with a content originally alien to him and with a more abstract formation of the consciousness, is more coy than it was in reality; the healthy, immediate, freshness is missing and the irony has become an insidious, disgusting consciousness, tickling itself inwardly over its separateness. In this, too, Plato’s depiction is mistaken, in that the opposition Socrates has to deal with has mostly become caricature. Men like Gorgias, Hippias were not these vain fools, these unintelligent schoolboys, who are finished with their wisdom at any moment and are sent home ashamed. With such clumsy people, about whom another, who wants to tickle himself, could only make fun, it would not even have been worth the trouble to argue.

**) Ibid. p. 325.

*) Hegel, Gesch. der Phil. II, 125.

413

Finally, Tholuck wants to dispense with the “esoteric proofs” and only remind **) “how one-sidedly, in the Christian church itself, certain moments” of Christian truth have been developed, depending on the power of the individuals, with the receding of the others. How different, he exclaims, is the doctrinal circle that James and that which a Paul derives from the Christian tradition!”

**) op. cit. p. 325.

First of all, it should be noted that this evidence also places the matter in a strange area – that of doctrine. The doctrine starts from something simple, from the concentrated view of the general essence, condensed into one point, and develops it to its inner determinations. Here there is a reasonable, tenable, and necessary difference, because the development of doctrine, even if it is typically and imperfectly indicated in its first attempts in single individualities, needs time for its full expansion, passes only gradually through its moments, and for the complete elaboration of it needs certain people-priests corresponding to the moments, until later time, when the movement is calmed down, summarizes the result in a system. But this ideal unfolding of the essence is not at all what is at issue in the present controversy, but rather the imprint of something that is historically and positively given, the representation of a life whose endless forms are reproduced by the Synoptics.

414

Nevertheless, we must add on the other hand – Tholuck, at least as far as the fourth gospel is concerned, has played the matter over into its true territory. For this Gospel is already on the ground of theory, it already proceeds from a general view which it freely shapes in historical form, and it has supplied in its essential content the material which the Greek Church has fully worked up in its Trinity controversies. According to this essential side of his writing, the fourth evangelist does not have his complement both in the Synoptics and rather in Paul, with whom he exemplifies the spirit, questions and interests of the Orient and Occident.

Here, however, in the area of free, reflective doctrinal development, where even the apologist had to move him, even if against his will and without realizing what he was doing, the evangelist will remain from now on and here in his home he can always be sure of the recognition he deserves.

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Critique of the Gospel of John
by Bruno Bauer

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388

§ 16. The unity of Jesus with the Father.

10:22-39.

On the feast of the dedication of the temple Jesus walked in the temple, in Solomon’s hall. The Jews surrounded Him, asking how long He would keep their minds in suspense and demanding that He tell them freely if He was the Messiah.

389

How often had Jesus declared loudly and publicly and without any restraint who he was! But they did not want to believe even the clearest speech, the reluctant ones!” So even Lücke must exclaim *), but he knows how to cover up the screaming contradiction with his complaint about the unwillingness of the people. As if the question of the Jews only presupposed their unbelief and not rather a reticent language of the Lord when it was important to speak out about the significance of his person. If the apologist no longer knows how to help himself, if he is already close to admitting that the evangelist was wrong in his pragmatism, then the Jews must atone for it with their unbelief **). But if we only take up the question in its true sense, the Jews want the Lord to explain himself more clearly than before about his person, for up to now he has only spoken about it in a vacillating way or rather avoided and evaded any definite explanation. This is the meaning, but the meaning that puts the whole structure of the Gospel in contradiction with itself, for from the beginning the Lord never failed to call himself the Messiah in the most definite way. The Jews had already asked him the same question: who are you? (8:25) and also then as now he only answered that he was what he constantly said about himself. Admittedly, now as then, the Lord complains of the unbelief which the people have opposed even to his clearest declarations, but this complaint is so far from serving as a support for the apologists’ talk of the people’s unwillingness that it is only the same contradiction with which we have just become acquainted. The evangelist must let the Lord complain about the unbelief of the Jews, for according to his account all the Lord’s speeches are only sermons about his person, the evangelist must come to this complaint, although the question of the Jews would only be possible if the Lord had rarely and then always only spoken vaguely about his person. The question of the Jews is therefore only a pragmatic irritant, which is instantly forgotten as soon as he has exerted his effect and set the Lord’s speech in motion *).

*) Comm. II, 363.

**) Olshausen, on the other hand, says of the Jews who called upon the Lord to make an open declaration, that they were “attracted by the wonderful appearance which the Saviour presented to them, and full of eagerness to understand the same.” (Comm. II, 250) But the Lord has done everything in our Gospel so that this understanding could come to a conclusion. He has not only given the impression of a miraculous appearance, which could be interpreted by others, but has himself constantly given the interpretation. Olshausen must of course also come to the reproach of “unbelief” because it is once written, but he can only do so by removing a difficult presupposition; for people who occupy themselves with the miraculous appearance of the Lord and its interpretation cannot surely be accused of unbelief, they are rather on the best way to faith and a kind guide would easily bring them to it. The Lord could only punish the unbelief of the Jews if His appearance was not only vaguely a miraculous one, but had long and often been interpreted by Him.

*) Gfrörer, therefore, has no other basis for his pragmatic argument about Jesus’ teaching of Himself (d. Heiligth. u. d. Wahrh. p. 2ü. 27) than only an accidental contradiction into which the pragmatism of the evangelist has fallen.

390

The point, by the way, which the evangelist has in mind already at the beginning of this passage and to which he only wanted to bring the Lord, is his saying that he and the Father are one, v. 30. But if the decision about his historical character can lie in what leads to this saying, then the verdict will be very unfavourable. For apart from the question of the Jews, which is impossible in this way, the Lord’s answer preceding this saying is also of such a nature that it shares the same fate with the question which gave rise to it, namely, the fate of proving its impossibility. Is the Lord, then, like the apologist, who is limited to a narrow circle of proof, always to refer only to his works (v. 25)? This would also contradict his conviction that the people do not believe this testimony of works (v. 26). And now the reason of unbelief! You do not believe, complains the Lord, because you do not belong to my sheep, as I have said; thus he refers to an earlier discourse, which can only be the likeness of the true Shepherd (10:1-18) *). But at that time the Lord had said nothing about a contrast of the sheep, he had rather spoken only of the contrast of the shepherds. The likeness therefore also receives a completely new turn through this new contrast, it is developed and expanded; but it can only be drawn into this new direction if it still occupies the mind of the present hearer with the freshness of the first impression and stimulates him to follow this new turn. After a quarter of a year, this stimulus has waned and the first vibrations that the simile aroused in the mind are over, so they cannot be carried on to further circles. The stone had to be thrown into the depths anew if it was to set the water level in greater oscillations. And then the very same persons should now call upon the Lord to make a clear declaration of his dignity, to whom he had so fully revealed a quarter of a year ago that he was the true Shepherd, who would suffer sacrificial death on behalf of the flock and also lead the nations into the Kingdom of God? This can only be seriously asserted by the apologist who, caught once and for all in the letter and the circle of vision of his protégé, thinks he has achieved everything when he paraphrases his protégé’s statements with a few more words. But if we only break through this fearfully confined circle of tautology and no longer fear the question of how the writer could entangle himself in contradictions as if it were a frightening image, then the view will be different and we can finally breathe freely. The evangelist has transferred the closeness that the Lord’s speech has for him and the reader to the point of view of the people who surround Jesus at the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, the crowd has received for its view the identity that is characteristic of the drama’s chorus, and now Jesus only had to allude in a new scene to what he had said in the previous scene or to change it with a slight twist in a new direction.

*) De Wette, of course, thinks that the Lord is only referring to earlier reproaches, e.g. 8, 47, where he rebukes the people’s insensitivity. But he rather refers to a speech in which he made this reproach in the context of a parable of the shepherd.

392

The saying: “I and the Father are One” now stands alone and is left to its own fate. We must not let it share the fate of the preparatory speech from the outset, since it can be a real piece itself, even if in an unobservant environment. According to the evangelist’s view, the saying is supposed to express the unity of the Lord’s and the Father’s essence, for precisely this unity of essence is the reason for the Lord’s power, which reveals itself in the fact that one can no more snatch His own from His hand than from that of the Father. This reasoning, however, is only in the form of speculative observation, and the living fullness, the immediate being, in which the self-consciousness of the Lord and his perception were held, is drawn by it into the abstraction of the reflective determination, which was, however, only possible from the later standpoint of observation. Through the historical dialectic that the person of the Lord experienced, the immediacy of being had to be transformed into the past and into the ideal content of consciousness before the world of essence could open up to speculative reflection. The thought of the unity of essence is not rendered unstable by this result of criticism – on the contrary, it must prove its truth from within itself; nor do those words of Jesus’ life, in which it is in itself contained, thereby in any way lose their force and significance, but are only placed on the standpoint to which they belong.

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We can easily disregard the attempt of the Jews to stone the Lord and the subsequent interjections in verses 31-33 as they fall short of their purpose and cannot deny the pragmatism of the evangelist as their origin. For he does not know how to resolve a collision with the Jews other than by allowing these stubborn and hardened enemies of the Lord, these stone-like people, to pick up stones *). It is also his standing formula that the Lord refers to his works when he is called to account (v. 32). We can therefore immediately move on to the new point, namely the saying in which the Lord proves that it is not blasphemous for him to sit with God, since in the scripture God himself calls others besides him gods (v. 34-36).

*) Tholuck knows the ground of evangelical history so well that he can tell us at once where the Jews got the stones so easily (Comm. p. 208). Since the building of the temple was not yet finished, the Jews were able to scrape together the stones lying around.

As this saying is detached from the presupposed occasion, so now, of course, its consequence must also be detached from it. Nothing else follows but the same appeal to the testimony of the works, vv. 37, 38, and that attempt of the Jews, repeated over and over again, to catch the Lord, v. 39. So much the better! now the saying stands alone, and it is possible for us to put it back into its true environment. When a mob of people is in a rage, and is already grasping at its last argument, stones, then there is no time to argue with it, and to prove to it from scriptures that it is wrong. Such a discussion requires a calm situation, and if we are forced to change the scene, we will also have to bring other people onto the scene, for the Lord could more easily give this proof from Scripture before the scribes than before the angry crowd. Because of the similarity of this proof with the argumentation reported by the Synoptics (Matt. 22:41-46), because of the purity and skill of the turn the proof takes, we consider it possible that the Lord really did reject the accusation of blasphemy from this passage in the Psalms and proved His right to ascribe divine dignity to Himself.

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Up to this point, the fourth gospel could be considered on its own and it was possible for us to get to know its peculiarity from the criticism of its pragmatism and its presentation of history, since up to this point it stands alone and only comes into contact with the synoptic gospel circle at individual external points. From now on, however, when he moves on to the presentation of the last part of Jesus’ life, the fourth evangelist cannot take a step without coming into collision with the synoptic reports. Even with the report of the raising of Lazarus, although the synoptics do not know anything about it, he is not alone, since this miracle, according to his view, brings the struggle of the legal authorities against Jesus to a final decision, while the first gospels convey this decision in a completely different way. But it is not only this last part of the life of Jesus that is subject to comparative criticism, but also the whole account of the public activity of the Lord, which the fourth evangelist has delivered, is to be considered again, if we examine the parallel account of the first three gospels. Up to now, although we have always drawn the final judgment of criticism from the inner pragmatism of the fourth gospel, we have also opposed the synoptic accounts to it, but we have not yet taken this opposition in the highest degree of seriousness: we have only brought them into the circle of vision in the way one makes demonstrations with an enemy power in order to bring the opponent to his senses and to a decision. From the distant heights, on which we left the synoptic power only in a threatening position, we will now bring it down to the plain; now the hot battle between it and the fourth gospel will begin, and only now will it be possible to solve the question of the historical character of what we found as the last basic material in the latter gospel.

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Before the battle breaks out, however, we must once again examine the forces of the fourth gospel and bring them back into the proper order of battle, especially out of the confusion and crooked position into which they have been placed by the apologists.

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Critique of the Gospel of John
by Bruno Bauer

—o0o—

311

§ 14. Continuation of the dispute about the person of the Lord.

8:12-59.

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1) The light of the world.

7:12.

The dispute that he had with the Jews about the dignity of his person in chapter 7, the Lord did not let rest for long, but immediately took it up again at the next opportunity. Now, however, after the collision with the scribes and Pharisees, the best opportunity was given for this; the people who surrounded the Lord and listened to him (v. 2), before the tempters came to him, still surrounded him, so he could immediately resume the speech about his person.

Whether the author has the view that the Lord conducted the following dispute in one go is also easy to answer, since the argumentative speech is referred to as a whole by the introductory and concluding remarks. First, it is said that the Lord took up the speech again and at the end it is stated as the result of the argumentative speech that the Jews wanted to stone him.

The question, however, whether we really have before us a coherent chain of sayings of Jesus, is a different one, no longer has to do with the view of the author alone and can only be decided by the criticism of the content.

The beginning of this discourse must at once disconcert us, for it lacks all occasion. The Lord suddenly says: I am the light of the world. By occasion, of course, we do not mean a circumstance of the kind assumed by the commentators here, that the two candlesticks in the women’s courtyard were burning precisely to glorify the Feast of Tabernacles, or that they were extinguished just as the feast had come to an end *). But to speak of himself and the dignity of his person, the Lord could only ever find the occasion to do so when a spiritual controversy, which could only be solved in this way, had preceded or the people had already been seized and set in motion by a general word of the Kingdom of Heaven. But, as it is presupposed here, to preach from the outset only from his person, that looks as unlike the Lord as it can be, and he would certainly have known that it would be useless **). It must have been so unsuccessful, as even our author must always assume, since the crowd was not led to this point by any particular interest. The person of the Lord would have been presented without foundation in every respect, if the ground, namely the idea of the kingdom of heaven and its general laws, had not been given beforehand. However, for the Evangelist, it is firmly established that the teaching of Jesus must be represented only as the theory of his person, into which theory his entire view of the Lord had condensed itself. His view moved only in the contrast, whose extreme points were the isolated person of the Lord and the world sunk in its sensual interests. Thus, for him, the teaching of the Lord could only be the preaching of his person, and the success of it even among those in the masses who were immediately inclined to believe could only be hostility, resistance, and furious persecution.

*) After this explanation has gone through these two modifications, Olshausen (Comm. II, 190) thinks “it is sufficient to assume that the colossal candlesticks remained standing – after they had served the festive purpose – and that Jesus spoke with reference to them. Nothing, however, would be more “expedient” than for the Lord to call himself the light of the world with reference to these lampstands. Now one speaks only in a tone of reproach of a construction of history a priori! This view of the purposeful is indeed a theory, but we reject it not because it is a theory at all, but because it is a false one, which in its application must lead to the greatest offences. But whether the evangelist himself ever followed this theory of expediency is highly uncertain.

**) Olshausen (II, 189) correctly explains the Lord’s saying when he says: “visibly his (the Lord’s) effort is to attract the attention of the people. But this explanation is correct only in the sense that it is tautology, and only repeats the text in other words; it would be a real explanation only if it were now asked whether such an anxious and uncertain endeavour, such outward importunity, and the effort to attract attention to himself, were appropriate to him of whom it is said: ουκ . . . . . ακουσει τις εν ταις πλατειαις φωνην αυτου.

313

2) The apologetics of the Lord.

8:13-29.

If the Lord’s dogmatic preaching of His person lacked all conditions by which it could find support and recognition, if it always, as now again in v. 13, provoked the objection that it was a one-sided testimony of Himself, then it was always left with only the same apologetic support, which the evangelist could form in fruitless opposition to decided unbelief, but which the Lord, with the certainty of His self-confidence, did not need. I know whence I came and whither I go, says the Lord, to prove the justification of his testimony of himself, but ye know it not (v. ll). To my testimony of myself is added that which the Father bears for me (b. 17-18). I am from above, ye from beneath; ye are of this world, I am not (v. 23). I speak what I have heard from the Father (v. 26). All of these are reflections that could be made from a later standpoint about the relationship between Christian consciousness and its content and the insurmountable stubbornness of the world, and they were inevitable in the perplexity in which a concentrated view in such a situation must be placed. However, all attempts to seriously attribute them to the Lord fail due to the weakness of these reflections and the correct view of the personality of the Lord. For Jesus could never be brought into embarrassment by the resistance he experienced, not alone, but always with the calm certainty of his self-consciousness, which only knows how to help itself through such contrasts. Only a view that had not yet gained a broad and solid foundation in the consciousness of reality or that did not know how to intervene in the world with that irresistible certainty of victory that supported the Pauline self-consciousness, in short, only a view that had concentrated itself in a simple opposition without richer inner development and expansion, could form those apologetic aids for its defense and limit itself to them.

314

Only at the price of limiting the content of Jesus’ self-awareness to a few points, which were immovable in themselves and were repeatedly presented at every opportunity, can this apologetic be held on to and defended as the Lord’s own creation. For all that the Lord touches here to defend Himself, in order to support His testimony of Himself, has already been completely exhausted on previous occasions and will be exploited again on later occasions. We do indeed find this price too high, and no one will be able to refuse us to free the Lord’s consciousness and language from this extreme uniformity and limitation, as long as the synoptic accounts testify to the richness and inexhaustible fertility of the discourse which the Lord had at his disposal on the most diverse occasions. In our Gospel, this poverty of presentation is connected with the fact that it always knows only one and the same conflict, namely that the opponents do not want to accept the Lord’s testimony about themselves. But that is precisely the fundamental flaw of this portrayal, that the Lord always only speculates about his person and therefore must always give rise to that projection.

315

3) The mystery of the origin of Jesus.

8:13-14.

Let us leave aside the comparison with the synoptic accounts, and here too, as always before, consider and judge our Gospel only from itself. In this way, too, it will be seen that its view is self-evident. To the Pharisees’ objection: you testify of yourself, therefore your testimony is not true *), the Lord replies that he knows where he has come from and where he is going, but it is hidden from them. But are the opponents somehow instructed by this answer? Has the Lord’s testimony now gained more strength for them? Not in the least, for if they do not know which is the true home of Jesus, then this testimony is not justified for their consciousness, and it is only incomprehensible how the Lord could posit such a testimony of himself, if he knew that his authority to do so was absolutely hidden from others. If he once wanted to engage in it and prove his right to testify of himself, then the reason must be accessible to the others as well as to him.

*) Actually, as Olshausen (II, 190) also remarks, the Pharisees should only have said, your testimony as self-testimony is one-sided and not valid, and real men could only speak in this way. Therefore, we must not, like Olshausen, wrong the Pharisees and say that their remark contains an obvious falsehood. Rather, the exaggeration, “Your testimony is not true,” belongs only to the writer who drives the contrasts to the utmost abstraction.

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4) The true judgment.

8:15-16.

At once the Lord speaks of judgment, in that he reproaches the opponents for judging according to the flesh, that is, according to outward appearance, and not going to the bottom of the matter, that is, the same reproach as on an earlier occasion, when he accused them of judging according to appearance (7:24). What the true antithesis of this reproach is, we have just indicated, and is also definitely expressed on that former occasion, where it was said, rather, exercise righteous judgment. Nevertheless, in our passage it says: “But I judge no one. How does this contrast come about? The Lord did not reproach the opponents for judging at all and questioning his testimony, but he only wants to give them guidance on how to recognise the validity of his testimony, even if the way to this recognition is cut off from them. He wants to give them the guidance to the right judgment and demands of them that, when they judge, they should penetrate to the core of the matter, that is, exercise just judgment. The only contrast to this would be that the Lord does not judge according to outward appearance but according to inwardness. This contrast also occurs in the form that the Lord, when he judges, does not do it alone, but in communion with the Father. Nevertheless, it remains striking that this other side of the opposition is so divided into two halves, the first of which was not even prepared by the entire structure of the opposition. This division – I judge no one and, when I judge, my judgment is just, because I am not alone – only comes from the fact that the evangelist could not refrain from inserting into a contrast, which is quite differently conceived and had to have a different conclusion, the other contrast, familiar to him, of arbitrary judging and judgment in unity with the divine will *). The evangelist, who is always accompanied by the monotonous idea of the opposition of the arbitrary, could certainly combine strange opposites in this way, but not the Lord.

*) Olshausen himself must admit that this interjection: but I judge no one, “seems to be out of context” (II, 191). That the apologist is not at a loss to resolve the pretence at the end and knows how to find advice is natural, even if it is only that he says that the interjection is “best understood as a casual remark that is meant to sharpen their sin. As if that were more than a mere tautological paraphrase. That is precisely the difficulty, that this juxtaposition of the most diverse relations is an overabundance or rather an unclear confusion of relations, which stupefies the listener and even the reader by dragging him in opposite directions without even leading him calmly to one of them.

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But if it is as certain as anything can be in this sphere that the Lord will not have threatened judgment on every occasion, it is absolutely impossible that he should have mentioned it in the form in which the Evangelist presents it. In the struggle with the really determined and serious unbelief, he will have threatened with the last judgement in general, with this last day of the Jewish conception, but without pushing himself forward as the judge. His speech was all the more powerful when he presented the Son of Man and himself as the mediator of judgement. In the Fourth Gospel, however, the idea of the Messianic office of judge is either wasted when it is only casually presented as an example of how one should judge, or it only occurs because the apologetics against the obdurate opponents no longer know how to help themselves. It is not the Lord, but the evangelist who reaches for the thunder of judgment against the doubters in such cases.

318

5) The testimony of the Father.

8:17-19.

How His testimony of Himself is confirmed by the testimony of the Father who sent Him, the Lord does not elaborate. But did the opponents, with whom he was dealing at this moment, know how he had once explained this testimony of the Father (5:36-37)? Did they know it so well that no explanation was needed? No, they knew so little that they did not even understand what kind of father the Lord was calling as a witness. But if they were so unbelievably limited that they could not see that God was meant, then the Lord could not and was not allowed to refer to the Father’s testimony in such a brief way. But it is really an unbelievable and impossible limitation, of which the Jews are here reproached *); for they know so well another time (10:30-31), whom the Lord understands by the Father, that they immediately want to stone the blasphemer, who said, I and the Father are One. Certainly, it is again only the love of contrasts which induced the evangelist to drive the Jews into such an impossible misunderstanding. But they did not even have occasion to make such a senseless statement as to ask: where is thy Father, for it is not the Lord who speaks here of the testimony of Him who sent Him, but the evangelist once more heaps together all the apologetic reasons for the truth of the preaching of Christ. But only briefly does he let the Lord speak here of the testimony of the Father, because he counts on the memory of the readers who know the earlier argument, and because he was prevented by an involuntary feeling from extending the repetition further.

*) If even Lücke says (Comm. II, 272): “nothing was clearer than that Jesus meant his Father in heaven”, let us leave aside the apologetic talk of the “carnal-minded opponents” of Jesus, who could not have understood such a clear saying.

319

6) The Departure of the Lord.

8:21-22.

With a new beginning of speech the Lord says: I go away, and ye shall seek me: but whither I go ye cannot come. Does he want to kill himself? say the Jews. We need only mention this misunderstanding, but no longer judge it.

7) The upper and lower world.

8:23.

It was really not necessary for the Lord to attack the misunderstanding of the Jews more specifically, since it does not belong to the real world. He therefore simply continues in his speech: you are from below, I am from above, you are of this world, I am not. The contrast between the kingdom of heaven and the world was of course familiar to the Lord’s consciousness, but certainly only in this general, grandiose form; but to apply it to his person in this spatial form of above and below was reserved for the view of the congregation, which in the struggles it had to endure here below with the world that had fallen into death, directed its gaze upwards, to the origin of its salvation *).

*) The formula ανωθεν of the origin of Jesus had already occurred above 3:31 in the sermon of the Baptist, in a sermon that was actually preached by the Evangelist.

320

8) Appeal of the Lord to His preaching of Himself.

8:25.

After the Lord has spoken at length about the dignity of his person, his origin, and his departure, the Jews ask him, “Who are you?” and he answers simply, “Just what I have been telling you.” But how could the Jews ask him in this way when he had not only just now, but constantly and continuously at every opportunity revealed himself as the Messiah? The answer – “I am what I say” – cancels out the question and itself; for if the Lord so briefly refers to his earlier statements because they are clear and detailed enough, the question of who he is could not have been raised. Rather, we hear from this answer the later apologist who, when all reasons are exhausted, can only say, “It is so, it is simply so,” and then we understand this turn.

9) A collection of strange relationships.

8:26-29.

At the end, the Lord says, “I have much to say and to judge about you, but he who sent me is true.” One would expect the following statement: “Indeed, he who sent me will execute the judgment that I would have over you and speak about you.” But nothing follows. It is only later in the fortuitous continuation of the dispute with the Jews that the specific supplement follows, that the Father seeks the glory of the Lord and judges the injustice of the denial of recognition of the unbelievers (v. 50). It is as if the necessary but omitted addition has resonated with the author and secretly troubled him until he brought it to light. Earlier, in the original context, in verse 29, the Lord had indeed hinted that he was not alone, that the Father was with him, but this does not improve matters because the idea that the Father will judge for him is not really expressed, and therefore not really returned to the starting point, and it was indeed hardly possible after the speech had taken a completely foreign turn. When the Lord said that he had much to say and to judge about his unbelieving opponents, he spoke as if he wanted to continue: nevertheless, he himself would not pronounce this judgment over them, for another, the Father, would do it. Instead, the Evangelist lets the Lord fall back into the usual track, namely the speech about the contrast, that he does not speak of himself but only speaks into the world what he has heard from the Father. The Evangelist’s views so dominate him that they insert themselves into his speech even where he had aimed for a completely different contrast. The approach of the speech, “I have much to say about you,” reminds the Evangelist of a theme that recurs in the Lord’s final speeches, where he promises the disciples the Paraclete, who will reveal to them everything he could no longer say to them (John 14:25, 16:12-13). This once-struck tone enticed the Evangelist to that turn that would enter with the death of the Lord into the knowledge of others, and while falling into the other contrast of self-will and divine authorization, he now lets the Lord say: “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He and that I do not act on my own, but speak only what the Father has taught me.”

322

What is the point of asking whether it was time for the Lord to speak of His death here, whether He, if He wanted to be understood, could indicate His death so inexplicably darkly in the expression of exaltation by His adversaries, or whether, rather, only for the later believer could the image of exaltation allude to the Lord’s death on the cross? These questions we need neither raise nor answer seriously, since the confusion of the last passage proves to us that it is not the Lord who is speaking, but that the views common to the evangelist, and even his literary turns of phrase, have flowed together so accidentally that even the connection which the author intended has been utterly dissolved. —

These and similar speeches of the Lord receive their true and original meaning when, through the critical process, through this spiritual chemistry, we lead them back to their basic substance and separate the admixture which the same has received through the form as an utterance of the Lord. They then appear in their true form as the first Christian apologetics, and it is not the Lord but the consciousness of the congregation that struggles in them with the objections of the world. If the unbelievers said: you always refer to the testimony of your Saviour with the confession of your faith, i.e. to something which itself first needs proof, the answer was: this testimony is justified in itself, for we know where the Lord is from and where he has gone; because you do not know, you certainly cannot accept this testimony. But we have another testimony, namely, that which lies in the work of the Lord and in the power which is inherent in this work and which could only proceed from the Father, who bears witness in it. You are from below and cannot judge him who is from above. And if you do not want to stop with your questions and objections, then know that the Lord is what he is, he is what he has always said about himself and what our testimony says about him. But your resistance does not go unpunished, for the Father judges the unbelief that resists the Lord. The Lord’s struggle with the Jewish world, the objections of the opponents and his defence, all this had to take on the form of later circumstances.

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10) The second section of the discourse.

8:30-59.

Through the preceding speech many were brought to faith and it is these to whom the following words of the Lord are addressed and who meet him with their objections.

In this part of the speech, too, we are confronted with several disturbing things: first of all, the context of the speech is torn apart, since the people to whom it is addressed are described in contradictory colours, on the one hand as willing and faithful, on the other hand as evil and wicked, as Satan’s children. Indeed, at the very moment when they are still presumed to be believers and nothing has happened that could have fundamentally changed them, the Lord describes them as those who wanted to kill him because his word does not find its way into them (v 37).

It is not only by accidental inconsistency that the author allows the character of these people to change so suddenly, but the Lord’s consecutive sayings presuppose listeners of a completely opposite character. The first saying: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and the truth which you will then know will make you free” requires faithful listeners who have already immersed themselves in the word of the Lord and are only made aware of the fruits of perseverance. On the other hand, the accusation: “You are not Abraham’s children, but Satan’s” (vv. 39-44) can only be directed against those who do not allow the Lord’s word to enter their hearts, who do not want to hear it. But did these people not know what to do with the Lord’s sermon? Were their thoughts only lies and murder? Many, it was said before, believed in the Lord and it is precisely with these many, it is expressly said, that this speech deals.

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Although the author thought that all these sayings, which presuppose such different audiences, have their common bond in the continuous mention of Abraham, this connection and this bond must be very doubtful to us, because the main sayings are not brought about by a collision, which could possibly arise from the relationship of Jesus and the audience to Abraham, but are presented suddenly and without any particular occasion by the Lord. The Lord says without further ado: the truth will make you free (v. 32), he who hears my word will not see death for ever (v. 51), and the Jewish pride of descent from Abraham then finds fault with this. If these sayings are indeed connected with controversy, then the order should be just the opposite, the controversy should precede, the saying that resolves it and closes the dispute should follow. Where this natural order is lacking, these sayings are unprepared, and it is incomprehensible whence they suddenly come, where they are to lead, or what purpose they serve. The dispute that attaches itself to them becomes the unnatural light of implausibility, and far from being a serious controversy, it becomes a quarrel of incomprehensibly obdurate hearers who cannot grasp even the simplest saying. The Synoptics, on the other hand, give us examples of real controversies, which bring the Jewish point of view into pure, simple contrast with the Lord’s inpouring, and are not merely the wrangling of misunderstanding. The answers of the Lord – and it was worth the trouble that he answered here – are decisive, settle the controversy and are so clear and accurate that they “shut the opponents’ mouths”. There appear living figures who express their character to the point of plastic definiteness and betray real life as their origin; their controversy is completely natural and their conflict is not purposeless and endless, but always resolves itself in the harmony of the higher self-consciousness and in the defeat of the finite intellect. In our Gospel, the controversies become a tangle that moves back and forth only in misunderstandings and, in its purposelessness, can only end in tumult. The stones that the people reach for when the confusion of their minds has risen to the highest level make a worthy conclusion.

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Let us now consider the main points of the dispute.

11) Freedom and bondage.

8:31-36.

The Jews do not want to hear that the Lord told them that the truth would make them free, because as children of Abraham they were never servants and did not need to become free. The Lord replies that he means the bondage of sin, from which the willing knowledge of the truth sets them free. But they must let themselves be freed from this bondage by the Son, for only the Son remains eternally in the house, but not the servant. Who does not immediately perceive the discord that enters into the whole discourse through the different turn given to the idea of the servant? Two utterly different ideas are immediately thrust one into the other, one of which could as well as the other be the centre of a special speech, and must be explained in just as much detail as the other. And yet the one is not explained at all, yes, as if it were absolutely the same as the other, confused with it! When the Lord says that the servant will not remain in the house forever, but the son will, the servant and the son are regarded in the same way, namely in their relationship to the master of the house. The servant can be changed by the Lord, but the son is bound to the master of the house by an indissoluble bond; the thought is therefore similar to that which is set forth in the Epistle to the Hebrews. As the author of this Epistle (3:1-6) illustrates the sublimity of Christ by comparing Him as the Son of the householder with Moses, who only served as a servant in the divine household, so here the Lord Himself as the Son opposes the people as the accepted servant. But it is impossible that the Lord in one breath used the image of the servant in such a completely different sense and at the same moment spoke of the servant of sin and of the servant of God, that he passed directly from one image into the other without preparing or even making the transition, it is impossible that he could speak in such a way with the appearance as if he spoke of the same servant, of the servant in the same sense. The evangelist could only confuse different thoughts in this way without paying attention to their differences.

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But if it was so easy for him to make turns of phrase, which go off to opposite points, appear to be of one and the same direction, nothing in the world can guarantee that he gives us the real facts when he reports how the Jews refer to their descent from Abraham against the Lord. This cannot be a guarantee of the so-called historical truth, for the Lord says later (vv. 37-39) that if they were really Abraham’s children, they would not want to kill him. For this contrast which the works form with their vaunted origin was too obvious once the masses’ reference to their descent was interwoven into the controversy. Even the evangelist lets this mention of Abraham pass by without a trace, as if it had not intervened at all when he came to the head of the dispute (vv. 41-50). Here the contrast is quite different, for the Jews boast that they have God for their father, and the Lord replies that the devil, on the contrary, is their ancestor, by ascribing to himself the origin of God with the usual contrast of self-authority and divine authority. Thus, from this side, the intermediate idea of Abrahamic descent is dissolved.

But if it was so easy for him to put phrases that go in opposite directions into the semblance of one and the same direction, then nothing in the world can vouchsafe for us that he gives us the real facts when he reports how the Jews appealed to their descent from Abraham against the Lord. Therein lies no guarantee for the so-called historical truth that the Lord afterwards (v. 37-39) says that if they really were children of Abraham, they would not want to kill him. For this contrast, which the works form to their boasted origins, lay too close at hand once that appeal of the masses to their descent was woven into the dispute. Even the evangelist lets this mention of Abraham pass by unnoticed as if it had not intervened at all when he comes to the climax of the dispute (v. 41-50). Here the contrast is completely different, the Jews boast of having God as their father, and the Lord replies to them that the devil is rather their ancestor, by ascribing to himself the origin of God with the usual contrast of self-authority and divine authority. Thus, from this side, the intermediate idea of Abrahamic descent is dissolved.

But is this double image of the servant really based on a double historical core? I.e., if the Lord, with his power over language and the clarity of his view, could not confuse different things, did he really, on different occasions, describe the truth that lies in his word as the power that liberates from the bondage of sin and himself as the Son who raises the servants of the Father to a free position in the divine household?

As to the former, the idea of the bondage of sin is not unworthy of the Lord, and there is nothing to prevent us from attributing it to him; but as the relation to national pride is omitted, only cease to attach to this saying that multitude of pragmatic and edifying considerations, and to give it the immediate relation to the political condition of the people, as well as to the sensual messianic expectations of them. In itself, the saying contains the idea of the purely ideal efficacy of the Redeemer, penetrating only into the depths of the spirit, but this “only,” this exclusiveness, is not expressly emphasised and need not have been originally inherent in the saying through its reference to a political collision. The situation that gave rise to it is in any case completely unknown to us, and even the evangelist gives us no hint of it, since according to his account the saying is already self-standing and so that its meaning is clear in itself, before the political pride of the people finds fault with it and tugs it to and fro.

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The other view, according to which the Lord, as the Son of the House, stands opposite the others as servants, need not therefore be of later origin, because it is so much in harmony with that view in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which certainly arose without external stimulus and purely from the spirit of the author of this Epistle. When we hear how the Lord, when he was asked to pay the temple ransom, calls himself and his people the free sons of the heavenly King, while the people are only the accepted servants of him (Matth. 17, 24-26), the same thought is expressed here as there. In Matthew’s account, it has only received a special emphasis and twist due to the specific occasion; but whether the same saying has been preserved here in the fourth Gospel from the same situation in a faint echo and has only been turned differently by the author, or whether the Lord Himself has gone back to the same view on another occasion and has excepted it again for a different application: that can no longer be decided.

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12) The Son of God and the children of Satan.

8:38-53.

The argument over the glory of being descended from Abraham leads to the climax of the dispute, where the Lord scolds the Jews as children of Satan. While he only speaks what he has seen from the Father, they, says the Lord, only do the works they have seen from their father (v. 38). When the Lord stops at this assertion, even though they had just called Abraham their father again, and they now sense a deeper accusation behind that charge, the Jews want to secure themselves in a decisive way and now call God their father (v. 41). It does not sound quite right that the Jews should call Abraham and God their father in one breath; heat and embarrassment can indeed lead to sudden leaps in a dispute, but the leap of faith in this case is too violent, and there is no reason why the Jews should not stand by the glory of their Abrahamic descent, even if the Lord had given them to understand that they had another father. But the evangelist knew what kind of father Jesus meant, and he could ascribe the consciousness of the meaning of this reproach to the Jews, so that when Jesus wanted to call Satan their father, they could immediately come forward or rather anticipate with the corresponding contradiction that God was their father. The transition is thus proven to be one made by the Evangelist himself, as is already shown by the starting point from which the transition takes place, the mention of Father Abraham, which is shown to be made up by the Evangelist, as the thoughts and sayings to which this mention is attached have only been converted by the Evangelist into the cause of this dispute.

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The contrast between the divine authorization of the Lord and the Jews’ descent from Satan is now freely presented out of its context and must, if it really belongs to the Lord, have a special reason for being and we would not dare to determine it if it had not revealed itself in our account. The Jews accuse the Lord of having an evil spirit in him, that he is possessed, and Jesus finds it necessary to reject this accusation and to appeal to his Father, whom he honors and whose words he hears and proclaims vv. 48-49. This is very reminiscent of the similar accusation made against the Lord in relation to his miraculous power, that he heals the possessed in the power of Beelzebub, the prince of the evil spirits (Matthew 12:23, 24). It is possible that the Lord was once accused of belonging to evil in relation to his teachings, because he dared to elevate his person above the measure of the ordinary human, and that he called his contemporaries Satan’s children on the occasion of such an accusation, as he once simply called them a wicked generation (Matthew 12:39, 45). However, we must add that it is just as possible that the Evangelist, according to the assumption of his entire work, could not present an accusation that originally referred to the Lord’s miraculous power in any other way than by using the Lord’s teaching about his person as the cause for it.

Therefore, at every other occasion, the Lord could refer to the one who keeps his word not seeing eternal death (v. 51) as a defense of his teaching about himself. The evangelist, as he has shown sufficiently, was able to bring up this saying on any occasion, while he has also convinced us that he was able to cite any other saying on those occasions where the Lord had to defend himself against doubts regarding his teaching about himself. Or in other words: the circle of apologetic arguments is very narrow in this gospel, and therefore the same sayings must always reappear very soon after each other. Here again, it is only the evangelist who wants to crush the doubt against the majesty of the Lord by preaching about his life-giving and immortalizing power. Already by the fact that this saying appears in a context where the struggle is against devilish obstinacy, it appears as an inappropriate and mechanically added appendage, and the answer of the Jews falls as well if it is not stopped by themselves. Anyone will call this saying inappropriate and purposeless if the opponents can only draw from it the reinforced conviction that the Lord must be possessed. And what conclusion do they draw to strengthen their conviction? Abraham and the prophets died, so does Jesus want to be greater than their forefather and the prophets (v. 52-53)? But how could they so completely misplace the only turn that could be taken from the starting point of this question? The only objection that was free to them, if they wanted to compare that glory of the Lord with the greatness of Abraham and the prophets, could only be made by saying: Abraham and the prophets could not spare their people from death, and you want to attribute such power to yourself? This is the only way they could have been indignant if they wanted to be, if the Lord had really offended their pride, which was based on their descent from Abraham, and if it were not the evangelist who had Abraham in mind here and in the preceding part of the conversation because he wanted to lead the conversation to a point at which the patriarch had to appear. Because the idea of the preexistence of Christ was fixed in the author’s mind as the conclusion of the dispute, because this preexistence emerged in its highest significance when measured against the ancestor of the Jewish people and the beginning of the theocracy, because the author wanted to sharpen the entire dispute to this conclusion, Abraham’s had to be thought of before, even in a context where this mention was inappropriate and had to be proven to be forced from outside.

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13) The pre-existence of Christ.

8:54-58.

The only question now is whether Jesus expressed the idea of His pre-existence in this particular way. After stating that he knows the Father and does not seek his own glory, the Lord says, “Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.” Jesus would not have had any other information about Abraham than what is recorded in the book of Genesis, and therefore, the patriarch’s joy can only have come from the promise of blessing that would come from his seed to all nations. The only point of contention is when Abraham was given the joy of actually seeing the day of the Lord. The usual explanation is that Abraham saw the Lord’s coming from paradise, where he is believed to live on and participate in the fate of his descendants. *) The Jews, however, understand the Lord’s speech quite differently, they understand it as if Jesus meant that he had seen Abraham and had already had dealings with him in the earliest past. The evangelist himself wants to describe this conclusion as the completely correct one when he introduces it with the words: the Jews said “therefore” to Jesus and the Lord confirms their view likewise when he says: “Truly, truly I say to you – i.e. do not be surprised when I speak like this, because – before Abraham was, I am, so he could already come to see my day in advance, since I could already reveal myself to him in the past. If it were really “a tautology of thought” *) when it is said once: Abraham rejoiced that he should see my day, and then: he saw it and rejoiced, then the evangelist would have to answer for it, and we would not be justified by it if we deviated from the explanation which alone is required by the context. But there is not even a tautology, but a heightening of the speech, in that the Lord wants to improve his words and say that it was not said enough that Abraham had only rejoiced over what he was to see in the distant future, no! his rejoicing over the future had been heightened to joy over the sight of the real and present already in the past. This does not make the idea of the day of the Lord “illusory” just because “it was not the actual day of the Messiah that Abraham saw”, because according to the view – let us say it nonetheless – of the evangelist, the prophetic vision was presented with the future as something present in itself, because it is eternally present. If one misses a “point of reference in the Old Testament and in popular belief” for this thought, one should only remember how the prophetic vision in the Old Testament sees the future as present and how according to the theory of our evangelist the person of the Lord appeared in his full glory to the prophets (Chapter 12, 41). There is no doubt: in the first sentence about Abraham’s joy over his day (v. 56), the Lord wants to say the same thing about himself as he expresses more directly (v. 58), when the opponents force him to. Both there and here, he wants to assert his preexistence before Abraham.

*) Lücke, Comm. II, 310. de Wette p. 121.

*) As de Wette thinks.

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At least the Evangelist has him assert it. However, it must be very doubtful whether Jesus really spoke in this way, when we see how it lies in the theory of the Evangelist that the Lord, as the Logos, as the eternal revelation of the Father, preceded all special historical revelations, and precisely these special revelations have been mediated in sacred history. It is more likely that the Evangelist formed that statement out of this theory, rather than developing that theory from a single statement of the Lord. For the Lord, it was probably also not the place to teach his pre-existence if he only had the intention to crush the pride of the Jews in their ancestor. Finally, it is contrary to the nature of revelation that it should only serve the purposes of theory and express a speculative determination in one sentence. It has enough to do when it addresses the need of redemption, to expand and fulfil the inwardness of self-consciousness, and without fearing the least for the success and recognition of its work, it can leave it to the reborn spirit to create the new world of theoretical consciousness out of the depth of renewed self-consciousness.

The view of his preexistence is indeed present when Jesus speaks of his heavenly origins. But only in this generality could he himself speak of the assumption of his personality, for only in this way did he connect with the general idea of the Messiah and avoid a danger that would have arisen immediately if he had wanted to teach his preexistence as the evangelist presents it. If he had measured his eternity by the point of a certain historical individual, he would also have given the appearance or even spoken as if he wanted to ascribe pre-existence to himself as this certain historical and empirical individual. But we must never ascribe such a view to Jesus, otherwise we would be transferring the utmost rapture into his self-awareness. Only in the spirit of the later community could this more specific view of the pre-existence of Christ be formed, for now it was something else when faith saw the Lord in eternal pre-historical existence and as the effective content of earlier historical revelations. Just as the empirical uniqueness, which is inherent in the historical appearance of the Lord, is transfigured in faith into spiritual generality and elevated to the eternal present, so faith, when it saw its Principle as eternally active, no longer saw that empirical individual in the past, but that individual in the light of the infinity of a divine power.

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Critique of the Gospel of John
by Bruno Bauer

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§ 12. Echo of the dispute about the first Sabbath violation.

Ch 7.

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1) The time of the Lord.

7:1-9.

The last time Jesus withdrew from Judea to Galilee, the evangelist, contrary to his custom, omitted to state the reason for this withdrawal. But this time he really did not need to, since he had described the murderous rage of the Lord’s opponents shortly before (5:18). On the other hand, he had (6:1) strangely enough fallen into the language of the synoptics by considering the shore on this side of the Sea of Galilee as the fixed point from which Jesus departed when he went elsewhere. The evangelist does not say that the Lord went from Judea to Galilee and from there he went to the other side of the lake, but from this side, where he is already located, Jesus goes to the other side. But for a long time the evangelist cannot deny his own view, now (7:1) he reminds the reader that Jesus only stays in Galilee out of necessity, because he would be found in Judea if the Jews did not want to kill him. Even his brothers cannot dissuade the Lord from his plan to stay in Galilee for the time being, although they ask him to go to Judea for the Feast of Tabernacles, so that his disciples – namely the followers who are supposed to be in Judea – can also see his works. In vain the brothers tried to provoke him from the standpoint of their unbelief: he replied that his hour had not yet come and that he would not go up to the feast. He stayed in Galilee.

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What it means when the Lord says that his time has not yet come is perfectly clear from the context. He could not surrender himself to the hatred of the world, which pursued him, arbitrarily and at will, but in the divine counsel the time was determined when he might surrender himself to the hostile world. The time of the Lord is the time of suffering. This conception is not in the least made uncertain or impossible *) by the fact that the Lord at the same time says that the time of his brothers is always there. For as is customary in the game of such antitheses, the corresponding elements are as much in agreement with a third element when viewed according to their superficial appearance, as they are opposed or divergent for the consciousness that follows their essence. The third element in which the elements of the present antithesis intersect is, in general, the idea of public appearance before the world. The Lord thinks that you can always show yourselves to the world, what you have in mind and what you demand of me, that I should appear freely before the world. This cannot yet be done on my part, but on your part, it can always be done. However, why the Lord cannot and may not do so at all times is justified in his consciousness in a particular way, because his time is entirely different from that given to his brothers every moment, and therefore is not a specific time. It is clear that the Lord is speaking here of the time of his death, just as he had earlier rejected a request from his mother by referring to his time of suffering. The difficulty that arises from the fact that the Lord refers to his time of suffering without his brothers being able to understand him must not tempt us to make artifices, nor does it give us a right to let the evangelist write everything else, except what he wants to write. It seemed to him that the only thing worthy of the Lord was that he should have the last conflict of his life constantly in view; from this point of view he has always let the Lord speak, and even the first revelation of his glory at Cana had to proceed from this point of view.

*) As de Wette (p. 93) and Lücke (Comm. II 157) think.

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Another difficulty does not entitle the interpreter to use violent means. Although the Lord says to the brothers: you are going to “this” feast, I am not going to “this” feast, although therefore this particular feast is spoken of, and because of the contrast to the time of suffering, this whole feast must be spoken of, but not only the beginning of it *), the Lord nevertheless goes to “this” feast after the departure of his brothers, as if he had wanted to do it secretly. Whoever wants to add a “now” with Lucke **) when the Lord says, I am not going to this feast, may do so after all, but he does not say that he is explaining a saying which he has long since lost sight of by such an addition. For such an interpreter, the evangelist has in vain made the speech revolve around the purpose of “this” feast. Lücke has another help ready, namely, he thinks that the contradiction disappears if the present tense: I am not going to this feast “is taken quite strictly” *), to which the following: my time has not yet come “gives an indisputable right”; but then one would have to let the Lord put an accent on that present tense with an ulterior consciousness that is unworthy of him. If all the words deny the idea that he will go to “this” feast, the gentleman is supposed to have indicated the opposite by an ambiguous accent, and not only to have gone secretly to the feast, but to have secretly put into his words the inwardly already existing resolution to go there? Assuming the case, impossible without Jesuitism, that the “strict” version of the present tense was able to put a “now” into the words: I am not going to this feast, this explanation is at least certain enough here because of the context, which deals with “this” feast, with “this” par excellence, and – to say it again and to cancel that “indisputable right” – opposes this particular feast as this whole feast to the not yet fulfilled time of the Lord. And the “strict” version of the negated present tense! Does it exist only with an ambush in the consciousness, only in that the near future of the action is silently affirmed **) ? But it is good that we are reminded of the strict version of the present tense: for there is a way of setting the present tense which is also very strict, but which does not merely hint at it secretly and covertly, but is endowed with great force and distinctness, and which we might call the categorical. It is the version of the present tense which, when the present is negated, strictly negates, namely, in such a way that it negates the action for the present because of the essential nature and destiny of the subject from whom it is demanded or expected. And this version is the only possible one here. I do not go to this feast means here: it is my task and destiny not to go to this feast, for it is my destiny to confront the hatred of the world only when the time determined by divine counsel, when my time has arrived; but this time, which is inwardly connected with my being, has not yet been fulfilled. If someone nevertheless prefers the surreptitious path of apologetics to the straight and simple course of evangelical speech, he may and must also assume that overnight, after the brothers had departed, the time of the Lord determined in the divine counsel was fulfilled. For no sooner are the brethren on the road, than he also departs.

*) This artifice is not without a Jesuit reservation, for example when Bengel says: qui primo die festi non inter- erat, non videbatur interesse; or as Bengel continues:: accedit deindc Jesus ad festum, sed quasi incognitus; nec tam ad festum, quam in templum.

**) Lucke (Comm. II, 168). De Wette thinks that the sentence: I do not go (ουκ), is after all to be retained in its simplicity, for it is “the negation limited by the following αυπω (my time is not yet).” How can the fog of apologetics obscure even the simplest provisions, veil the clearest indications! Not limited, but strengthened, justified is the negation. Because his time is not yet here, the Lord does not go to this feast.

*) This is also Beugel’s opinion : αναβαινω striete in praescuti acciplendum.

**) Another time, where Lücke again speaks of a present tense with such “emphasis,” ibid. p. 252, he himself says that “the present tense, which is in itself ambiguous, would then have to be determined by a closer one”!

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2) The journey of Jesus to the feast of tabernacles.

7:10.

But it is evident, says the apologetics, that my help cannot be so proudly rejected; the Lord is really going to the feast, so – So shall we make ourselves a new gospel? Erase what is written in the Gospel? Shall we cut out and add to it as we please, until it has become an altogether poorer one? No! The contradiction cannot be blurred, but it can be explained if we get to the bottom of it and see how it arose with both its assertions. One thing we have already found confirmed by the whole structure of his work, that it seemed worthy of the Evangelist of the Lord when he constantly referred to the time of fulfilment, namely to the time which, according to divine counsel, should bring his work to a decision and conclusion. In addition, the Evangelist held the view that it was not worthy of the Lord to be determined by any external decision. His miraculous activity was not caused by the complaints or requests of the needy: thus he feeds the multitude, he heals the sick man at the pool of Bethesda, and Ch 9 the man born blind without their request. Or if he is asked for help, he first sternly rejects the request, such as the admonition of his mother at Cana or the request of the royal official whose son is struggling with an illness, and he does not respond to the call to the sick Lazarus until no more request for help was to be expected: always only so that the miraculous deed may proceed from his free decision and seem to serve only the revelation of his glory as an end. If in such cases, where request and admonition had been most severely rejected, the deed nevertheless comes to pass, it must finally happen because the evangelist also wanted to report it, for he forgets the Lord’s absolutely negative answer, does not allow himself to be misled by it and unites in his consciousness two contradictory interests, because he was driven by them with equal strength. Thus, here too, he satisfies the interest of giving an example of how the Lord rejected every external impulse, even if it came from his closest relatives, because he only allowed himself to be guided by divine counsel through his consciousness: on the other hand, he lets the Lord go to the feast because he wanted to involve him in the following conversation in Jerusalem and in several collisions with the people’s parties.

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It is impossible to determine if there is anything similar in the life of Jesus that underlies the account of that interaction with his brothers, and if so, what it might have been. It may be *) that the Lord rejected a similar request of his brothers on the impulse of an inner voice – although such a daimon can hardly be assumed in view of the clarity of Jesus’ self-awareness; it may well be, but then the evangelist went beyond the goal if he nevertheless let the Lord set out on the journey, and he let himself be determined to do so by the presupposition that the Lord walked to the holy city for the celebration even in the face of the most imminent danger. He forgot that the Lord would then, according to the other conditions of the report, have preached to the murderers of the Jews before the time.

*) What Weisse (Evangelical History II, 237) assumes.

3) The mood of the people’s parties.

7:11-26.

It does not seem as certain as the evangelist 7:1 states, that the people of Jerusalem were so murderous against the Lord, and the apologists do not have the right to praise the evangelist for reporting the development of the deadly catastrophe so accurately. On the contrary, since, instead of letting the catastrophe grow, he always regards it as already finished, since the assassination attempt has matured so early, it is in the nature of things that the evangelist himself must betray, by a multitude of individual features, that the thing is by no means so far advanced. If in one moment he stretched everything to the extreme, it could not fail that immediately afterwards he would bring the unnatural tension to a lower level and significantly soften the mood of the whole.

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The crowd who missed the Lord at the beginning of the festival, as if it were a matter of course that he would attend every festival, had a divided opinion of him. What judgment would we expect from one party of the people if the authorities were to consider it necessary to go to the extreme? Clearly, it would be an enthusiastic recognition of his messianic dignity. However, the Evangelist only reports (v. 12, 13) that the well-disposed part of the people judged the Lord to be a good man, while others said he was leading the crowd astray. But such an insignificant judgment, that Jesus was a good man, could not provoke the authorities so much that they recognized death as the only solution to the collision. On the other hand, it was not necessary to whisper it to each other in secret, as it was not so terrifying. One thing cancels out the other: either the people had more decisively declared themselves for the Lord, or the authorities could not resort to the means that desperation would have suggested to them.

But not only does one thing exclude the other, but each of the two sides of the contradiction cancels itself out, or at least is cancelled out by the report. When Jesus appeared publicly in the temple in the middle of the feast and taught, his knowledge of the scriptures caused wonder, since, as is generally known, he had not enjoyed a learned education, and those who were thus astonished were the Jews (οι Ιουδαιοι), by whom, according to the context here v. 15, the evangelist understands the authorities as usual. Apologetics, which appreciates so much the fine pragmatic remarks of our author, could easily find here, or rather should find here, the suggestion that only now the rulers and scholars had come into contact with the Lord, while otherwise only the crowd of the uneducated people had surrounded him. For as soon as the rulers were in any way concerned about the Lord and considered him worthy of attention, they had to make this remark and marvel at his learning in the Scriptures. And this fine pragmatism must now dissolve itself! The authorities could only have decided so decisively on the downfall of Jesus if they were completely certain of the danger that threatened them in him, i.e. if they had decided in favour of the Lord’s death, then the power of his speech and the depth of his knowledge of Scripture could not have remained unknown to them. Or if the superiors only now noticed to their astonishment how the Lord knew how to treat the Scriptures, they could not yet have come to the conclusion from the knowledge of his danger and the power of his speech, that it was a matter of his or their downfall.

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The author also made sure that the fear of the people, who did not dare to speak out loud about the Lord because they knew the plans of the authorities, was also satisfied. The astonishment of the Jews at his learning of the Scriptures prompts the Lord to make some remarks, and among other things he reproaches them for not keeping the law of Moses, for they wanted to kill him. When the author then has the crowd ask in amazement who would want to kill him, since he is probably not in his right mind to speak of assassination attempts (v. 20), he has of course soon enough noticed the contradiction into which he falls. For at the first opportunity he does not refrain from suggesting that it was only the strangers who knew nothing of the plans of the authorities, but that the citizens of the capital were better informed (v. 25). Only when he lets the leaders speak for a moment as if the lord were completely unknown to them, was it appropriate that he should let the mob wonder when the lord speaks of assassination attempts; then he returns to the original premise of the hostile plans of the leaders, and now he ascribes knowledge of them at least to the citizens of the capital. But the help comes too late, and the contradiction has once been too strong for it to be blurred. The crowd had already been brought to the scene in its entirety, v. 12, 13, and no one from this whole mass dared to speak aloud his opinion of Jesus, because they knew the plots of the rulers. All were warmly informed of it, for all were afraid; but if only the chiefs had been informed, if the strangers, as must be assumed from their statement in v. 20, had known nothing of the plans of the rulers, they would have had to speak out loudly and impartially their opinion of the Lord. So again a ball of presuppositions which, when unwound, falls apart into individual extraneous threads!

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4) The mood of the people during the feast.

7:26-43.

With great care the author now also reports how the people’s opinion of the Lord developed during the feast. The report seems all the more accurate since he continues, as he had begun in vv. 12, 13, to contrast the opposing opinions of the mass of the people. The citizens of the capital assume that Jesus might be the Messiah, since the rulers let him teach without danger, but they immediately stifle this seed of faith, since they know the origin, which must be unknown in the Messiah, in Jesus,and they even make accusations against the Lord. On the other hand, another part of the crowd, and a large one at that, believed in the Lord and was induced to do so by the calculation that the Messiah, when he came, could not do more signs than Jesus had done (vv. 26-31). Thus the masses are divided. But alas, we cannot acknowledge this division: the multitude of signs is said to have brought many to faith in Jesus, and that just at this feast, for before Jesus arrived, the opinion of the people was much more undecided; but now there is nothing to indicate that even one sign was performed by the Lord in these days. Indeed, there is so little talk of miraculous deeds that this festive talk must revolve around a sign that had happened long before at the Pool of Bethesda. So how can it suddenly be signs that move the crowd to faith! Perhaps the memory, which now ran through the whole of the earlier time and summarised all the miraculous deeds of the Lord in one glance, had brought about this faith? Not even that, for the same memory should have had this effect before, and the better part of the multitude should have thought more of the Lord than is assumed and reported in v. 2. When some of the people here judge Jesus to be a very good man, they do not think of signs, nor do they speak in such a way as if they remembered the excellent works of the Lord. His opinion is only that the Lord has no evil intentions in his dealings with people and does not want to seduce them to evil through the influence of his speech. Where, then, does the power of the signs suddenly come from? It comes from the pragmatism of the author, who once laid out this passage in such a way that he presents the crowd in its relationship to the Lord as a divided one and must now continue and enforce this division in every way.

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Finally, on the last day of the feast, when the Lord had invited the thirsty to Himself, because He was able to satisfy their need in a true way, the division among the people was completed. Some said that Jesus was the Messiah, others denied it, because He was from Galilee, but not from the tribe of David and from Bethlehem, from where the Messiah must take His origin, and the third opinion was that Jesus was in truth a prophet (vv. 40-42). The two first opinions are actually the same as those mentioned by the evangelist just before; the only difference is that those who deny the Messianic dignity of Jesus are brought into direct opposition to those who definitely acknowledged it, and that they do not demand an unknown origin of the Messiah but the one prophesied by the prophet Micah. But now the third opinion is that Jesus is not the Messiah, but the Prophet, and it is – to say it at once – to blame for the fact that the whole division of popular opinion disappears altogether, the divided masses flow together again, and the apologists are deprived of the most beautiful opportunity to show their art and to load hypothesis upon hypothesis. The prophet (ο προφητης) in this excellent definiteness must also be something excellent, or rather, as this exclusive person, beside whom there is no equal, he must be the highest thing that can be thought of as the middle member of divine revelation. And so he is also otherwise in the N. T. as the mediator promised in the law, the Messiah. Even our author had to acknowledge this involuntarily when he reported how the crowd, after the feeding, wanted to raise the Lord to the position of king, i.e. as the Messiah to their ruler, he himself says that they wanted to do it because they had recognised in Jesus the promised prophet. Yet he suddenly distinguishes between the Prophet and the Messiah? How could he forget that both were the same to the people, namely the highest thing they expected from the future? That the author forgot is shown by the facts; but how it could have been possible for him is sufficiently explained by his interest in painting the shades of popular opinion. Anything that seemed to produce the slightest shade had to be welcome, and anything that offered only a hint of diversity was used *).

*) It thus becomes evident how futile it is when Gfrörer (Das Heiligth. und die Wahrh. p. 32, 33) wants to prove from the above passage, as well as from 6:14, that Jesus worked so that the people would not take him for the Messiah promised by the prophets, but for the prophet of whom Moses had spoken.

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When we have now restored the crowd to its indefinite surging and to the manifold play of waves with which it flows to and fro, that is, to its actual element, we are also relieved of the question of whether the author went around among the crowd and counted the voices or whether the crowd itself dispersed and grouped itself according to the diversity of its opinions. Another gain! We are not obliged to go into the unanswerable question of what the Jews meant when they said in v. 27 that when the Messiah came, no one would know where he was from. The question is unanswerable because the Jews could not think of anything in terms of an idea that they did not even have and for which no evidence can be found anywhere **) Either they thought of David’s tribe as the starting point of the Messiah or, in the strength of faith, they, like many who joined the Lord, did not take offence when such a one made the impression on them of the Promised One, of whom they knew no other than that he did not have the earthly starting point determined by Scripture. In their ideal view, it was always certain that the Messiah would come from God. But: “one does not know from where:” this groundless indeterminacy is not peculiar to the popular view, and it is only the product of a writer who, as in this passage, seeks to set up a series of opposites, and since he needs so many, now also places one in the most groundless limbo.

**) Usually one cites, as also de Wette briefly does, the Dialogue with Tryphon as a witness that this idea existed among the Jews. The dialogue with Tryphon is usually cited as a witness to the fact that this conception existed among the Jews. But first, we saw that the idea of this dialogue of the anointing of the Messiah by Elijah, until which he would be unknown, only took its origin from our Gospel, or from the circle of thought in which it stands, and was a transformation of the view of this Gospel of the baptism of Jesus and its purposes. Then, if it be Dial. c. Tryph. p. 226, the Messiah will be unknown until Elijah anoints him, this does not refer at all to his origin, to his completely inexplicable origin, but only to the fact that his Messianic significance will only be revealed after the anointing by Elijah. The idea of this dialogue and that ascribed to the people in the fourth Gospel are therefore not so closely related as Lücke thinks (Comm. II, 176); only if the people had at least said that until Elijah came, no man would know who the Messiah was; “but whence he came,” then the people would not have been allowed to say at all, because the unknown of the person, not the secret of the origin, forms the point in the view of the dialogue with the Tryphon. The other passage, p. 336, which is quoted from that dialogue, deals just as little with an unknown origin of the Messiah, but with his twofold coming and appearance, with the δυο παρουσιαι, as the dialogue says: in the first, which takes place in lowliness, the Messiah will have to struggle with the resistance of the world, with disregard and misjudgment; only in the second coming will his glory be so clearly revealed that every contradiction will be repulsed. Gfrörer (Das Jahrh, des Heils II, 223) also brings Targum Jonath Micha 4:8 to our passage. Here it says: “Thou anointed of Israel, which art hid because of the sins of the people of Zion, unto thee shall the kingdom be given.” Lücke uses this passage (Comm. I, 363) to prove that the view that the Baptist came with water baptism to reveal the Lord to the people was based on a similar popular view that had already been given. But as far as the latter is concerned, the Targum knows nothing of a forerunner in this connection; but it does not speak of an unknown origin of the Messiah, nor of a hiding place where he is hidden, but it is only said that his arrival is held back by the sins of the people. There is no thought of an unknown whereabouts, but only of his ideal, heavenly pre-existence, from which he would not yet emerge because of the sins of the people. But the people do not even say in the Gospel: we do not know where the Messiah is hiding now, but: when he comes, no one knows where he will come from.

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5) The three attacks of the enemies of Jesus.

7:30-44.

Again and again, and at every opportunity, we must hear it said, “that John, more than any other evangelist, has revealed the natural connection and the soon hurrying, soon hesitating course of development of that great hour, and has thus skilfully linked the religious view of the history of Jesus with the natural pragmatic one”. *). The “religious pragmatism” is expressed in this passage on an occasion that is repeated three times here: they sought to seiize Jesus, but no one laid a hand on him, because, it says in v. 30, his hour had not yet come. If the danger from which the Lord is delivered were serious, sudden and threatening, then this pragmatism, which finds such incomprehensible things explained only in divine counsel, would not be rejected outright. But where the assassination attempts are commonplace, where the Jews have long (5:18) sought the death of the Lord, and where now again three attempts are made to capture the Lord, that pragmatism explains nothing, because it is supposed to explain too much. The wonderful power of that hour, for which the highest suffering is reserved and which must now thwart the earlier murder attempts, is weakened too much when it is supposed to be proven so often, and we finally do not understand how it happened that it did not collapse when it was continuously strained without interruption. By merely stating, “his hour had not yet come,” the author cannot explain to us the constant alternation of murder attempts and their thwarting time and time again.It is not because it is religious that we maintain that this pragmatism explains nothing, but because it remains in uniform while it is applied to a longer series of changing cases.

*) Lücke, Comm. II, 181, 182.

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But let us leave only the religious point of unity in its sublimity, where it may, however, miss many rays and unite in itself an abundance of finite relations, and let us examine the “natural-pragmatic view” of the evangelist. The basis of historical relations, we have already seen, is not the firmest. The relationship of the authorities to the Lord fluctuates between the extreme endpoints of having once recognised the full danger of the Lord and at the same moment behaving as if they had never heard the Lord speak. The crowd, on the other hand, seems to be completely familiar with the plans of the rulers and is careful not to express its opinion about Jesus aloud, and then again it speaks as if it did not even suspect how far the matter between Jesus and the authorities has progressed. Finally – which is not without importance here – the mood of the crowd in relation to Jesus was a purely manufactured one, and if three assassination attempts in succession now emerge from such a nebulous region, then one finds apt pragmatism here?

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The first attack (v. 30) comes from the part of the people who are surprised that the Lord speaks so freely and openly, although he is threatened by the superiors. These people even think that the rulers might have acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah and only the one circumstance keeps them from the decisive belief that they know the origin of Jesus, which would not be possible with the Messiah. But this certainly cannot be the mood in which an attempt is made which only the prerogative of the Lord’s actual time of suffering could repel. If the crowd suspected that the authorities might have withdrawn their attack and acknowledged the Lord, and if they were so inclined to do so, they would not have excepted that hostile plan with all the greater zeal. The cry of Jesus, that he knows where he comes from and who sent him (verse 28-29), could not have caused this anger of the crowd, not least because the crowd’s statement that they would not know the origin of the Messiah could not have elicited that cry, as there was no such popular belief.

The second attack comes from the Pharisees who, in connection with the priests, send out servants to catch Jesus; but the thread on which this attack hangs is so weak that it breaks at the first touch. The Pharisees had heard about the murmurings of the crowd, which was moved to faith by the calculation of the number of miracles in which Jesus revealed Himself (vv. 31, 32.). How the miracles of Jesus suddenly came here and had such a decisive effect, we would not be able to explain, if we had not already discovered the hand of the author, who forms and sets in motion the machinery of the whole at his own discretion: but how the Pharisees learned what the muffled murmurings of the crowd meant, can just as little be explained from the first premises of the report, for it is precisely out of fear of the rulers that the crowd is said not to have dared to speak openly of their opinion of the Lord.

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Finally, for the third time, the danger breaks loose, and some again want to seize the Lord. Some! namely, some from the crowd (εξ αυτων), which grouped itself in its judgment of the Lord in such a way that some declared him to be the Messiah, while others declared him to be the Prophet, while several believed they could not recognize him as the Messiah because he was not from Bethlehem and from David’s lineage (verse 40-44). In this context, the few who wanted to seize the Lord can only be those who judged him less favorably, but must those who are only slightly less willing to believe immediately go to extreme hostility? Must those who still hesitate to recognize Jesus as the Messiah only because he is from Galilee act as his sworn enemies? They are only swaying, only one step away from full belief, but a deep chasm separates them from bitter enemies who could only find peace in the death of the Lord. But leading them over this chasm does not cause the author any trouble, and this easy task – a stroke of the pen is strong enough to be a bridge over that chasm – he had to use because he had previously let the plots against the Lord follow the judgment of the crowd each time (verse 25-30, verse 31-32). Therefore, if the crowd concludes its judgment, it is also appropriate that the hostile incident is repeated at the end. This is what the pragmatic arrangement demands, even if the strongest assumptions of the report itself must be overlooked at its request.

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The apologist allows us one more question. Both times (vv. 30, 44) when the crowd wants to catch Jesus, the evangelist says, “No one laid a hand on Him”: if they did not even try to catch the Lord, how did the evangelist know that they wanted to catch Him both times, i.e. in these two moments?

6) Transition of Jesus’ Speech to the Point of Contention.

C. 7, 16 – 19.

Now the speeches that the Lord gave during the feast remained to be seen.

It is immediately striking that the Lord’s speech not only refers back to a long-past event, the healing of the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda, which had occurred during a Sabbath rest, but also that the main subject of this speech is the same as that which was discussed in detail at that time (in chapter 5). The contrast between self-will, seeking one’s own glory, and the activity that seeks the glory of God, reappears here (verse 18). The Lord refers, just as he did then, to his knowledge of the one who sent him (verse 29). In fact, in order to gather together some other striking repetitions of the speech that was given after the healing of that sick man, it should be noted that later in chapter 8, verses 13-18, the offense of the Lord testifying about himself is dealt with in the same way as it was then, by pointing to the righteous judgment of the Son and the testimony of the Father. It is also reiterated that the Son follows the pattern of the Father (verse 26), and finally, the works are brought up again so that they might bear witness to the Lord (chapter 10, verse 38).

This relationship is so strange that it is not enough to call attention to it and to present it as a fact; but the question arises as to what sense can be made of this fact. Lücke also says *): “A closer look teaches that the first important persecution and defence of Jesus Ch. 5 lies at the basis of the later speeches of argument and defence. The later speeches of the Lord, as reported by the evangelist: that is clear. But is it also a basis in the sense that the Lord Himself took proofs from it on every occasion, as it were, and almost always went back to it? This, of course, is how Lücke understands the matter, and this is how the apologist must understand it, that the Lord later repeats what he presented on an earlier occasion, and that the basic ideas of Ch. 5 “only return expanded and turned differently.” But the first glance at the new but groundless situation, which has already completely dissolved, teaches us that this division of the crowds was not an opportunity to revisit earlier sayings, to expand them and give them a different twist. And in the event that the situation was more settled, and the Lord had wished to give a different turn to thoughts which he had previously expressed, we have in the synoptic accounts quite different examples of the wealth of individual figures at the Lord’s disposal when he developed a substantial idea according to its different determinations. When we first hear those basic ideas of chapter 5 for the first time, they still have the advantage of the first impression they make on us: but if now the Lord, in order to prove his divine justification, always only emphasizes the contrast between the self-authoritative and the self-denial which seeks the glory of God, if he always only refers to the testimony of the Father and the works, then the repetition misses its purpose and takes on the anxious and pleading tone which is peculiar to apologetics when it asks the inclined opponent for concessions. It is not the Lord that we hear speaking in this tone, but the apologist who moves in a few narrow views, who has based his conviction on certain reasons and only has these reasons to draw on on every occasion.

*) Comm. II, 100.

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It is also a vain effort if the interpretation tries to breathe some strength into the transition of Jesus’ speech to justification because of the Sabbath violation and to help it up. It is difficult to think of a more weak and laborious transition, and the Lord, after he has proved in the synoptic sayings how well he knows how to introduce a subject, should not also take upon himself the ambiguous glory that he has understood even the weakest transitions?

The Lord wants to give the Jews who wonder about his scriptural learning the touchstone by which they would learn that his teaching is not from him but from God: if they wanted to do the will of God, they would come to understand it. – This is the first turn of the discourse, which goes to the actual point of controversy. – One need only see the commentators of our Gospel at one point busily running to and fro through one another to notice for the time being that it is not quite right and sane, not at all as it should be. Even at this point, they are anxiously trying to bring out an inner coherence of the speech and yet cannot prevent its parts from falling apart. *). Everything would have held together if the Jews had wondered about the content of Jesus’ teaching as a completely new one and not only about the Lord’s teaching from the Scriptures, and if Jesus had answered in the same way as he did in 8:31-32: only receive my teaching into yourselves, make it your life principle, and you will then recognise its truth and its divine origin through inner experience. But the Jews did not say anything about the fact that the teaching of Jesus appeared to them as a new one – and yet the answer of the Lord presupposes this astonishment about the content, yes, it even jumps away from this presupposed subject and even falls apart into two unequal parts when it says: whoever does the divine will will recognize the origin of my teaching. The divine will is here an indeterminate abstraction, the most abstract generality, which stands apart from all living connection for that which is determined, namely for the doctrine of the Lord, and can bear as little witness to it as the barest deism can to ecclesiastical faith.

*) Olshausen, for example, (II, 173) defines the transition thus: “the object of the teaching of the rabbis was indeed essentially the right thing, but their relation to the true teaching was wrong. They taught without a true divine commission and without a divine calling.” Accordingly, the Lord would have to assume that his teaching and that of the rabbis was essentially the same. But he rather assumes that his doctrine is a new one and that the impulse of the new will be removed “if one does the will of God.” Lücke (Comm. II, 161) summarises the connection thus: “Certainly not from you and in your schools I have learned what I teach.” But that his doctrine is only his own, the Jews have said as little of this as that it is a new one.

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Suddenly (verse 19), the Lord turns to the Law of Moses and accuses the Jews of not practicing it, for if they did, would they want to kill him? But how does this fit with the previous assumption, where the Jews’ amazement at his scholarship was entirely innocent and harmless? Even though there was talk of the divine will before, it was held in such a wide vagueness that the transition to the positive, Mosaic Law can only be called a leap. And as soon as this leap is made, how sluggish the speech becomes: “And none of you keeps the law. Why do you seek to kill me?” This is not the Lord speaking, but the evangelist has him speak this way because he still wants to add an argument for the legitimacy of that healing on the Sabbath.

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If we have to ascribe to the age of the sick man who was healed at the pool of Beth- esda, in Hengstenberg’s sense, a symbolic relationship to the feast time in which the healing took place, that feast 5:1 was therefore a passover, but in the meantime (6:4) a new passover has passed, then a year and a half has passed until the present Feast of Tabernacles. What a coincidence it is that the Lord is immediately surrounded by the same crowd that saw the healing of the sick man and took offence at the violation of the Sabbath! How useless was the long speech wasted, which the Lord gave at that time Ch. 5, if the people, as soon as the Lord came to the holy city, were still in the position of amazement, which they had assumed at that time after that miraculous deed. The changeable crowd must have been of a quite different kind then than it has otherwise been in all the world and in all time: a petrifying spell must have taken hold of the people, so that after one and a half years they still stood amazed at that story and the Lord could immediately address them again after such a long interval: “Why are you surprised at my deed?

A year and a half! A much shorter time is enough to give the crowd new thoughts, interests and attitudes *). But on paper and for later perception, even greater periods of time shrink. The colourful change of reality simplifies itself for the memory, and the changing crowd that surrounded the Lord solidifies into the crowd in the statistical sense, into one and the same crowd that the Lord now always encountered when he came into contact with the people. How far this transformation of the changeable into a fixed quantity can go, we already had a striking but instructive example of it above at the Sea of Galilee 6:36. Finally, the rich interrelationships and interests of the real world merge into a simple circle of relationships and become fixed quantities. But to go so far in the petrification of relations and the mass of the people could only be achieved by a writer who, like everything else, had dissolved the real world into a simple abstract opposition, had already brought history and its collisions to an end at the beginning, and could now only ever have the same decisive opposition repeated. Now, of course, if the death of Jesus had become a firm decision for the Jews on the occasion of the healing of the Sabbath, it was self-evident that later on they would constantly bear that event in mind and that the Lord, after a long time, would have to take up his responsibility again, or rather, as if he had not brought it to an end earlier.

*) Olshausen (Comm. II, I76) explains himself, because of their difficulty, against the relation to Ch. 5. “It is far nearer to say that such a case had occurred again and that it gave rise to the whole conversation. How hasty! Only the innocent astonishment of the Jews at the Lord’s knowledge of Scripture gave rise to the conversation. And then not only would “such a case have occurred again” but it would also have to be reported by the author, yes, not only “such a case” but also the similar impulse to which it gave rise. Olshausen, however, has only given us an example of how facts are formed for sayings.

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7) The justification against the Sabbath law.

7:23.

But what harm does it do to a saying of the Lord that it is placed in an inappropriate context? It always comes to us at the right time, as long as it is otherwise reproduced in its pure originality. However, this is very questionable for this saying about the justification against the Sabbath law. The epigrammatic preparation necessary for such sayings lies in not postponing circumcision on the Sabbath, and the conclusion or the punchline is now the question: Why do you now consider it wrong that I healed a whole person on the Sabbath? Anyone who does not hear the disharmony with which the two parts of the saying are set in a essentially different key instead of harmonizing together has not yet learned from the synoptic Gospels how much the Lord’s sayings, like finished works of art, agree with all their parts and lead the listener to their pure, harmonious conclusion through the charm of rich melody. But this saying draws attention in completely different directions and ends in a dissonance, if that were even worth calling it that, which is a connection of indifferently different tones. The preparation of the saying suggests a different conclusion, and the conclusion is without preparation. The expectation aroused by the first part, when it is said that the Sabbath law deviates from the commandment of circumcision, would find its true conclusion in the fact that it is even more permissible for the Lord, who pursues higher purposes than the commandment of circumcision prescribes, to set aside the Sabbath law. Similarly, at least, the Lord says (Matt. 12:5, 6), if the priests profane the Sabbath for the sake of the temple service, and do not fall into sin, I am still more above the Sabbath law, because I am more than the temple. The fourth evangelist, however, could not in fact provide the appropriate preparation for the conclusion of the saying: “So there is no cause for accusation if I heal a whole man on the Sabbath”; he could not do so if he did not want to fall into the silliness of his interpreters.

It was reserved for them to attribute to the Lord the view that circumcision, which refers to this single member, also has a “medical” purpose *), and thus to place the Lord in the same line as Philo and Johann David Michaelis, who present this neat natural explanation of the purely religious symbol according to the legal view. Certainly, this interpretation has a right as such, since the conclusion of the saying presupposes this preparation. But it is just as certain that, if the preparation is taken worthily, it expects a different conclusion. We know from the synoptic account of a more dignified dialectic of the Lord, and even the evangelist did not dare to put the preparation of the saying in prosaic harmony with the inappropriate conclusion. Therefore, we do not commit a crime if we let this saying pass in its dissonance in honor of the Lord. **) —-

*) Lücke, Comm. II, 174.

**) Olshausen (Comm. II, 177) summarises the saying thus: circumcision refers only to the body, “but Christ’s healing was for the whole man, to which the inner life necessarily belongs. But it is only a question of the healing of this human being, and this encompasses the whole bodily organism, whereas circumcision refers only to a single member of the body. The body as such forms the medium tertium, and Christ’s healing and circumcision only diverge in such a way that the former completely embraces the body, while the latter has only a limited “medical significance”.

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As an encore to this sacrifice of honour we would also add the attached saying (v. 24): “Judge not according to appearance, but hold righteous judgment”, if we did not allow the apologists the pleasure of exercising their anxious acumen in finding the most diverse and remote connections. As our evangelist proves, everything can be put into context, and we therefore do not want to trouble his interpreters with the question whether the Jews had judged only according to appearance and not rather according to the revealed law when they imputed the Sabbath violation to the Lord as an offence.

8) The Lord’s Ascension to the Father.

7:33-36.

The Lord’s saying that He knew from whom He came and who had sent Him (v. 29), we will only touch upon in passing, since on the one hand it is only a repetition of the contrast between the independent appearance and the divine mission, and since the reason for the multitude saying that it was not known from where the Messiah would come, has already disappeared. We already know enough about how the author loves to make people take offence at the known lowly origin of Jesus. He already enjoyed it when he led Nathanael over this offence to the company of Jesus, and finally, after the people had felt this offence (6:42; 7:41-42) on all sides, he even lets the learned Pharisees mock at the Galilean origin of the supposed prophet (7:52).

But the evangelist now begins to exploit a new theme and to lead it through all the stages of misunderstanding just as diligently as he had hitherto used the mystery of the origin of the Logos to shatter the sensual mind and also the folly of the people. The Lord has always spoken of his death, but from now on he does so more clearly by calling his death the going home to the Father who sent him. In this way he speaks immediately to the servants whom the Pharisees had sent to seize him (vv. 32, 33). A man who speaks as a prophet, who wants to be acknowledged as God’s messenger, cannot refer to God more clearly and understandably than the Lord does when he says: “I am going where the one who sent me is.” And yet the Jews are to understand these words in such a way that this man, who has so often spoken of the testimony of the Father who sent him, might be willing to go into the dispersion of the Greeks in order to teach them. Never. This contrast does not belong to real life, but to a view that takes the contrasts so far that they no longer hold together at all and break like an overstretched string. The Lord’s self-awareness certainly had to struggle not infrequently with the rigid sense of the people, but if the gulf had been as great as we would have to assume according to this statement, then he would not even have been allowed to call out; he had to remain silent. The evangelist has so far exaggerated the contrast between the incomprehensibly dull spirit of the people and the clear self-awareness of Jesus that he has made it appear to his Master as if he had not been very conscientious in guarding the pearls of truth.

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But we have one more reason to acquit the Lord of the unwise waste of the pearls, and the people of an intemperate folly, when we see only too clearly by what weak parenthesis that saying of going home to the Father is attached to this occasion. The servants of the Pharisees seek the Lord, and find him among the multitude: nothing but this suggestion of seeking and finding, which lies in the context, has brought this saying hither: later, when I have gone to the Father, ye shall seek me, but shall not find me. The reading αυτοις (v. 33): Jesus said to them, namely, to those servants of the Pharisees, is not quite certain, but if the Lord addressed the multitude with that saying, he must have addressed the servants of his enemies at the same time, since only the historical situation gave him the transition to this saying. Or he may have addressed the crowd in preference, in which case he must have regarded the crowd as complicit in the plan of the Pharisees’ servants, otherwise he would not have been allowed to address the people in this way. “You will seek me later, but you will not find me.” These words only make sense when they are addressed to those who have just sought the Lord and found him. The crowd would therefore have understood this address even less than the evangelist presupposes; they would not even have understood where it came from if they had not known the starting point of it, that they had sought the Lord with hostile intentions, and if they had not for a moment considered themselves to be guilty. But was this the right place to speak of the return to the Father, had it not been the Lord’s boastful revelation of a secret, which would have had no other purpose than to show that he was far above the present danger and would in future be inaccessible to all persecution? This speech is nothing other than one of those surprises to which writers resort when they cannot extricate princes and kings from dangers into which they have fallen through concealment of their rank, except by having them show the signs of their princely dignity. Our evangelist, however, when he reached for this help, was at a disadvantage because he could not even communicate to the crowd an understanding of this revelation of majesty, nor was he allowed to do so, because he immediately wanted to use the opportunity, according to his custom, to contrast the obtuseness of the people and the clarity of Jesus’ self-awareness.

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9) The living water.

7:37-39.

“In the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, let him that thirsteth come unto me, and drink.” The thought is the same that the Lord spoke to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well when He asked the woman for a drink of water. This time a certain occasion seems to be presupposed, for the attitude of the scene, how Jesus stands there, how he cries out, has something dramatic about it and clearly indicates a stimulus in the environment. The commentators have therefore thought, quite in the sense of the author, that it was a custom at the Feast of Tabernacles to pour out water before the people; but let us add that the Evangelist has here indeed acted in the manner of his commentators, who do not like to let the Lord use an image without showing the sensual material which is used for the image in the actual surroundings. They cannot hear that the Lord calls Himself the light of the world: immediately they must point to the sun or to the lampstands in the temple courtyard of the women, for these the Lord had in mind. When the Lord compares the position of the disciples in the world with the position of a mountain city which cannot escape the gaze, such commentators are immediately at hand to point out to us the particular mountain city whose sight brought the Lord to this image. Yes, who should believe it, if it were not written *), scarcely has the Lord said this time (v. 38), that from within (κοιλιας) the believer rivers of living water would flow forth, then a scholar also shows us the sensual occasion of this image in the belly of the temple-mountain, through which the water, which brought the Lord to the first half of the image, was conducted away in pipes **).

*) Theol. Studien u. Kritik. 1829. I, 138.

**) Bengel sees in the word κοιλια an allusion to the pot-bellied water-jars which had just been carried past. Alluditur ad amphoras, quibus ultimo festi illius die aqua ex sonte Siloah per urbem ad sacrarium ferebatur. Magnum enim ventrem habebant. Apart from the taste of the interpreter, one must also praise his exact archaeological knowledge of the shape of those jars.

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There is no reason not to bring method into this kind of interpretation, and indeed we do not know how those interpreters could prevent us from surrounding the Lord with a magazine of sensual things, so that he had the salt immediately at hand when he called the disciples the salt of the earth, or could immediately point to the bushel with a light under it, in order to prove to them by the extinguished light how absurd it would be if they did not want to let their light shine. So – either consistency or the confession that this kind of interpretation misunderstands the figurative way of speaking! “Ye are the salt of the earth, I am the light of the world; come unto me, and I will quench your thirst;” in these images the general definiteness of the matter is indicated; for it is the very nature of the disciples that they are the salt of the earth, and it is likewise the general meaning of the Lord that he is the light of the world. Now, as the thing is conceived in its general definiteness, so also the figurative substratum is excepted in the generality which it has in its nature known to every one, which it has in general, which it always has, in short, which it has as a generic term, and which it can also only raise to the sign of a general spiritual destiny. Not this handful of salt, not this particular spring or bucket of water, not the sun rising or setting today, but the nature of salt, of water, of light in general, is what the Lord has in mind when He designates His or His disciples’ destiny. In the simple image, the general joins the general; any restriction of the natural substrate would give the image the most unbearable appearance and cast an unedifying dispute into its calm parallel. The picture is dignified and sustained when the general nature of the natural substance congruently joins the corresponding general power of the spirit; but when the general spiritual meaning is related to this single piece of the sensuous world, both sides throw themselves over, they quarrel *) and the general spiritual meaning unwillingly tears itself away from this handful of salt, from this bucket of water, points to it not as to a corresponding image, but as to a trifling, contemptible thing, in short the comparison acquires the appearance of grandstanding. The spiritual would then not be satisfied with the view rising of its own accord from the sensuous image to it as the counter-image; it would not expect this self-elevation, but would say from the outset: what do you want to do with this piece of sensuousness? Throw it away and come to me! As if the figurative way of speaking did not know that the spirit rises calmly and safely from the sensual image to its proper home. Our evangelist, however, has thrown into the picture a strife and quarrel which it does not originally know. In order to call himself the fountain of living water, the Lord did not need to refer to the water bucket of the Feast of Tabernacles or to the well of the Samaritans; rather, the invigorating and refreshing power of water in general was sufficient reason for him to see in it the image of his own invigorating power.

*) On occasion, the quarrel between the two sides would not only remain an ideal one and remain in the mind’s eye, but would also become very serious in reality. Just look, for example, how Tholuck Comm. p. 162, 163 describes the procession of priests with the holy water that has just arrived and considers it very probable that the Lord would throw that cry into the midst of this solemn act – would Jesus not in this case at least have interrupted, disturbed and confused the ceremony in a very obtrusive and untimely manner?

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The Lord did not even think of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as the evangelist suggests, when he says that streams of living water would flow from within the believer. Even in the way the evangelist presents the saying, without dogmatic distinction, the personality of the Lord and the believers are related.

10) The meeting of the Sanhedrin.

7:45-53.

The session of the Sanhedrin has waited a long time before we come to it, it is therefore time that we lift it up. Two speeches of the rulers are brought to us from this meeting; first a word to the servants who were sent to catch Jesus, but returned to no avail. To excuse themselves, the servants said that no man had ever spoken like this man, but the superiors immediately attacked them and said: “Are you also deceived? But do you see that one of the rulers or of the Pharisees believes in him? This answer, says Lücke *), “is so completely in the manner of domineering hierarchs and arrogant guilds of all times that – what do you expect, perhaps: that any writer, even the most ordinary one, could create it on their own? No! – that it is not necessary to develop the meaning of the words further.”

*) Comm. II, 201.

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This is especially the fundamental error in the interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, that one thinks to have done everything if one believes to have demonstrated some sense of the words, some connection between the sentences, and has spoken edifyingly about many things. After such work, a passage whose meaning does not even need to be “further developed” provides true Sunday joys. Against this painful explanation that creeps along the ground of the letter, it is finally necessary for interpretation to stand freely, to speak from the heart and to also give honor to the scripture, to look without fear at its foundations and to examine the origin of its individual parts and its letters. The reward is immeasurable: the true core sayings of the Lord, the pure content, the gold, all this imperishable and originally free material is emancipated and no longer serves as a mere occasion for commentators to demonstrate their wit and intelligence – but these sayings become suns, rising to their own element, thundering on in their own revolutions, and now revealing the full power of their rays. Some things that seem like gold may indeed prove to be mere appearances and the work of later reflection, but even that is a gain, because after a thousand years of unsuccessful effort, the human mind no longer needs to fumble around with material that has no original life and can convey none.

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Thus, those words of the Pharisees are indeed “so completely in the manner of power-hungry hierarchs and arrogant guild scholars of all times” that any writer of any time could find and consider them to be the true facts and write them down as such. If, therefore, it is at least highly probable that they are the product of pragmatism, this becomes certain when we see that they are nevertheless improper and highly inappropriate to the situation. The words are spoken to the servants who themselves belong to the people; in this case the speech is not natural, but – brutal to a degree that exceeds all measure of the real world. Yes, if it was even an educated man, a Pharisee, who seemed to be inclined to the faith, such a one could then be made aware of it: Behold, only the people can be deceived; but do you see any other of the educated, learned, and rulers inclined to the faith? But spoken to those who themselves belong to the masses, these words are so outrageous that by their very lack of moderation they should have provoked resistance and failed in their purpose. For the next thing after such a throwaway speech would have been the answer alone: Well, we belong to the people and therefore have this kind; you do what you want!

The servants excuse the unsuccessfulness of their mission by saying that no man had ever spoken like this man, so that this man’s speech would have made such an impression on them that they would no longer have been able to think of their task. But what authority, if it is serious about the business it has entrusted to its subordinates, will be content with such an excuse: it would immediately send the sentimental servants back again, so that they could better carry out their task on the spot. Hierarchs, who are so soft-hearted and satisfied by such a message, could not have had the courage to send their servants out into the midst of the crowd, which had even grown by the visitors to the festival, in order that they might seize their enemy from the protective crowd of his followers. And now the servants even say: No man teaches like this one; but all that they heard Jesus speak was only that hint that they would seek him in the future, but would not find him. These are not words of life that must shake the listener through and through, for no one could understand them, at least no one understood them.

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Finally, the Sanhedrin disperses after a question directed at Nicodemus, who had dared to try to appease the passion and anger of the leaders. He is asked if he is also from Galilee, and he is told to investigate and see if a prophet has arisen from Galilee. He would soon be convinced of the opposite. And yet several prophets arose from Galilee, which could not have been unknown to the learned assessors of the Sanhedrin even in the moment of the highest passion. The manuscripts which read εγειρεται do not offer the help which the apologetic interest welcomed in them. For if Nicodemus should inquire and see that no prophet arose from Galilee, such enquiry can only refer to the nature of the country and to experience, which would teach him that none indeed “arose from thence.” The difficulty, then, remains the same – a body of scholars could neither deceive nor wish to deceive one of its members with evidence of this kind. The reason for the rebuke which Nicodemus received from his scribal comrades is already known to us: the evangelist wanted to let the entire historical environment of the Lord test their limited intellect against his lowly origin, and finally the scribal authorities also had to have their turn. But, as elsewhere, he let his love for contrasts drive him far beyond all bounds of probability *).

*) Olshausen (Comm. II, 188) thinks that “in the heat of the argument” the scribes could have overlooked a historical circumstance. (Likewise Tholuck Comm. p. 166.). But if the heat had passed away, i.e. if Nicodemus, as the apologists suppose, had communicated the conversation of that meeting to the evangelist, or beforehand to the Lord, then the author, with calm reflection, ought to have noticed it, and also to have told his readers that an oversight had occurred here. But this “heat” is rather peculiar to the author; in writing this speech he does not think of the historical data of the O. T. and is only driven by his love of contrasts.

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The same fate that the grouping, the contrasts and divisions of the mass of the people have had to experience, therefore also benefits the meeting of the Sanhedrin – it dissolves. This particular business, at least, which is assigned to its agenda here, could not have been treated with such desperate earnestness, since the presupposed conditions and the speeches that took place in it could not bear the criticism. Especially in the last period of Jesus’ life, the synod will often have spoken of the stir he caused among the people, but not this time, i.e. at this feast; now the high council had to assemble only because the evangelist wanted it that way. For he wanted to portray all the shades of popular opinion about Jesus, and his painting would have lacked a poignant background if he had not moved the meeting of the synod there, which put the favourably-minded in fear and supported and even led the hostile attacks against the Lord.

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Critique of the Gospel of John
by Bruno Bauer

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§. 11 The feeding of the people and the church.

6:1-71

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1) The nearness of the passover.

6:1-4.

Apologetics, which devotes itself to the service of the letter, has almost nowhere so much to do and so much business as is presented to it in the passage to which we are now passing; for no sooner has it got over one difficulty than, before it can breathe, it is engaged in a new struggle with another. Criticism now does the most unselfish kindness to the direction that opposes it most stubbornly, in that it not only makes the difficulties disappear for a moment in the exegetical fog, but solves them for ever by explaining how they arose; thus it seizes here, as always, the opportunity to gather fiery coals on the head of its opponent. It is only a pity that the latter at the same time becomes too much disgruntled to give room to the feeling of gratitude, since he cannot be freed from the torment of those difficulties without having many a hearty joy of little traits,that serve him as amusing resting points on the field of impulses.

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For example, the apologist is immediately pleased with the remark (V. 4.) that at the time when the miracle of the feeding and the following conversation took place, the feast of the Passover was near. From this “it is explained, says Lücke*), that there were just crowds of people wandering about in the land.” But if this remark, as de Wette also says **), “seems to explain why those houses of the people were on the move,” then the evangelist also appears to regard the gathering of the crowds of people around the Lord quite differently from the Synoptics. Only by an accidental circumstance does he set the masses in motion, at least for a reason that lay outside the personality of the Lord, whereas the Synoptics tie the multitudes to the Saviour by an inner bond of need. Matthew (15:30) has the multitude of the sick flock to the Lord so that he may heal them, and when Mark says (6:34) that the Lord felt compassion for the multitude because they resembled the herd without shepherds, and that he taught them many things, he is at the same time saying that the multitude, feeling spiritually helpless, flocked to the Lord to seek counsel from him.

*) Comm. II, 72.

**) Kurz. Ex. of Ev. John p .77.

But it is not so bad, one might object, that our evangelist leads the multitudes to the Lord only by the nearness of the Passover; for he does not mean to explain the presence of the multitudes in general, but only the great number of the multitude; that a multitude of the people followed the Lord at all, he sufficiently explains (v. 2) by the impression which the miraculous healing of the sick had made on the people. Thus the proximity of the Passover feast is mentioned only to explain, at least “in part, the wandering of great crowds”. *) But even this more limited purpose of the time is as disturbing as it is striking. Or is the escort of the crowd not sufficiently and completely explained in relation to the size of the crowd, when it already says in v. 2: a “great crowd” followed the Lord, because they had seen his signs on the sick? Why is it necessary to mention the proximity of the Passover in order to explain the presence of large crowds? The evangelist would have brought the most harmful excess into his narrative if the mention of the time of the Passover really served that purpose; for now he would not have trusted the Lord’s activity and its impression on the masses to have so much power that it alone could gather the multitude around the Lord. The first reason would have been weakened by the second, or actually annulled, even to the point of contradiction with the inwardly more coherent view of the synoptic accounts.

*) Lücke, Comm. 11, 5.

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But even if the evangelist may have at least partly connected this pragmatic purpose with this timing – it is not impossible for him to have had such an intention, which would destroy the immediate surroundings of his narrative – we cannot go so far as to attribute to him the unconsciousness that he only noticed the proximity of the Passover feast in order to explain the gathering of a large crowd of people. He must have had another purpose and the apologists will agree with us if they really care about the honour of their protégé. How, namely, if the determination of time had grown together more with what follows than with what precedes? But let us not ask! It is so; the time is not directly connected with the remark that many people have come together, but the crowd is already quietly assembled, the report has already turned away from it in v. 3, because it is sure of it, it has already drawn the reader’s attention to the situation of the Lord, and only now, as it wants to develop the relationship of Jesus to the crowd, does it notice the proximity of the feast of the Passover. So this remark may still refer to the preceding in silence, but its actual direction is turned forward to the following, and in this direction it is supposed to point out how what Jesus did and said is internally connected with the approaching feast. The miraculous feeding, however, is so intimately connected with the following conversation – intimately, let us say, according to the Evangelist’s view – the enjoyment to which the Lord offers his flesh and blood is so much the pinnacle to which the bodily feeding of the people rises, that the near feast of the Passover must necessarily also be related to the content of this conversation. In the enjoyment of his person, the Lord wants to establish the higher image of the legal Passover feast, for his person, whose highest significance is revealed in his sacrifice unto death, is the eternal, heavenly archetype of the Passover lamb. And when could the Lord speak more appropriately of the higher sacrifice of his body and its appropriation than at the moment when the people were preparing to celebrate the Passover sacrifice? Now, if this connection sheds significant light on the following conversation, namely that it is already certain from the outset that the evangelist had the idea of the Lord’s Supper in mind and that he already portrays the Lord as instituting and calling for a celebration here, which the Synoptics only derive from the last Passover evening of the Lord, then the following part of the report also lends an explanatory light to the time determination. For if the criticism of the following conversation will teach us that it could not have been held by the Lord either in the present form or on the presupposed occasion, then that determination of the time proves to be one that was made and pragmatically deduced from the content of the conversation, which seemed to necessarily follow the miracle of the feeding.

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2) The introduction to the feeding of the people.

6:5-6.

The passages of sacred Scripture which, on closer examination, might cause some offence, usually betray by their torn and distorted appearance the struggle which apologetics has fought with them – it is always a struggle to the death, even if it is the word of sacred Scripture which its patrons kill – or they resemble the proof of that biblical manuscript on which the curious hands have gone to and fro until the distinguishing sign about which one argued has been obliterated. Only criticism brings back peace by allowing the Scriptures to say again freely and unhindered what they want to say.

As soon as Jesus lifted up his eyes and saw the people approaching him, he thought of where he should take bread to feed them *). But did the crowd come to him to be filled, or did he have nothing else to give them, so that he could only think of bread? On the contrary, the crowd was said to have come to him because they had seen samples of his healing power, and according to this, as Matthew says, sick people of all kinds were brought to him so that he might heal them. The Lord, as the same synoptist reports, by no means evaded this expectation; indeed, according to the account of Mark, he gave the people the gift of his teaching before he fed them bodily. And both times, where the synoptics report the feeding, which was repeated afterwards, they give as the reason for the miraculous help, that the people had once been around the Lord beyond the time when they needed new food, and the other time even for three days. There the thought of help was obvious, but in the account of the fourth evangelist it comes before all need and without need. We now ask, is this still an explanation of the evangelical account, when Lücke says *): “the deviation of John lies, as it seems to me, only in the abbreviation of the narrative, which omits the instruction of the people before the feeding”? If the narrative, in the sense in which the apologist thinks, namely, consciously omits something, then it would still have to leave room for the addition, but it rather completely excludes even a moment that could be devoted to another thought. No sooner does Jesus see the crowd pouring in than he thinks of the feeding and, as outcome also shows, with the intention of having it happen immediately **).

*) Correct Bengel: veniente populo jam providit Jesus cibum.

*) Comm. II, 73. Likewise Calvin: omittit Evangelista, quod alir tres referunt.

**) Tholuck, Comm. p. 131 says that the evangelist “draws the narrative together.” But the only one who draws together an account is the one who briefly and summarily reports what lies between the extreme endpoints. Krabbe (Lectures on the Life of Jesus. 1839, p. 365.) regards the account of the fourth evangelist with that of the synoptists as agreeing from the outset, and knows nothing at all of a difference. We mention the latter book only to remark that it can give us no occasion for consideration. It only repeats the old apologetic turns of phrase and differs from the writings of Lücke and Olshausen only in that it presents the apologetic inventions as dogma, whereas those men still had a feeling of difficulty. However, apologetics has indeed come full circle in history! Either it can only maintain its old, decaying supports for as long as possible and present them to the criticism as the pillars of the Church, until it dies from the historical weakness of age, or – and this now seems to be its most compelling argument – it must fight and push back against criticism with external force. But in so doing, as all history teaches, it will only hasten its fall, for spiritual power is only strengthened by external pressure and by the hardships of life, driven and transfigured to ever brighter self-confidence.

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The individual features of the report are so arranged and the parts of the plot so placed in relation to each other that the miracle is the only goal from which they are derived. This is also the aim of the question Jesus asks Philip. Where shall we buy bread? Jesus, as the evangelist remarks in between, only spoke to his disciple to test him, for he himself knew quite well what he wanted to do. The question here could only be that the Lord wanted to see whether Philip expected a miraculous feeding through his power the moment he thought of the present crowd. And in this sense, as soon as he looked at the matter intelligently, since no sign of need or distress had yet been given, he must have passed the challenge poorly enough. It has also been asked why the question was addressed to Philip in particular, and the answer has been found in the fact that this disciple, as he also appears elsewhere (14:8-9), “held to the outward appearance and was not quick to believe. **). But as soon as he is interested in a different contrast (e.g. in the scene at Jacob’s well in Samaria), the author portrays all the disciples as being sensual and rational to the utmost degree. The fact that this time one individual must stand out is only a trait that arose from the striving for clarity and was also necessary because the roles in the present scene are distributed in a more definite way, in that one more disciple, Andrew, stands out in order to point out the small supply that could still be found for the need (vv. 8-9). Otherwise, the turn of phrase is essentially the same as our author loves to use in order to make the Lord’s majesty stand out against his surroundings. Here it was the perplexity of the sensual mind, against which the image of the wonderful certainty with which the Lord immediately has counsel and help ready in time of need, should stand out all the brighter. But it is not even necessary for us to remember how no need had yet appeared when Philip was called upon to seek help: even without this, we can say without hesitation that this complacent reflection on sensual thrift and narrow-mindedness was foreign to the Lord and that it was only created by a consciousness that loves movement in exaggerated contrasts.

*) Thus Lücke, Comm. II. 73S.

**) de Wette, too, therefore finds this circumstance “fitting” (short. Explanation p. 78.). Bengel assumes somewhat more prosaically: fortasse Philippus rem alimentariam curabat inter discipulos.

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Incidentally, there is something very striking in the relationship between this preference for the depiction of the miracle and the way it is viewed in the following discussion about the bread of heaven. For here the attention is drawn so much to the spiritual living bread that the bread of heaven, with which the fathers were fed in the wilderness, is not only relegated to the background, but is also contrasted with the spiritual bread, which is by no means truly heavenly. With the manna, however, the bread that Jesus gave to the people must also recede as if in a world that has been pushed back and over which the spirit has risen far above in its quest for the true food. This contradiction is the old one that is inherent in the idea of miracles in general and which we have already learned about above.

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3) The desire of the people.

6:14-15.

The miraculous feeding made such a strong impression on the people that they acknowledged the Lord as the promised prophet, i.e. as the Messiah. But Jesus withdrew into solitude because he realised that they wanted to make him a king by force” This is again one of the features in which one admires the “great care” with which “John recorded everything that increased the hatred of the Jewish world and helped to bring about the last great catastrophe” *). That Jesus withdrew after the miracle is also reported by the Synoptics and is in the nature of things, because he did not want a tumultuous, external recognition, but only that of faith: but in the present case it is already difficult to explain what purpose an instantaneous withdrawal should serve in the presupposed excitement of the people, when several thousands had been witnesses of the expected and now proven Messianic glory. At least the Lord should not have come forward again the next day, for now those people had to worry him anew with their intentions.

*) Lücke, Comm. II, 79.

But do they really worry him, do they really prove that the Lord had seen correctly on the previous day when he feared that they wanted to make him king? Surely they would have conceived such a far-reaching plan only in the highest excitement which the sign evoked: but now the Lord says, v. 26, not because they had seen signs, but had become full, only for this reason did they seek him out. However, the mere feeling of a full stomach would not have brought them to confess that Jesus was the Messiah and to adopt that extraordinary plan, and we cannot degrade thousands of Jews to the point of saying that their expectation of the Messiah was based solely on the natural feeling of hunger. Therefore, if they sought the Lord for the sake of satiety, it is also certain that they did not want to make him king the day before in the midst of their faith. Let us not speak of the instability of the masses, it does not go so far as to reveal itself overnight without anything decisive intervening. Jesus also does not indicate anything that might have made the crowd change their minds or even that they had different thoughts today than yesterday. Instead, he simply says that the sensation of being satisfied drives them to him, but he does not mention anything about them wanting to make him king, which would have been worth mentioning and even required a rebuke. In short, both contradict each other: either the Jews did not merely feel the natural well-being of satisfied hunger when they thought of Jesus, or they did not plan in higher desire to make the Lord king. Of course, both sides of the contradiction throw a detrimental light on each other, and the fact that the contradiction exists at all makes them both suspicious; but it is at least possible that one side – we will begin with the first, and consider the second later – could really exist in itself, that is, that the Jews wanted to make the Lord king after the feeding. But it is just this first side of the contradiction that is least lasting, since it appears from the outset only as a pragmatic explanation of the writer, while the second is nevertheless given as the express word of the Lord. The author created this pragmatic hyperbole: it seemed natural to him that this time, when the Lord always withdrew after a miracle, there was the most urgent reason to do so, since people had seen a miracle and in the midst of their enthusiasm could go to the extreme, to declare the Lord as the Messiah and proclaim him. And the evangelist concludes that they had indeed wanted to do so when Jesus withdrew.

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4) Jesus on the Sea of Galilee.

6:16-25.

In the sentence: the disciples “wished to receive him into the ship,” when Jesus approached them across the lake and made himself known to them, the ἤθελον should never have been rendered in such a way that it signified more than the actual desire, namely, at the willingness of the actual action. At least the arbitrariness, which is master of all meanings, should not have been thrown beyond the sacred Scriptures, which once had to be accustomed to such treatment, to the classical writers also. Because everywhere in these writings where an action is connected that requires overcoming or against which one has previously resisted, it is only said that one is now willing to perform the action, but whether it has actually been carried out only becomes apparent from the context and is by no means inherent in the word itself. Therefore, in our account, it is said that they immediately wanted to take Jesus into the boat, but whether they actually did so is not stated in the word θελειν itself *). Since it is said in our report that they landed at the very moment when the disciples, having overcome their fear of the Lord, whom they at first thought to be a ghost, wanted to receive their Master into the ship, this is obviously meant to say that it was now too late and no longer necessary to really receive him into the ship. The interest why the word, which only signifies the decision to do an act, was also given the meaning of the actual deed, is clear enough, since, according to the account of Matthew and Mark, Jesus was really taken into the ship: but the contradiction cannot be removed. All the less can it be removed, since the circumstance of whether Jesus was taken into the ship or not does not stand alone in the accounts, but is conditioned by other circumstances: in the Synoptic account Jesus meets the disciples far from the shore, according to the account of the fourth evangelist at the moment when they are about to land. But the detail with which the evangelist emphasises that Jesus did not need to get into the ship seems to reveal very clearly that he was guided by a specific intention in his account. The miracle and the sublimity above the finite mediations appear greater when the Lord catches up with the disciples on the shore beyond and is now so close to land that he no longer needs the boat.

*) As nevertheless de Wette still maintains, c. Explanation p. 79.

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However, the contradiction goes even further: as the disciples had traveled 25 or 30 stadia, Jesus is said to have come near their boat. 25 or 30 stadia! This would mean that the disciples were still in the midst of their distress and would also be in line with Josephus’ statement that the sea was 40 stadia wide. And yet, the disciples were said to have immediately landed as soon as they recognized the Lord, which supposedly happened upon his first greeting. In any case, it is an irreconcilable contradiction that the same scene is relocated 25-30 stadia away from the departure point and then again placed close to the shore where they had been sailing. The vagueness that leaves five stadia open and the overall calculation that counts from the departure point and thus still so far from the destination, assumes a great distance from the opposite shore, and yet the disciples were said to be so close to the landing place that it was not worth the effort to take Jesus into the boat when he approached them. This contradiction can only be resolved if we admit that in the mind of the author, two things crossed each other: the power of the actual presuppositions of the basic material and the transformed view for which the miracle had become quantitatively greater.

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The report carefully states the circumstance by which Jesus’ miraculous walking on water became an event that not only happened for the disciples’ perception but must also have become known to the people through the simplest deduction *). The people knew (V. 22) that there had been only one boat available for the Lord and his disciples, yet they also knew that the disciples had crossed alone. Now, by chance, the people get means of passage on other ships arriving from nearby Tiberias, and over in Capernaum they find the Lord, where under the given conditions it was actually a superfluous question how he had come here, for how else but by miraculous means had it been possible? Whoever says *): “the miracle is nowhere emphasized and the question of the people about how Jesus crossed the sea is not used to make the miracle valid” or even: “the Johannine account falls short of the synoptic accounts in terms of the miraculous and superstitious”, demands coarseness/heavy-handedness from a writer who has already lost his way so many times by his finger-pointing, before he should ascribe to him the interest in a miracle. After all the individual circumstances that must have caused confusion for the people and led to the miraculous event, is not the miracle empirically certain for the reader? Does not the conclusion, when the reader draws it himself and must follow the people based on the assumptions, gain even greater power and impact? Certainly the author would have weakened everything, if he had gone further and allowed the relation to the miracle to stand out even more starkly or glaringly, if not in substance, of course, but at least weakened the impression.

*) Augustine, tractatus in Joann. ev. XXV, 8: insinuatum est illis tam magnum miraculum. Calvin: Hic Evangelista circumstantias refert, under conjicere posset turba, divinum fuisse Christi trajectum.

*) Like de Wette p. 80.

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The pragmatism aimed at the general recognition and confirmation of the miracle has thus gone as far as it could if it were not to betray the subjective intention too much. But the author has not succeeded completely, if we look at the context intelligently, as is our duty. The whole thing is based on the assumption that only one ship, the ship of the Lord and his disciples, stood on the other shore. But the multitude that followed the Lord on his passage, because they had seen his miracles on the sick on this side in Galilee (vv. 1-2.), surely they also followed him by ship, so that on the following day their boats had to be ready to bring them back to this side? On foot, as Matthew assures (14:13), but of which the fourth evangelist knows nothing, will not all of them, among whom there were many users and owners of boats, have gone round the lake? Or, if the last point is that by chance ships came from Tiberias to bring the people back, could not just as by chance a single one have come from there beforehand, which could give the Lord an opportunity to cross over? All this only proves how the author, in momentary forgetfulness of the starting point, created the contradiction that only one ship stood on the shore beyond, in order to make the crowd guess the miracle that brought the Lord back to this side and to testify to it by their question.

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5) The sensual desire of the people.

6:26.

In answer to the question of the people, when he had returned to this shore, Jesus answered that they did not seek him because they had seen signs, but because they had been filled with the loaves. But why were these people able to seek the Lord again, if it was not because they had experienced his divine power in the miraculous feeding? We do not want to mention that the multitude should have acknowledged the Lord as the “promised” prophet because of the sign; but if they were only concerned about satiety, they could have stayed at home, for that the five thousand Galileans all lived in the most helpless poverty is not mentioned, and according to the report of the Synoptics, the lack which the miracle remedied was only brought about immediately by the fact that the thousands had stayed with the Lord longer than planned. The reproach is therefore so highly exaggerated and presupposes such an unbelievably base motive in the people that it must have caused the apologists enough trouble. They do help themselves, but only in such a way that they make the words into nothing, that they do not let the evangelist say what he says, that they let him say the opposite of what he says so strongly, so definitely. If, for example, Lücke *) thinks that the words: not because you have seen signs, but because you have become full, you seek me, should be understood comparatively, i.e., that this motive is stronger than the other. But he must answer for this to the evangelist, who, after all, lets the Lord say it as clearly as possible, so that that the crowd is not being drawn to him by the signs themselves. Or does Lücke**) say: “the crowd consisted of people of different kinds and directions”: well, then the Lord would have done very wrong if he had attacked all without distinction so harshly, although it was not his custom to extinguish the smouldering wick. Or does the same commentator go so far as to say: “Jesus himself had noticed a certain trust in him and his power in the predominant sensual appetite with which they had come to him, and had considered it possible and necessary to stimulate this germ of spiritual life, which the people themselves were not aware of *), then he has to deal with the Lord himself. For the Lord virtually strikes down this “desire to eat”, he does not take it up again in a formative way, he does not want to have anything to do with it, but says: “Away with your low desires!” and with one stroke he wants to lift the crowd into an absolutely different realm where it can procure imperishable food. Now, if this contention of the joy of natural satiety and of the commandment to seek imperishable food appears in all its purity, it also remains with its impossibility, and it is again only the author who formed it, in order to be able to pass from the rejected and limited lust of the multitude directed at the belly to the following conversation of the true food of the spirit.

*) Comm. II, 90. Likewise Calvin: neque tamen negari potest, quin miraculum respexerint; imo prius narravit Evangelista, siguis fuisse commotos sequendum Christum. Sed quia miraculis abutebantur in alienum finem, merito illis expro brat, quod majorem ventris quam signorum respectum habeant

**) Ibid. p. 91.

*) Lücke speaks quite differently, ibid. p. 89. Here he says, “the crowd was only aware of their amazement at the signs they saw. As if the Lord did not miss this astonishment! The astonishment as such has not only to do with the desire to see.

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6) The imperishable food.

6:27-29.

The Jews understand the word of the Lord about the imperishable food, which they are to receive, to the extent that they understand that it is to be obtained from the works of God, i.e. from works that are in accordance with the divine will. They are therefore much more understanding than the disciples, who earlier (4:33) had understood the word of their Master about His food in such a sensual way. But how is this consistent with the assumption that for the masses to whom the conversation was addressed, the Lord was only valuable for their stomach? Apparently so little that Lücke feels compelled to assume that it was “the more educated and receptive” who understood the Lord so bravely, that the crowd as such was “probably not able to understand Jesus’ figurative speech in the same way” *). So the evangelist always has to please his embarrassed apologists by saying, or rather meaning, the opposite of what he actually says. But everything is so coherent according to the structure of the conversation, everything follows one after the other, that it is always the same people, the same mass to whom the Lord addresses his speech, and who now respond more or less appropriately depending on whether the evangelist wants to continue the conversation without causing offense or introducing new contrasts. Now he lets the conversation flow without interruption because he is about to move on to a new contrast, which will occupy him for a longer period of time.

*) Comm. II, 93.

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We have already noted that the figurative words of the Lord are too meager and limited in their interpretation when they are given the position that they originate from a real relationship with a sensory substrate and are spoken with a contemptuous glance at sensory relationships that are legitimate or indifferent to the spirit. The figurative view and way of speaking are essential to the spirit because its peculiar world has its reflection in the natural world and is reflected in a concrete way. But when the spirit uses this reflection for its representation, it is not so noble as to have nothing more important to do than to ridicule the reflection in its insignificance and contemptibility. Instead, it is confident that its reflection will only be taken as a reflection. Or viewed aesthetically: The point of the image is destroyed, corrupted, and the striking meaning is pushed down into flatness, if the natural image is rejected with great seriousness as inappropriate for the spirit. In the language of our evangelist, however, we have seen sufficiently how he does not allow any content to work through its inner, original power, but only believes to have fully developed it when he has separated it from its opposite. The Lord’s figurative words gave him ample opportunity for this movement in opposites, which he also used diligently, but only with the success that he weakened the power of those sayings as much as possible.

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Just as the Lord did not have to fearfully reject the sensual image in figurative language in order to seek the true meaning, so he could also use a figurative expression without an outwardly corresponding situation giving cause for it. He did not need to have satisfied the physical hunger of the people beforehand in order to be able to speak to them of the imperishable food of the spirit. By such an outward occasion, which would then always have to be exposed in its vanity, while the sensual in the image is transcended in itself and by itself, the saying would only have been mechanically drawn out and the contemptuous attitude towards the sensual image would have been just as tiring as it was stilted. On the contrary, a pictorial expression is only striking in that it assumes the form of a familiar, generally known and always valid sensual relation. The independence of the image in the present case is already proven by the unnatural manner of the transition, which, however, was only possible and unavoidable even on the presupposed occasion. If it was not possible for the people to seek the Lord after the miraculous feeding merely for the sake of a full belly, then the word of the imperishable food of the spirit could not be attached to such an inhuman and unnatural motive.

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7) The Bread of Life.

6:30-40.

The misunderstandings into which the author lets the Lord’s listeners fall, otherwise and also now, are only pragmatic supports by which the speech, which would otherwise collapse due to its misguided structure, is needfully helped up again. For the speech would have to collapse in any case, because it is untruthfully motivated and consists of sayings that are supposed to form a whole but never can. The clamps that are to force the mechanical whole together must therefore be unspiritual, or, comparing the whole to an animate organism, be taken from death. The death and extreme loss of the spirit, the death to which the spirit can never again descend, now supplies the spiritless bond, and impossible misunderstandings must now serve to drive the halting speech on. Thus, as the fourth evangelist incessantly presupposes, figurative expressions cannot be misunderstood to the point of senselessness — where they are at home and the daily bread. The Hebrew – just look at the prophetic books – delights in images and still understands them even when they have been stretched to the smallest play or brought from the remotest distance. Jesus was only able to speak so often in images on a ground that brought forth an innumerable multitude of them, and in addition his figurative speeches are so simple, so drawn together out of immensity or playful pettiness into a definite and speaking form, that they make their meaning known directly in them. Yes, if the Lord had spoken among the dullest people, among a people who did not know the “parallelism of heaven and earth”, the parallelism of a spiritual and a natural world, which is otherwise praised in the Hebrew view, then misunderstandings of this kind would have been possible. But only possible – not necessarily, for the spirit would first have to have lost all “ultimate” perception of itself before it should be insensitive to the flash of those images. The apologetic talk of the “carnal sense” of the Jews *) is a play on an indefinite word, a support of indolence which is not serious about the matter, is apparently edifying, but in fact a mindless delight in unnatural contrasts. The parallelism of heaven and earth, body and soul, nature and spirit had not yet collapsed into the dead uniformity of the “flesh” for the Jews at the time of Jesus – how else would the time have been fulfilled? – but vibrated in the most living relationship, both sides were connected by thousands of trembling rays and sought their living unity. But later, when the seeking and fleeing, when the dispute between the two sides had been so decided for the greater part of the people that they had rejected the unity of heaven and earth that appeared in the Lord and had renounced it, the unhappy people had separated themselves from the goal of their historical development and appeared to the congregation as having fallen prey to this world and its meaning. Then, at last, evangelical apologetics came to ascribe to the people in every case, even in those cases where it was impossible, the misunderstanding of the simplest expressions of the Lord.

*) Guerike (Beiträge zur historisch-kritischen Einleitung ins N. T. 1828 p. 65) even says: “the inner nature of the speakers, as we have to imagine it elsewhere and as far as we can, also lets us see that their answers and comparisons had to turn out just like that and not differently. Just to mention one thing – if the opponents had understood nothing at all of the Lord’s utterances, they would not have brought him to the cross.

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The crowd, which had shown an uncommon willingness to engage with his words in our Gospel, the Lord had revealed what the work of God was that they should do: it was to have faith in the messenger of God. Suddenly, like a treacherous wind changing direction from just moments before, the crowd asks Jesus: so, what sign do you perform so that we may believe? And from this starting point that the crowd takes, the Lord is led to the declaration that he is the bread of life. It is a malice that even borders on ridicule when the Jews take up the same word “work” that the conversation had revolved around until then, for the purpose of turning it against the Lord. But where does the crowd suddenly get this malicious disposition, when just moments before it seemed so receptive to the instruction about the imperishable food? The wind may change direction suddenly, but the crowd, though rightly accused of being fickle, cannot change its disposition so quickly without cause. Yet, there is no cause here, as the demand for faith in the messenger of God cannot be considered a cause, since the crowd was ready to acknowledge the promised one in the Lord with fervent enthusiasm the day before.

It was the sign of the feeding that had brought the crowd to this willingness to believe. But that they should suddenly ask for a sign to convince them of the necessity of faith, seemed so impossible even to apologists who still have a feeling for difficulties, that they must suppose that it was “probably not those who had experienced the miracle of the feeding the day before” *) who had made this demand for a new sign. But what a torment it is to be an apologist when at the same time the nature of the matter and the author of the scripture must be given their due! For even if we are relieved of the difficulty in the matter by that assumption, we must pity the writer that he is again forced to say the opposite of what he meant and expressed so clearly. So futile, then, in the case of his faithful interpreter, are all the arrangements which he has laboriously enough made, so much wasted effort is it that he translates again to this shore the multitude which was fed over there, that he lets the Lord address them as those who were fed by him yesterday – that he must now, after all, all at once let quite different people speak to the Lord. No! when we interpret, we must not disregard the writer’s words. No, we must not let the transfer of the audience surrounding the Lord happen in vain, so that we, even if it is more convenient, summon a new audience of the Lord from the near shore of the lake. No, and a thousand times no! even if the matter seems petty – but in the matter it is at the same time the word of an evangelist and – in the apologetic sense – an absolute truth. No! it is the same people who yesterday saw the sign of the feeding, who again sought out the Lord because of their “lust for food” and now demand a new sign. At least, what must first lie at the heart of the interpreter is the writer’s word, and we must now say: then the matter falls, then people who saw such a powerful sign yesterday that inspired them to fervent belief cannot start again today and demand a new sign—thus both, the writer and the matter, have received their true right. For we must not deny the matter its right, even if its right and that of the writer cannot be reconciled. But the measure of justice we owe to the writer has been fulfilled when we see how he came to his particular view. The evangelist cannot move forward except in contrasts, but the contrast against yesterday’s feeding was already exhausted when the Lord pointed the people to the imperishable food; now Jesus should designate himself as the true bread from heaven, so a new contrast was needed, and the people provided it by demanding a sign that corresponded to another bread from heaven. Moses had given the fathers manna as bread from heaven: now the Messiah should show what similar or greater thing he could give!

*) Lücke Comm. II, 94.

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It seems so certain and appropriate to his self-awareness that the Lord called himself and his person dedicated to redemption the bread of life and the food of faith that it is not open to doubt. But that he did it in contrast to the manna food of the Father is so impossible that all apologetic efforts to give even a pleasing appearance to the opposite must fail *). It is not comparative consciousness in general that contradicts the infinite self-consciousness of the Lord – he compares himself with Jonah, with Solomon – but that form of comparative self-awareness that withdraws and restricts itself in contrast to the image from itself and to its power. It cannot be reconciled with the infinite self-sufficiency of the Lord. When he says: here is more than Jonah, more than Solomon! he is solely concerned with the relationship between the Ninevites and the Queen of the South, who turned to those men with faith and admiration, and the people who turned away from him, unbelieving and demanding signs that he could not grant. But measuring his life force against the manna that Moses gave to the fathers and repeatedly applying this measure (v. 49, 58), he could not and should not have done so, even if the crowd had given him the opportunity through their ignorance. Instead of spinning it out endlessly, he would have cut off or shut down this opportunity. On the one hand, if the Lord had really made the comparison between the manna bread and the food that he is for faithful enjoyment, it would be without proportion, which is never the case with his actual comparisons. But it is also unjust, because Moses gave the fathers not only manna but also the word of Jehovah.

*) In passing, we can call attention to another contradiction, which, however, is only due to the context in which the evangelist has formed it.The signs, to which the feeding of the five thousand also belongs, are to be subordinated to the need and food of the spirit, yet just before (v.26) the Lord had accused the Jews of seeking him for the signs. But there is another “and yet!” for the latter point: the same faith for the sake of signs, which the Lord demands here, he had previously denounced as very reprehensible in the case of the royal official from Capernaum.

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One could argue that the designation of the person of the Lord as the bread of life still contains a reference to a sensory foundation, which is thus reduced to being finite and transient. That is indeed the case with every metaphor. In the comparison which presents the natural as the image of the spiritual, the starting point, namely the sensuous and immediate, is reduced to the reflection of the higher, but – learn it only from the sayings of Jesus in the Synoptics – at the same time ennobled, illuminated by the light of the spirit and acknowledged in its justification, which it has as the reflection of the spirit. The Spirit, who is looked upon in his natural image, loses nothing in this mirror, but rather receives a basis which places it in the midst of ordinary, immediate life and enlarges the scope of its power. This was mostly alien to the fourth evangelist, who believed that he had only made the spiritual certain when he had torn apart or dissolved its natural image by laborious denials that it was not the true one. When the Lord called Himself the Bread of Life, He presented Himself and His vitalising power in a natural image, and in presenting Himself in it, He did not allow it to exist for Himself as the true thing, but at the same time He honoured it as His image, for He now considered it so worthy that it reflected Him and His power to the believing view. And what is this thus ennobled image but daily bread? Was it necessary for the creation of that figurative expression of quarrelling over the gift of manna? Did the Jews first have to give rise to it by boasting about the food of the fathers?

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If all the internal evidence cannot convince you that the evangelist created the coherent discourses of the Lord, that his discourses are a kind of system in which reminiscences from all the places of his Scriptures themselves naturally come together, you may be convinced by the external evidence which lies in the passage vv. 36-40. We call it external because the evidence can be grasped with the hands and seen with the bodily eyes. The word of the bread of life, which is given to the world, is understood by the Jews in a foolish way, so that they think Jesus is talking about bread, which satisfies the hunger of the flesh. Jesus says that he is the bread of life, but, he adds, “I told you so, that you should see me and not believe. This phrase is so brief and suggestive that it presupposes the most vivid recollection and a firm memory in the people, which still retains the features of a speech heard earlier. “Ye have seen me, and believe not”: this is only to be understood when one remembers how, above Ch. 5, the Lord pointed out to his unbelieving opponents the whole extent of his works, which testify to him and his divine mission. The reflections which the Lord adds to his reference to the earlier discourse lead us to the same discourse, especially the antithesis, that he does nothing of himself, but according to the will of the Father animates the faithful and finally raises them from the dead. But – this is the external proof to which we wanted to draw attention – was the same crowd to which the Lord speaks here also present during the earlier discourse? I.e. was the crowd that hears the Lord here in Capernaum also his audience at that time in Jerusalem, where the Lord held his speech after the healing of the sick man at the pool of Bethesda? Who would seriously say that the same crowd which the Lord had miraculously satiated yesterday, and which brought Him today to this discourse on the Bread of Life, had long ago accused Him of violating the Sabbath? Chance, as they are wont to say, may play marvellously: but think what an effort of chance would be required to this end, if now as then the same multitude should surround the Lord, that He might need but briefly to remind Him of that former discourse. The insight into the method by which our author works frees us from the postulate of so highly miraculous a coincidence. Since the evangelist, because everything can be brought into connection, also really puts much into connection and always works towards a fairly complete system, which embraces everything related, it was inevitable with this arrangement of the larger speeches that they did not come into contact and that some things were repeated more than once. Usually this happens without the evangelist reflecting on it, but here the speech to which he returned was too close, especially the testimony of the works was too prominent, for him not to have had to take it expressly into account. But since the Lord was speaking, he had to refer to the earlier word, to remind the listeners of what they had heard before, and the evangelist did not immediately think of the fact that this earlier speech had been delivered in a different setting before a different audience *).

*De Wette p. 82 considers it “more probable that the evangelist omitted the earlier saying to which Jesus refers”. But this is a probability which is inaccessible even to your loftiest, most outrageous faith. John’s memory must have so meticulously recorded all the turns of the Lord’s speech that even a parenthetical phrase (“as I told you”) could not have escaped his notice – and yet he is said to have been so careless with the main point. The evangelist, however, considered his work to be so much of a whole that, if he included a reference to earlier things in a parenthesis, he would have known and indicated quite well what those earlier things were. Or – to put it more intelligibly – he could only make such a reference if he himself had already written down what he was pointing to. In this case, however, he saw it already written before him, since the thoughts and words of the section vv. 37-40 are the same as those in the speech Ch. 5.

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8) The procession of the Father.

6:41-15.

If the speeches which the fourth evangelist gives us were not to lose their relation to the presupposed hearers altogether, and either not to falter or not to become too much of a homily or pure theory, the hearers had often to intervene, but they could only make their presence known in an outward way, since the connection of these speeches is neither an original one nor continued to the perfection of the art. Mostly it is misunderstandings that make the flow of the speech more lively, sometimes the listeners murmur among themselves and the Lord takes occasion from this to continue. How little, however, a muffled murmur of the crowd can further the development of a speech is self-evident, since it is completely devoid of content and is only a kind of tautology which takes up what has gone before and looks at it only with a dull sense.

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This time the Jews murmur that the Lord calls Himself the Bread that came down from heaven, and then bring up their murmurings in such a way that they say: is not Jesus the Son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? The Lord had to experience many controversies in his speaking and doing, but – apart from the childish misunderstandings – he could not have experienced so many in succession as are only mentioned here in this conversation, when he addressed the people with his words. Thus it is at least more probable that the annoyance at Jesus’ well-known lowly ways belonged to another occasion and was used by the author, who remembered it here, as a welcome motive for the continuation of the speech. But what is in itself more probable is made certain by the position of this motive in the context.

Whether the Synoptics, who also report an offence that was taken at the generally known origin of the Lord, know more precisely where this offence originate, is not our concern here. But when the Lord responds to those who took offense at his lineage, according to their reports (Matthew 13:57, Mark 6:4, Luke 4:24), “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country,” it appears perfectly fitting, and human wit could hardly invent a better response. After the fourth Gospel, the Lord replies that no one can come to him unless the Father draws him. This, however, could no less appropriately serve as an answer to a thousand other objections; indeed, it is not even really an answer, but really only a continuation of the speech, which was to be set in motion by an external impulse. Earlier, in v. 37, the Lord had said that all that the Father gives Him comes to Him; in vv. 39, 40. He had said that He also really cares for the blessedness of those whom the Father gives Him; and only in order that He might say the same in the form of an antithesis (No one can come to Me unless the Father draws him), only in order that this turn of events might be brought about, must the Jews again intervene. An inner relationship that connects the interjection and the answer cannot, of course, be discovered in this kind of pragmatism. The commentators admit that the continuation of the speech does not exactly take into account the objection of the Jews, and they therefore even praise the doctrinal wisdom which does not reach to the root of the problem, but “seeks to meet the misunderstanding in an indirect way” *). Now, this doctrinal wisdom, which would have been lacking in the Lord according to the testimony of the Synoptics, who always tackle the problem directly, or whose fame was unjustly withheld from him by the first Gospels, is easy to come by. Because everything is connected “indirectly,” and the greatest teaching wisdom would be the one that only our Gospel knows, which moves furthest away from the problem and, seeking the most remote relationships, does not come into direct contact with the objections. Let us not seek the “wisdom” of the Lord in this, which is only a cumbersome combination of the evangelist and, on the contrary, would present the most unfavorable picture of the Lord’s teaching wisdom as soon as it is taken historically.

*) De Wette p. 83.

*) Lücke Comm. II, 106.

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In the saying about the Father leading to the Son (v. 44) **), it is easy to find the original core that the Synoptic saying Matt. 11:27 has preserved for us in its healthy strength and freshness. Jesus may have returned to the content of this saying more than once and explained it in terms of the mutual relationship of Father and Son, that the relationship of others to the Father and Son could not be arbitrarily mediated by themselves, but only by the Father and the Son. But that he spoke almost exclusively of this relationship, preached only on the subject of this saying, and elaborated it into a kind of system, is impossible. In the Synoptics, the Lord proclaims Himself as the centre of the Kingdom of Heaven in the victorious and world-conquering way that He lifts all conditions of spiritual life off their hinges and places them on the ground of the Kingdom of Heaven with the sinners, the hungry and the weary. In this way, encompassing, penetrating and enlivening all reality, all conditions of life and the periphery of all humanity, the Lord alone could bring it about that he indissolubly chained the periphery of humanity to his person and fused it with his life force. In the fourth Gospel, the omission of this kind of work is not just an innocent deficiency, as apologists would call it, but rather it gives the appearance of weakness and lack of stability to the central figure himself. We constantly see the center point, or at least we are supposed to see it – but what is it, if not all the spiritual powers for which it is the focal point appear, if it does not prove itself as such in the fullness of the radii and real relationships? It is an atom. No one who has an eye for it would call these the living conditions on which the Lord acted and which he drew into the circle of his personality with original force, if all we hear about is murmuring Jews and childish misunderstandings. The points that surround the Lord in this way are also nothing more than atoms that are related to each other and to the isolated person of the Lord only through a spiritless emptiness. On the other hand, when the Lord, as he does according to the synoptic reports, has worked through the scope of the spiritual struggle, brought it to himself, and now points to himself and presents his person as the center of life, how different it is! He not only says that he is the only mediator, he does not just preach about it, no! He is now what he is and appears as the true mediator: countless threads now go back and forth between him and the entire reality, and just as all the pulses of the world beat towards him, he himself stands in the fullness of the light that emanates from him over the spiritual world. In the midst of work that is so effective, Jesus could and had to speak of himself and say: “Everything has been entrusted to me”.

**) V. 65 the speech comes back to this saying.

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This contact of the fourth gospel with a synoptic saying can therefore certainly serve as proof that his speeches are not entirely without historical foundation, but now one must not immediately rush with apologetic recklessness beyond all bounds of the permissible and conclude the historical character of the whole thing wholesale. Only one ray of light is taken from the reality which the synoptic gospels portray to us, caught by the fourth evangelist and applied over and over again, but since the colourful painting is missing, on which that ray of light only really receives illuminating power, it loses its full meaning *). Light without the matter it illuminates, spirit without corporeality, brightness without opacity, does not enlighten and inspire, and has as little power as the little dot without the ground stroke which makes it a sound. Christ’s preaching of his person lacks nothing more and nothing less in the fourth gospel than the world of sinners, the weary, the hungry and the thirsty; it is the seed that falls into emptiness and finds no field according to whose manifold nature it bears fruit. So let the apologist stop using Matthew’s verse as evidence for the credibility of the speeches in the fourth Gospel—unless they also claim that someone who repeats a single prominent part of a melody a thousand times over or copies a painting by repeatedly drawing a single glimpse of light on a blank canvas a thousand times over or who copies an insightful sentence by continuously repeating only its concluding phrase or extending it into a line has truly reproduced a rich musical piece, a complete painting, or a meaningful sentence.

*) It is precisely at such points, where the synoptic Gospels touch the fourth, that the dissonance sounds most cuttingly.

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9) The mediation of the Son.

6:46.

The thought of the Father’s course, this saying, which through the infinity of its content appears at first sight to be an independent magnitude, must serve the author to bring the speech back to the bread of life and to the comparison of the same with the man’s bread. But how? In the Synoptics, the Lord never shies away from presenting a saying in its own right and with the stamp of infinite validity, even if the same saying is limited by another purpose. This kind of speech exerts that magic which never lets the soul come to the dormant rest which now considers the matter done, but excites it and, as the saying constantly resounds in it, calls upon it to occupy itself with it. As an infinite magnitude, the saying can capture and occupy the soul to its innermost depths, but when one determination is only externally limited by another and the limitation only appears as a combination of the understanding and not as the infinity of the higher unity, then such a network of sayings can only occupy the understanding that is satisfied when it has heard of that limitation. The Lord never spoke to the mere understanding; the saying that complemented another also came at his time and under his living circumstance, and it also came with infinite validity, not only for the sake of a reasonable limitation, and the struggle that now fought infinite against infinite happened not only in the understanding but primarily in life and soul, and before it found its solution in the rational idea, it had to work on life and soul over the course of many centuries. Let us now see whether the saying of the father’s course is not prematurely limited, if the thought is immediately rejected as if someone besides the son had seen the father. The idea of the Father’s inner revelation is not explained and supplemented by this, but dissolved into nothing. The Lord was too sure of His mediatorship to have so jealously bound and tamed this thought; for in the Synoptic account He says without envy and without a sensible clause: blessed are you Simon, for this is what My Father in heaven has revealed to you. But here, how disruptive and hasty is this jealous “not that anyone has seen the Father except the Son” in pushing aside the previous idea. Moreover, this limitation is only a reminiscence from the conversation with Nicodemus and from the Baptist’s speech to his jealous disciples, a reminiscence of a saying that we ourselves have already recognized as fabricated. The reflective intellect must receive this limitation as the Lord’s property to his honor.

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10) The food and drink of the church.

6:51-58.

The continued talk about the bread of life in vv. 47-58 seems at first to be a mere continuation or rather repetition of the previous comparison between the manna and the person of the Lord. But v. 51 takes a turn with the words: “and the bread that I give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world,” with which it changes to a new view. When Jesus hitherto called himself the Bread of Life, it was evidently figuratively speaking, and the actual object of appropriation, which was compared with the bread, was the spiritual content of his personality: this, as it is in its self-awareness, also holds the consciousness of unity with the Father, the will to unity with the divine will, and redemption in its actions. This spiritual infinity should be appropriated by individuals so that they may gain their eternal spiritual life substance. With the Jews, who, at the new turn of speech in v. 52, disputed among themselves how the Lord could possibly give them his flesh to eat, later commentators have also asked whether this eating, this enjoyment, is to be understood as figuratively as in the preceding context. If the Lord were to speak only of the eating of his flesh, we could really remain with the figurative conception, since the flesh (σαρξ) denotes the earthly, human appearance of the Saviour in general. This totality of humanity is the flesh, for example, when it is said that the Word became flesh. The progress which the speech would now make would then consist in the declaration that not only the abstraction of the spiritual content from the personality of the Lord, not only the general thought of unity with the Father and with the divine will, not only the abstraction of the atonement would be the content of the enjoyment, but the atonement as it is real and living as this personality of the Lord. In this case the speech would still be figurative, because the sensual determination of eating would be connected with a spiritual one; for even if flesh (σαρξ) is the human, earthly appearance, yet by it is to be understood the totality and generality of the human appearance together with its essential content. This essential totality of personality is inaccessible to the senses, even to the most spiritual sense, the eye, and cannot be grasped in faith in any other way than by means of spiritual perception. The expression “flesh” is not used here in this general sense, but is returned to the meaning of the body in a more limited sense, when it is combined with the meaning of blood in order to complete it, so that the totality of the bodily appearance may be designated as the object of enjoyment. This provision, that one must drink the blood of the Lord as one must eat his flesh if one wants to have eternal life, decisively cuts off the next path that could lead to the figurative conception. The next path, namely the one that the letter could show. The further difficulties as to how the consumption of the flesh and blood can create eternal life, i.e. have a spiritual effect, how the flesh, which is given for the life of the world, and the blood, which is poured out for the atonement, can be eaten and drunk, these difficulties decide nothing for the apologist, since they are not to be overcome by the artifice of interpretation, but by faith. And for faith, to which these words are actually spoken, the enjoyment of the body and blood of the Lord is not only an image of union with the Redeemer, but this itself at the highest point of its promise and enjoyment.

255

We hardly need to say that the Lord is speaking of the enjoyment of his body and blood, which the congregation celebrates in the Lord’s Supper. But we must not express it in this way, that the Lord speaks of this enjoyment *), but the Evangelist lets him speak in this way: He was once tempted by the allusion in the word “feeding” to lead the Lord from the miraculous feeding of the people to the saying that he is the bread of life, and now he exhausts this allusion completely by having him speak in the same context of the enjoyment of his body and blood, i.e. of an enjoyment which he only offered to his disciples at the last supper which he held with them. Shall we remind you how impossible it is that the Lord addressed this discourse to a crowd for whom the miracle of the feeding and the miracle-worker had value only for the sake of bodily satiation, who misunderstood the simplest figurative expressions to a crass degree, to a crowd which could therefore also see in this discourse only the invitation to anthropophagy? Or to a crowd that had degenerated to the point of dullness and stupidity was the Lord supposed to have spoken of his sacrificial death without making the slightest attempt to prepare, motivate or even emphasize this revelation in its importance? No! As if it were self-evident, even according to the view of this crowd, that he would go into sacrificial death, that the Messiah must suffer death for the world, so speaks the Lord, i.e. he speaks as a later teacher could homiletically present the known views to the believing congregation or, once the later sphere of life of the congregation and the real circumstances in which the Lord had worked and taught had grown into one, let the Lord speak. The only consequence that remained for the writer, and which ours does not lack, even in an inappropriate place, was that he either did not understand the Lord’s sayings or let them be misunderstood to the utmost.

*) As Bendel says: Jesus verba sua scienter ita formavit, ut statim et semper illa quidem de spirituali fruitione sui agorent proprie; sed posthae eadem consequenter etiam in augustissimum S. Coenae mysterium, eum id institutum foret, convenirent. Jesus, says Bengel, here prophesied of the Lord’s Supper. Tota haec de earne et sanguine J. Ch. oratio passionem spectat et eum ea S. Coenam.

256

If the apologist wanted to find the view of the Lord’s Supper here only if there were also an allusion to the sacramental substratum of bread and wine, he would be asking for an impossibility that even our author could not overcome.

We will now address the difficulty we encountered earlier, namely, that the Lord opposed himself to the manna of the fathers as the bread of life in a manner that does not correspond to the character of the one of whom it is written: ουκ επρσει ουδε κραυγασει. Now that this comparison with the manna also introduces and concludes the discourse that refers to the Lord’s Supper (verse 49, 58) and the impossibility that it belongs to the Lord is beyond doubt, its origin is also revealed to us. The community that had received its heavenly food in the Lord’s Supper and its daily bread on its journey through the desert of the world was the only one in which the manna of the fathers could present itself as an image of the food of the Lord’s Supper, but as an image that touched the nature of the archetype internally, since it was also a heavenly gift, while at the same time indicating the nature of the archetype in an imperfect manner, since it was only finite food. In the image, these two aspects of unity and difference are always combined, but our evangelist, who can only think of truth in contrast, this harsh character had to completely remove the aspect of internal connection between image and archetype and leave it only to the Jews as a false boast.

257

11) The apostasy of many disciples.

6:60, 66.

If one asks what is gained by denying the Lord this speech, by proving that it does not belong to him, and whether the loss does not at least outweigh the gain, the answer is obvious. Nothing is lost: what is the Lord’s genuine good remains and remains all the more certain now that it has been taken out of this disturbing environment, which can only harm him. But how great is the gain when the Lord’s doctrinal wisdom is again set in its true light, when we no longer have to torment him with incomprehensible difficulties or difficulties caused by himself, and especially when we no longer have to assume that he was always able to speak so harshly and with such difficulty that the listeners had to turn their backs on him. If the Lord did not give those speeches, then their consequence, namely that many of his disciples turned away from him, also falls away. But indeed they should have turned away, for such a teacher could not help them and could not enlighten them. According to the synoptic reports, those who were otherwise willing also turned their backs on the Lord, but according to sayings that were clear, transparent and only too comprehensible to the hearers, and which only too clearly expected of them an inwardness and a freedom from everything finite, which they really understood, but which they did not want to understand. There the collision is simple and a real, efficient one, but all collision falls away when the listeners are offered something that they could in no way even understand. This time the evangelist gives those people far too much credit when he lets them call the Lord’s speech hard. One calls a contradiction hard, the two aspects of which one understands well and just cannot bring together. But these people have not yet understood the parts of the discourse and its individual provisions, that they know what is flesh and what is eating; for flesh and blood and eating and drinking are here said with reference to the sacrament, of which they could know nothing. Actually they should have said: we do not understand anything of this speech – but it is good that they did not need to say anything, since they have not heard anything of the speech *).

*) Gfrörer (das Heiligth. und die Wahrh. p. 72.) gives us a clear example of the sentimentality of the enlightened view, which has especially befriended the fourth Gospel. “The statement, he says, that the Lord was forsaken by many of his disciples, is a melancholy confession, which certainly cost our evangelist trouble and caused pain, for it runs counter to his favourite idea of the logos nature of Christ.” But it is precisely through this opposition, which is formed by the fickleness and the closedness of the mind to the person of the Lord, that the latter is exalted. Wisdom appears to the evangelist the more profound the more it is offensive; the certainty of the Lord appears to him greater when it maintains itself in the midst of the apostasy of the followers. It is a manufactured contrast; the painfulness that the evangelist put into the situation is infinitely cancelled out for him by the joy of the sublimity in which the image of the Lord now stands.

259

12) The increase of the offence.

6:61-63.

After the speech and the offence caused by it have fallen away, it would seem that the explanation of the following words of the Lord, which refer to that offence, would have to be made more difficult. But the words cannot become more difficult than they already are in this context; rather, there is every prospect of grasping them correctly if they are isolated. Yes, the question in v. 62, “if ye then see the Son of man ascending where he was before,” is really inexplicable in this context, and the meaning which the evangelist connected with it must have remained for him in the most indefinite sense. It refers to the distress the hearers feel at partaking of the Lord’s flesh and blood: “That, but only so much, is clear at first, but what the relationship is, can only be indicated with some difficulty. The matter is not as simple as those exegetes think who take v. 62 as a facilitating explanation and as a removal of the offence *). The meaning of the passage would therefore be as follows: You are offended by what I have said about the enjoyment of my flesh and blood? How now? When you see the Son of Man rise again, will you not then see that my word must be understood spiritually, and that this offence will be removed? To facilitate the comprehension of mysteries, however, is by no means the author’s endeavour. We say: “the author,” for we cannot attribute this transition to the Lord. Just look at this “How then?” this “When you shall see the Son of Man ascending? How then?” and listen carefully to how secretly the Lord would have offered a solution which He would have possessed completely for Himself, but which He would have only half given to the hearers with a cunning glance at them. It requires but a glance at the preceding discourse to see how, on the contrary, the author is not at all afraid to heap offence upon offence. The Jews hardly took offence at the fact that the Lord calls Himself the Bread of Life, when the speech immediately increases and now the consumption of the flesh and blood of Christ is demanded. So from this the progress is made to a harder offence: “Does this offend you? (When you therefore see the Son of Man rise again, must not your offence increase?

*) Thus Lücke Comm. II, 141.

260

If this transition is taken seriously, but the greater vexation is to consist only **) in the fact that the Lord will really go to death, then the speech is deprived of its escalation, for the death of the Lord was already more expressly emphasized before than now, when the enjoyment of the flesh, which he will give up for the life of the world (V. 51.), was demanded. Or should the offence increase by the Lord’s demanding the eating of His flesh and blood, even after He has ascended again, the same offence already lies in the fact that His flesh, which has been given up to death, is to be eaten.

**) As de Wette p. 88 explains.

261

And yet the evangelist must have had something in mind when he made this transition, and before we can reproach him for what otherwise only happens to profane poets and even to Homer from time to time, we must have tried all possibilities. The following statement of the Lord: “The spirit gives life, the flesh is of no use. My words are spirit and life” (v. 63), or actually not this saying, but his passage here, proves that the evangelist had already reflected on the enjoyment of the Lord’s Supper. Therefore he brings these sayings here, in order to remind his readers at the same time that the flesh and blood of the Lord, which is offered for consumption in the Lord’s Supper, is not sensual, and that the demand for this consumption is to be grasped spiritually. Anyone who would still want to draw further conclusions from here regarding the theory of the evangelist would go too far and push the reflection of the same beyond its standpoint. Enough! He seems to have solved the difficulty contained in the idea of that enjoyment by shifting it altogether to the realm of the spirit, without finding a more specific answer to the question of how. Thus, we now indeed come back to the explanation that the ascension of the Lord should establish the relocation of this enjoyment to the spiritual sphere, and therefore actually eliminate the offense. But we cannot hold onto this explanation alone, because the form of the transition to a greater offense is too clearly defined, and the evangelist refrains from his tendency to pile offense upon offense, even in a context where he actually wanted to facilitate understanding. Thus, the complete contradiction between form and content has arisen.

262

The sayings which the Evangelist uses in v. 63 to explain the true enjoyment of the Lord’s flesh, both appeared so independent that they could not have been spoken in succession, as on this occasion – if the preceding discourse still existed as historical – so little on any other occasion. The first: “the spirit makes alive, the flesh is of no use” is most easily explained when it is brought about by a collision with some legal commandment. The other, “my words are spirit and life,” which is infinitely weakened if, as here, it means nothing else than “my words must be understood spiritually,” will have originated in a similar context and in the same sense in which the Lord called the weary and burden-bearing to himself and promised rest and refreshment to their souls.

13) Peter’s confession and Judas’ betrayal.

6:64-71.

The discourse of the Saviour’s partaking of the flesh and blood was not actually delivered, the Jews could not grumble at it: so neither could many of the disciples take offence at their Master’s discourse, and he did not need to reveal his knowledge of their unbelief to them (v. 64.). It is not to be remotely asserted that those who had already drawn near to the Lord would not have turned away from Him again, if their willingness did not reach to the fulfilment of the Most High: but here, on this occasion, we say, no disciples could fall away from the Lord, because this occasion never happened. But the evangelist does not want to bring the matter to this catastrophe in vain; he takes it even further, to the Lord’s prophecy of an even deeper, more terrible catastrophe, and to calm the scene he adds the reconciling contrast with Peter’s enthusiastic confession.

263

The escalation reveals all too clearly its origin in the aesthetic contemplation according to which the author arranges the story and develops its various clusters. “There are some among you who do not believe” says the Lord v. 64. Earlier, or actually immediately in the account of Jesus’ first public appearance among the people, the evangelist had remarked that the Lord had seen through the inner man: now, in a later collision, it must be said that “from the beginning” the Lord had known which were the unbelievers among his disciples, so that he could never have been surprised by the apostasy of the weak; indeed, he had foreseen even the most despicable apostasy, the betrayal of Judas. It is not enough that the evangelist gives this only as his pragmatic remark, the Lord must finally say it himself (v. 70), that one of the disciples is a devil.

The pain of this scene of mourning is alleviated by Peter’s confession, who, on behalf of the others, vows constancy of faith and discipleship; for, he says in v. 68, “You have words of eternal life.” The synoptic account of Peter’s confession does not contain a counterpart, but a rival who fights with him for the field. The fact that Peter twice made the same confession is contradicted by the fact that the Synoptics also place his confession close to the feeding of the people (Matt. 15,16 Mark 8 Luke 9). Nor does this prove the double issue of fact, that in the account of the fourth Gospel he so enthusiastically praises the very words of life which the Lord had; for this praise was very near to him who let him speak, when the Lord had so just called his words life. It is one and the same confession which we hear here and there. But since it is linked in the fourth Gospel with speeches of the Lord, which are not only not given in this place, but are not given at all in this form, the Synoptics need not be ashamed that they do not have Peter proclaim the praise of such sayings, and the glory of having better motivated the confession of the disciple cannot be diminished by the fourth Evangelist.

264

As for the prophecy of Judas’ betrayal, we saw through what sequence of ideas it came to this place. However, the roots it has in this context go even deeper and lie even further back: just as the Lord’s statement that he is the bread of life develops into the talk of partaking in the Lord’s Supper, so too is the mention of unbelief among some followers escalated to the lamentation about the betrayal of one disciple, even to that lamentation that the Lord only expressed at the last meal he held with his disciples.

*) As also Weisse, evang. Gesch. ll, 235 notes.

——————-

Critique of the Gospel of John
by Bruno Bauer

—o0o—

185

§. 10 The first Sabbath violation.

5:2-47.

———-

1) The pool of Bethesda.

5:2-4.

The Lord heals a sick man by His word, who could not have been healed in the pool of Bethesda. If the natural explanation otherwise always knows how to eliminate the appearance of the miracle in the Gospel accounts and thereby goes so far that it does not even allow the possibility of the witnessing of a miracle by eyewitnesses, then the description of the miraculous stirring of that pool, which was always supposed to be caused by an angel, must have been uncomfortable for it, for here it concerns the evangelist himself conveying a very strong, miracle-believing idea. On the other hand, to the believing point of view, which is otherwise very ready to accept miracles, this description of the way in which the water of the pool was from time to time imparted miraculous healing power by an angel, must have seemed objectionable, because it is in no way different from the popular superstition, which regards every striking natural phenomenon as an effect of higher spirits, as soon as it does not know how to explain it by its inner law. Both points of view, that of the natural explanation and that of the faithful contemplation of the Holy Scriptures, must therefore have welcomed the fact that in some of the older manuscripts this offensive description was not found, and so Paulus, Lücke, Tholuck and Olshausen declare it to be spurious and a later insertion *). But is the motive with which the modern devout view decides in favour of the testimonies which do not have this addition, so recent that it could not have had an effect earlier and have led to suspicion against those words? Was it not possible that from a certain point of view of spiritual education doubts could arise about the explanation of the healing power of the pool, so that according to the usual procedure, which is still valid today, one would not want to ascribe to the evangelist a view which one no longer shared? If, however, it is preferably the Alexandrian witnesses who completely omit the description of the miraculous power of the pool, it is very evident from the formation of the ground on which these witnesses stand, and from the arbitrariness with which they also proceed in other matters of this kind **), that they have here exercised their criticism, or rather their after-criticism, on the basis of a certain presupposition. And if we consider that human nature has not suddenly transformed itself in our time, and that it did not just start to determine the object according to its inclinations and desires today, but rather what is a plague in our time had previously been expressed in individual signs in critical questions, we will no longer be unclear about how it happened that particularly on the Alexandrian soil that aspect of our report was viewed with suspicion and rejected as a superstition unworthy of the gospel of the Logos *). The inclination to believe in miracles, which otherwise so readily accepted such traits, was in this case pushed back by the preference with which one sought to keep the image of the Christian logician pure, and this was all the more easily overcome, the more the explanation of the healing power of the water was portrayed in a sensory manner. We do not need to develop in detail what has already been pointed out, that the following narrative itself presupposes every aspect of the description of the miraculous power of the pond; for if the sick man says (V. 7.) that he has no one to bring him into the water when it starts to move, this points to the earlier explanation that a secret power moves the water. Furthermore, the complaint of the sick person that he could never get into the water first, because someone else always came before him, would be incomprehensible if it had not been said beforehand that only he who got into the water first, as soon as it began to move, would be healed. However, the report could not tacitly assume such a miraculous quality of the pond, but had to emphasise it and possibly explain it, i.e. as far as possible. Or if one wanted to be content with the closing words of the third verse, that the sick always waited for the movement of the water, one need only try this economical sparseness for a moment to immediately have the sensation of an intolerable break: After the report had begun such a detailed description of the situation – of course! because he knew that what followed needed and deserved careful preparation – he should suddenly break off halfway and, by saying that the sick were awaiting the movement, give his words a definiteness which would only have seemed to remain if he had not described this movement and its nature in more detail? Therefore, instead of “not taking the liberty of declaring the whole passage unworthy of attention” with Lücke *), we must rather describe it completely and unabridged in the interest of the evangelist himself and his report as absolutely necessary. The explanation cannot be omitted if the account is to be coherent and not belong to the disabled who surround that pool. If we are now forced to give the offensive passage its well-founded place in our Gospel, it still does not justify the conclusion that a disciple of the Lord could not be the author of this Gospel. For it is not essential to a disciple of Jesus that he should immediately have been set apart from all the views of his people, nor is it the way in which the Holy Spirit works that he should violently tear those to whom he communicates himself out of all the conditions of their previous life and thought, even as far as it concerns a more definite knowledge of nature**). At least it would have had to be done by force if the first disciples had been torn out of a popular belief that could only give way to a scientifically mediated education after thousands of years. And finally, in the impossible case that the evangelist did not share a popular belief, of which even Lücke assumes *) that it existed at the time of Jesus and had stealthily forced its way into our Gospel through the Christians of the first times, would it not then have been the evangelist’s duty to do everything to make its intrusion impossible and to reject it forever? Should he not, since in the words of the sick man he still reproduces all the elements of that popular belief and gives the impression that he understands them in the same way as the sick man, have done away with this appearance and given a more educated, intelligible explanation, especially as expected of his later interpreters? Certainly, he would have given it if he had thought as he ought to have thought in the enlightened times of today’s apologists, but could not in his own time.

*) Paul’s Comm. on the Gospel of John, p. 262, calls the explanation given by the addition of the movement of the water a “superstitious” one; Tholuck even assumes (Comm. p. 122) that it is an “apocryphal gloss.

**) Just think of the question of the author of the Apocalypse.

*) The critical arbitrariness of the Gnostics was, of course, only peculiar to them to this high degree, but in individual statements it was not entirely foreign to the other church teachers.

*) Comm. II, p. 17.

**) As is well known, no one in modern times has expressed this principle more often than Neander, and he also credits the fourth evangelist with it several times (e.g., Life of Jesus, p. 334, History of Planting, etc., 1833, p. 324), but why does he now suddenly forget it when he derives that explanation of the miraculous power of the pool of Bethesda from an “old gloffem”?

*) Comm. II, 18. Olshausen, Comm. II, 127, even thinks that the addition came into the text from manuscripts “to the margin of which the owners had added this note from their own observation.” Finally, Paul, who also transfers this popular belief to the time of Jesus, says (Comm. p. 288.): “one must still, in a certain sense, thank those who added the legend to the text.

189

So far, then, it remains the same that this passage belongs to the author of the Gospel, but in no way does him dishonour, since nothing is taken away from his dignity once he has followed the poetic naturalist, the popular belief. But the matter becomes more dangerous and threatening for him if we go after this popular belief more seriously and ask whether it really existed for the author. It would be inexplicable if it were so, as Josephus then knows nothing of this Pool of Bethesda, nothing of the angel who miraculously set it in motion, reports nothing of it, since he otherwise does not like to conceal the miraculous treasures of his people and also mentions several pools of Jerusalem. Under these circumstances, the testimony of Eusebius to this pool has no more critical value than the testimony of Ambrose to the discovery of the cross or than the scholarship of the people, who have created a sacred geography for themselves out of the evangelical history on the often churned ruins of the holy city and still know how to show that pool without hesitation. The apologist helps himself by supposing that Josephus may have mentioned the miraculous pool under a different name, but the fact that he does not mention its miraculous nature is the height of difficulty. A magical healing power, which daily led shafts of sick people to the pool, must have made this pool strange and important to the Jewish archaeologist, because of the wonderful light which it could impart to the holy city. Nor should it be said that “Josephus had no opportunity to mention the pool; to mention a pool of such excellent and outstanding miraculous power would have been an opportunity for him to mention anything, even the most remote. If Josephus is now so completely silent about this treasure of the holy city, it certainly does not require any wilful doubt to put us into the greatest anxiety about whether such a pool really existed in Jerusalem, i.e. at the same time whether the evangelist had indeed followed an original popular belief or – One will try in vain to cut through this double question by pointing to the speech of the sick man, in which at least the whole miraculous nature of the pool is clearly enough presupposed. The matter only becomes worse; for far from proving the miraculous power of the pond and the popular belief, this speech itself must now be doubted, and the possibility intrudes that it itself, together with the belief in the “miraculous” power of that water which it presupposes, has only arisen from a situation formed later. And this possibility condenses ever more inexorably into reality the more seriously we consider Josephus’ silence and the extraordinary miraculous power of the pond. No other means of resolution remains here than the assumption that the evangelist is following a legend which sought to emphasise a simpler material, which in itself is a miracle, even more by a miraculous contrast. The miraculous word of the Lord heals a sick man whose helplessness had long prevented him from benefiting from the miraculous healing water.

191

2) The sick man.

5:5-7.

The assumption that the evangelist used a material found in legend would not only relieve us of the embarrassing difficulties into which we would fall with regard to his character if the opposite assumption were made: it also frees us from the irresolvable contradictions into which other features of the report enter with all reality. For the world, even in its worst times, is not so depraved; no man is ever so forsaken as the words of the sick man, V. 7, are supposed to imply. He has no one, he complains, who will immediately bring him into the water when it is moved miraculously. But no one? And if he had no one, was there no one to bring him into the healing water? Impossible! But the sick man must have had someone to take care of him, for someone must have carried him to the pond on his bed, which he could only carry himself after he had been healed, and whoever had taken pity on him so kindly every day would also have done him the lesser service of love. The legend could let the sick person speak as he does, in order to contrast the healing power of the Lord with the extreme helplessness, which is all the greater, the more help has always eluded him. In reality, however, this situation is impossible. It is also inconceivable that this helplessness would require for its explanation that the sick at that pond or the friends who took care of them would have been left to themselves. For if it was always only the first who found healing in the water when it began to move, and if it was only up to their or their friends’ power and strength that they gained the lead over others: what terrible, oppressive tumult would we have to imagine at this pond, what crude appearances would have occurred here daily? Under these circumstances, some kind of official supervision would have been ordered long ago, so that it would not be left to the self-help and violence of individuals to gain the lead. And if this supervision, which properly watched over the order of events, had certainly been appointed by the priesthood, how – we must ask again – could Josephus have been unaware of the matter or not have found it noteworthy? But even without the help of the police, the appalling turmoil, which would have plunged the cripples into the pond as even bigger cripples or as crushed people, has been put to rest for us, since it has been shown that this entire sanatorium is the stuff of legend.

192

Finally, how does the author know, or rather how did Jesus know (v. 6), that the sick man had been afflicted for a long time, namely 38 years? The sick man could not have told the Lord, for there is no room for such a revelation in the discourses he has with him: on the contrary, it is precisely because the Lord knows the duration of his suffering that he turns to him. Therefore, the disciples could not have been moved by idle curiosity to ask the sick man about such things. Nor will the Lord have learned from others how long the sick man had been suffering, for no sooner had he arrived in Jerusalem than he saw him lying by chance at the pool as an unknown person, so that he must have seen with his penetrating gaze, without needing to learn from human information *), how long the sick man’s suffering had lasted. This, it seems, is how the evangelist sees the matter, and this is how he wants us to see it, but we must not, for the Lord alone would have to have chosen such a long-suffering sick person from the mass of others, so that the miraculous healing would appear all the more extraordinary. In the usual way, therefore, the duration of the sick person’s suffering should not have been known, nor can the Lord have known it in a miraculous way: has the author perhaps drawn the definite number from the stock of his imagination? This is not possible either, for if he wanted to make the cure seem all the greater by the duration of the illness, he would have been content with an indefinite and all the more magnifying relation or would have reached for a round, common number. Or if he had intended a deeper intimation by the number, he would have implied the purpose. The number must therefore have been handed down to him by the legend, and the latter, however, could have arrived at this particular number through a spiritual, poetic perception and through a specific purpose, by seeing in it a symbol which the author, if he did not suspect it from the outset, did not need to become aware of. Hengstenberg offers us a helpful hand here; at least he reveals to us the meaning of the symbol which we must now, after the failure of all other attempts at explanation, assume here. The newer Christologist only says: “we regard this sick person as a type of the Jewish people”; namely, how the latter, after 38 years of misery, in which it bore its guilt of sin, took possession of the Promised Land with the celebration of the Passover, one must find a relation to this if the sick person was healed after 38 years of suffering at the time of the Passover *). But the interpreter, who discovers such a beautiful correspondence between the image and the counter-image, will not assume that Jesus came into contact with the sick man by chance and without knowing which treasure of typicality he was touching? From his point of view, Hengstenberg can only allow himself to say, “We contemplate”, if the Lord had intended this contemplation, when he set his eyes on this very sick person among the crowd of others. But we cannot ascribe this intention to the Lord, for if so many speeches and such a serious involvement were connected with this healing, he should at least have revealed in one word the higher purpose he had in mind, indeed he should have shown the hostile people, who condemned him because of this healing, the image of himself in the sick man. It is rather possible that for the view of the congregation the healed man became an image of the general misery or rather for the Jewish coloured view an image of the misery which the holy people had once contracted through their guilt and from which they were freed again by the divine good pleasure. So far, then, the symbolic interpretation can be admitted, but this is also certain: the evangelist has taken the number without being aware of a symbolic reference in it.

*) Nemine indice, as Bengel correctly explains in the context.

*) Christ0logie II, 568.

195

3) The Sabbath.

5:6-17.

Just as the situation with its preconditions could not stand up to criticism, so the transition from the situation to the action will not be able to prove reliable. Jesus asks the sick person: do you want to get well? What has not all been sought and found in this question? Tholuck and Olshausen let the Lord awaken the attention, longing and receptivity of the sick person with the question, Lücke the good will, so that this serves as an “analogy of faith” to the inner point of connection of the miracle. As if the question were more than a creature of pragmatism, since the author, in order to get from the presupposed situation to the matter itself, needed a transition, and how could he form such a transition more easily and simply than by letting the Lord relate to the sick person in the first place? If the Lord had wanted to awaken the confidence of the sick person for the miraculous healing, he would have had to know him, which is not the case according to the report. And then the Lord would have had to relate his question to himself and say: Shall I help you? For the sick man’s wish to be healed is already expressed clearly enough in the fact that, despite years of thwarted attempts, he nevertheless did not lose heart, and rather allowed himself to be brought to the pool again and again.

The healing happened on a Sabbath and resulted in a conflict with the legal anxiety of the people. To mention it in passing – when Jesus healed on the Sabbath, he not only rose above the “Pharisaic petty spirit” *) which had surrounded the simple Mosaic law with a multitude of commandments and prohibitions, but he then declared the OT commandment to be one which could not put any barriers against the spirit in its original freedom and movement. With no word, not even with the slightest hint, does the Lord mention rabbinical statutes in his responsibility, he does not say that one must only distinguish the simple law from its later enclosures, but he goes straight for the Mosaic provision and says of this that the spirit with its free activity may and must reach beyond it.

*) As Lücke says, II, 21.

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But is it really because of this that the sick man was healed on a Sabbath? Certainly it seems certain enough, since the Lord must justify himself against the accusation of the Jews with a saying that seems to refer only to a conflict with the Sabbath law. As the Father never rests, but works continually, so, says Jesus (v. 17), the image must follow the divine archetype. **) Although this saying seems to presuppose a collision with the Sabbath law, it is not yet beyond doubt that it arose on this occasion and that the sick man was healed on a Sabbath. On the contrary, the opposite case becomes more certain when we consider the historical course by which the Lord’s answer is supposed to have been brought about.

**) When Lücke (II, 23.) says: “Jesus does not want to touch the Sabbath law itself, but only the abuses which the carnal mind of the Jews allowed themselves,” this is the constant apologetic play on the word “carnal,” which cannot be rebuked seriously enough. Was not the law itself “carnal” when it limited creation and divine rest to days and demanded pure unemployment on the Sabbath in imitation of the divine archetype? Must the rabbinical fearfulness be understood only as a carnal corruption of the spiritual law, was it not rather the proliferating growth of the original “flesh?

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Jesus heals the sick man and tells him to carry his bed and to appear freely. When the Jews see the healed man carrying his bed and point out to him that he is breaking the Sabbath command, he refers to the commandment of the one who healed him, but when asked by the Jews, he does not know who it was. By chance he meets Jesus again in the temple and only now, when the Lord called out to him: sin no more, lest something worse happen to you, does he know to tell the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. If he did not know Jesus before, if he did not get to know him through the healing, then he could not get to know him even at a second meeting with him without further ado. Something special that opened his eyes did not intervene, for the fact that the Lord warned him of distant sins could not appear to him as something remarkable, something outstanding, since it was a Jewish idea in general that sickness and misery were punishment for sin, so that he too could be warned by anyone else and, if necessary, by himself in that way. The fact that the sick man did not immediately learn who the Savior was is explained in v. 13 by the fact that Jesus withdrew from the crowd that was standing by. Well, then at least some of the bystanders must have known Jesus, for if they were not attentive to the incident or did not speak of the miracle worker, Jesus had hastily withdrawn without purpose or need; thus the healed man could easily have learned from them to whom he owed his recovery. However, even if there were reasons beyond our understanding why he did not know it, afterwards he could not have known it either, since his encounter with Jesus in the temple appears only as a momentary and quickly passing one. Since it was only accidental, the new difficulty arises that Jesus should have left it to chance whether he could call out to the sick man a warning, which, if it was essential and necessary, he should have given immediately after the healing, when he ordered him to stand up and carry the bed. Against the order to carry the bed, even the warning not to sin anymore is the more important thing for the salvation of the soul, and the essential, spiritual thing should have followed so late like an accidental addendum or like an occasional appendix? Since we are not able to recognize anything that looks like history in all of this, the fact that the healing took place on the Sabbath also fades into the area in which the other features of this report have their home, into the area of pragmatism. Or shall we, in order to complete the proof, still ask why Jesus hid himself after the healing and afterwards (probably soon after, if the heat of the Jewish investigation for the physician of the sick should not cool down) walks around freely in the temple? Lücke’s statement, that the Lord wanted to avoid similar things, like 6:15 which always had to be feared *), contradicts too much the context, according to which (5:15, 18.) the murderous Jews are by no means inclined to make the Sabbath-breaker their king. We should also ask how the evangelist knows about the two times he touched the hostile Jews or why the Lord does not present Himself as the spiritual Savior and the bodily Savior, as He usually does (Matt. 9:2-3) and as is worthy of Him. No, we do not need to remind you that the sick man had already violated the Sabbath by letting himself be carried on his bed to the pool.

*) Comm, II, 22.

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If it therefore only remains to explain how the author came to place the healing of the sick man on a Sabbath, we have to remember that this healing is one of the few points where an agreement with the synoptic reports of the public activity of the Lord is found. Also Matthew (op. cit.) knows about the healing of a paralytic (which seems to be the sick man of the fourth gospel, since he lacks the use of his limbs), who was healed by the Lord on his bed. But if our gospel has only a few points in common with the synoptic reports of the public life of Jesus, then with regard to the facts similar things will have happened to it, what otherwise in the evangelical historiography tends to happen with the speeches of the Lord, namely that, because in the memory the empirical quantity of the occasions was condensed, what in reality lay far apart was heaped together on one point. If we add to this the fact that the fourth evangelist reports only a few miraculous deeds of the Lord, it is no longer conspicuous and it was self-evident that he added the conflict with the Sabbath law to the healing of the paralytic.

What seemed offensive and inexplicable to us until now, is now explained as a necessary consequence of the pragmatism, which had to present itself to the author as natural, if he did not have the hostile Jews immediately at hand and had to lead them to the attack against the Lord first. The healed man himself had to form the middle link and first attract the attention of the Jews by walking freely and publicly before them carrying his bed (v. 9).

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But now the evangelist remembers that the Lord did not like to make an appearance with his miraculous deeds and usually withdrew after such a deed; so he surrounds him with a crowd immediately at the healing of the sick man (v. 13) in contradiction to this first condition. The evangelist thought he needed this retreat of Jesus to explain how it came about that the sick man did not know his Savior, and he overlooks the fact that Jesus could not have been completely unknown to the crowd if he thought he had to retreat. But if the sick man should nevertheless tell the Jews who had authorized him to violate the Sabbath, then he had to meet Jesus again, even if it remains inexplicable how he comes to know him as Jesus at the second merely occasional meeting. But if the author was led to assume a twice repeated contact of the sick man with Jesus, then it was necessary for the connection of the individual parts that the words of the Lord belonging together were separated and used on two occasions. The question, finally, why and in what spirit the healed man told the Jews that it was Jesus who had restored him to health, is now answered by the fact that it is completely omitted, and we do not need to agonize over it with the apologists. Only from the plan, according to which the healed man was once the only mediator between the Jews and the Lord, did this report come forth, and as little as the evangelist was concerned about whether the healed man might not appear as a malicious, ungrateful braggart, or whether the more innocent motive of obedience to the authorities might be the reason for the report, so little do we have to worry about this profound question.

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4) Jesus’ speech of defense.

5:18-47.

There follows a series of sayings of Jesus, all of which are connected to the fact that the Jews wanted to kill Him because He called God His own Father, and thus made Himself equal with God. Jesus wants to appease the murderous zealots by saying (v. 19, 20) that the Son does what he sees the Father do, and that the Father shows him out of love all that he himself does. This beginning of the discourse must already disconcert us, for it only repeats that which had given the Jews so much offence, but does not remove the offence or prove what seemed to the opponents an impossibility. For the kind of aesthetic sense that delights in contrasts without examining their elasticity and durability, it is, however, melodious when Lücke says: “Jesus calmly contrasts the unbelief of the Jews with the decisive self-awareness of his messianic dignity and power” *). That Jesus was able to do this is undeniable, and that he did it otherwise is proven often enough by the Synoptics. But then the Lord’s answer had to be short, compact, decisive, and not, as happens here, lose itself in a rambling argument, which at every moment gave rise to new objections and reflections. If, on the other hand, the Lord, as Lücke states **), had at the same time intended “to correct the false, incoherent ideas of the Jews about the Messiah”, then the speech, if it was not to be spoken in vain, would have to take into account the contrast step by step and let this intention emerge more clearly. But such a thing is not found either, and when the Lord says (v. 20) that the Father would show the Son even greater works than the present hearers had seen, “that they might marvel,” this is the right expression for the turn the speech takes here. They had to marvel at what was now opened to them, and even after this opening the Lord had to call out to them again with justification: do not marvel! (v. 28. ) For so lofty are these sayings, so inaccessible to the presupposed unbelief of the murderous hearers, that only wonder remained for them, but not wonder, which is the beginning, but the enemy of all knowledge, because it dulls the spirit from the beginning.

*) Comm. II, 26.

**) Ibid.

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And indeed the Lord *), after having expounded his supreme authority of judgment and the raising of the dead, “is compelled by the obstinate incomprehension of his adversaries to give a different turn to his discourse,” v. 31. For he, says the Lord, does not testify of himself, but it is another who testifies of him. He will not appeal to the testimony of John the Baptist as that of a human being for himself, and he will only invoke it for the sake of the listeners, so that they may believe and be saved. Rather, he had a greater testimony, namely, the works which God had entrusted to him and which he was now carrying out. But again, the Lord must see that he also appeals to this highest testimony in vain, for the inner revelation, the word of the Father inwardly, his unbelieving opponents do not have in them in a lasting way, and so it is not to be wondered at that they also do not believe the testimony which the Scriptures bear of him.

*) As Lücke again correctly explains, ibid, p. 27.

This overview in the present passage reveals a well-meant apologetic, an apologetic that the struggle with doubt and unbelief had to call forth early on, and which even in its outlines is pretty much the same as it still looks in our situation, i.e. it does not move from its place with approaches taken again and again in vain and remains resolved in the same circle. But it must be impossible for us to banish the Lord and his victorious word into this barren circle of tautology; we owe the Lord the confession that we do not recognise the clarity and certainty of his spirit, as well as his sublimity above the antithesis in these windings and in this anxious alternation of approach and relapse. The Lord could not have spoken in such a way that in every sentence he was conscious of the uselessly wasted effort and only lost and entangled himself, as if out of embarrassment, in proofs of which, according to the premise of this speech, he should at the same time know that they would all be of little use. We do not deprive the Lord of anything, but rather free his image from a disturbing course, if we admit that it is only the evangelist who has put together this apologetic edifice. The presupposed situation of a hostile contact of the Lord with the people seemed to him to be the suitable occasion on which words of the Lord, which were originally intended to prove the divinity of his work or which might not have been uttered with this purpose, were spoken. But if it had already happened to him that the Lord’s sayings, which were meant to prove his divine authority and mission when uttered on special occasions, fell into a misguided place in this context, it must have been even more the case with words that originally did not serve this specific purpose at all, but were rather only the pure, unintentional expression of the Lord’s inner power and glory. But if the danger of change is so near, we would only be halfway in the following explanation of these sayings and would still have to fear a hidden enemy if we did not also want to examine the presupposition that these sayings, apart from their position, belong completely to the Lord.

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5) The likeness of the Son.

5:19-20.

“What the Father doeth, that doeth the Son likewise.” As much as these words are inwardly connected with the preceding ones, “My Father worketh, and so worketh I also,” in that they are only the general expression for them, it is not very probable that they were spoken in succession with them on the same occasion, if they belong to the Lord. The saying, “My Father works, and so do I,” is a self-contained, perfectly complete entity that does not require any additional emphasis to enhance its impact. In itself, it is perfectly clear and has a great lasting effect on the mind; the statement actually loses power when reduced to a general formula. So the Lord has made these reflective observations at another time? This is not yet necessary and is by no means beyond all doubt; at least the dogmatic attitude, which is expressed in the negation (the Son can do nothing of himself) and the corresponding affirmation must make it more probable that a simple, original core has been theoretically worked out by the evangelist. In the Synoptics we find similar sayings which point to the intimate relationship between the Father and the Son, as, for example, Matt. 11:27 ascribes to the Son the perfect vision of the Father and to the Son the same vision of the Son. But the speculative implementation of this relationship, its application to the entire work of salvation, the distinction between the archetype, which is contained in the eternal divine activity, and the after-image in the activity of the Son, the relationship of both sides, which is intelligibly conceived as the teaching of the Father, and finally their deeper union in the love of the Father for the Son: All this unmistakably resembles a later theory which sought to understand the relationship between the Father and the Son, and contradicts the certain immediacy with which the Lord contemplated and expressed His unity with the Father. The simple idea of unity with the Father and that of obedience grew into a dogmatic development in that saying.

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6) The raising of the dead and the judgment.

3:21-36.

Anyone who does not believe in dogmatic theory in the fourth Gospel must abandon their disbelief when they consider the statement in V. 21-30 carefully, both on its own and in the context of its surroundings. The statement is meant to provide the highest example of how the Father shows the Son everything and how the Son in fact reflects the prototype of his perception. This idea, however, runs through the entire exposition from beginning to end: nevertheless, the transition from the general purpose to the explanatory example, which holds everything together, is such that it cannot have been made by Jesus in reality. It is only a dogmatic bracket, a makeshift and a work of embarrassment that could not have mediated this leap from the general to the most specific individuality in any other way. Any other aspect of the Lord’s redemptive activity could have been cited as an example of how the Son follows the perception of the divine prototype in everything, for the Lord always and in all things demonstrated his obedience to the divine will. However, when the discussion suddenly shifts to the invigorating activity in spiritual creation, judgment, and the resurrection of the dead, the transition had to be made in such a way that the astonishment of the listeners was determined as the purpose (V. 20), and this purpose had to be achieved precisely because of the nature of the transition, as the speech indicates with commendable consistency against its own structure in V. 28. However, this also reveals the intention with which the speech was originally designed and proves the artificiality of the exposition.

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But no! Let’s first say, the artificiality of the transition; before we judge the explanation itself, we need to examine it more closely. Corresponding perfectly to its purpose, the speech starts with the general divine archetype and develops the copy according to the individual aspects in which it expresses the archetype, until it concludes with a glance back to the general archetype. The Father, that forms the beginning, awakens the dead and brings them to life (v. 2l.), and his will is accomplished, as in the quickening efficacy, so also in the judgment which the Son executes, for only through this conformity to the will of the Father is it just (v. 30.). The divine archetype, the efficacy of the Father, who awakens the dead and brings them to life, is presupposed to be universal and to embrace the entire development of the spiritual world; but the representation in the after-image proceeds in two acts, each of which is again divided into the two sides of the raising to life and the judgment. The impartation of life, which proceeds from the Son, is at first conceived as such as already takes place in the historical world (νυν εστιν ωρα v. 25.); but it is still a limited one, for only “whom he will” does the Son animate, or rather, since his will is not arbitrary, he who honours him and in him the Father has already passed from death to life in the present through the mediation of the Son. If, therefore, only those who listen to the voice of the Son pass from death to life, the other side is that the unbelievers remain imprisoned in death and are already judged, for they are those whom the Son does not want to revive. But where does the Son get the power and authority to revive and to judge? Therefore, because the Father has given it to the Son to have life in Himself, as He Himself has it in Him, and the Son has the authority of judgment, because He is the Son of Man. Especially this last provision is truly profound and thorough: the judgment, which is carried out in history inwardly and in self-awareness, is carried out by the Lord, because he, as the Son of man, is the completed idea of humanity, and humanity in its historical development can only be judged through its idea.

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Do not be surprised – v. 28 says at the transition of the speech to the end, namely to the last judgement – do not be surprised that the Son of Man attributes this power to himself, for the hour is coming in which all in the graves will hear his voice and come forth to the resurrection of life or to judgement. The only explanation appropriate to the course of the discourse, where the aim is ever greater astonishment, is that of which the transition to the end is conceived as the transition to the most astonishing. Do not be surprised, that is the meaning of the transition, do not be surprised at the power which I ascribe to myself, for it will reveal itself even more gloriously, greater and more comprehensively, when the resurrection will prove itself not only inwardly in the historical world of the spirit, but also as the resurrection of the body. The opposite view *), that the Jews should conclude from what is known and common, from the resurrection of the dead already known from the prophetic promise, to that which is more difficult for them to access, to the revival already taking place in the present, this view is already inappropriate because the centre is always missing for this conclusion, namely the concession that Jesus is the one promised by the prophets. The image of the Messiah is rather presented as a free centre in itself and only one feature is added after the other in order to complete the vision of his glory in a progressive increase. In the work of painting, what was already not taken into account at the transition is completely forgotten, namely that this image of Messianic authority was to be held up to the Jews, who did not even recognise that Jesus was the Messiah at all.

*) In Weisse, evang. Gesch. II, 221.

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It only takes an overview of this many-faceted dogmatic work to see that it cannot belong to the Lord in this form. Written as it lies before us, we can follow its twists and turns and let ourselves be carried away by its gradual progress, especially since its content has long since become known to us. But spoken to those who were to hear in it for the first time truths hitherto closed to them, it must have been utterly incomprehensible, and instead of drawing the listener along in its progress, it would rather have had to confuse him with its twists and turns and, by plunging him from one astonishment into another, stupefy him. Yes, just read the whole passage, the slower and more deliberately the better, follow its artful concatenation and then still have the heart to claim that it could have been grasped by people who heard it for the first time and, what is more, should have heard it in stubborn unbelief.

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If one believes otherwise, one may at least attribute it to the play of the aesthetic impression that others cannot find a spoken word of the Lord here: well! then there are still certain reasons that this speech does not belong to the Lord. “All things are delivered unto me”-that was possible for the Lord to say, and is explicable from the fullness of his self-consciousness; but to regard it in the objective relation of purpose: “the Father hath delivered up judgment unto the Son, that all may honour the Son as they honour the Father”-that is only for later reflection, for which the main features of the heavenly household are already positively given, and which now wants to come to a clarity about the relation of the individual provisions. The Lord could clearly and openly describe himself as the mediator of resurrection and judgment, and he did so, but only because he knew himself to be the promised one. But how far is it now from this simplicity and certainty of self-awareness to the question of the definite side of the Son’s relationship to the Father, in which His quickening power lies, or of the side of His historical appearance, in which His authority to judge is founded. Before these questions could be asked, life and judgment must already have manifested themselves many times in the spiritual world of the congregation, and the personality of the Lord must already have become a free object of reflection. These determinations, that the Son was the mediator of life because it was given to Him to have life in Himself as the Father has it in Him, that He, as the Son of Man, had the authority of judgment, were drawn from the depths of the spirit of the congregation, they were views which brought together the whole fullness of the determinations of the subject matter: but they could only be conveyed through the historical conditions indicated.

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Now, when these determinations have been transferred from the Lord’s self-consciousness into their true birthplace, into the spirit of the congregation and into the later believing contemplation, the question still remains whether the distinction of a twofold resurrection and of a judgment on this side and on the other is really pronounced by Jesus. Why not? answers the believing consciousness at once, and we could be reassured by its answer, if it were not determined in such questions less by faith in the Lord than by believing familiarity with the letter of Scripture. Or does the doubting critic believe to discover a contradiction in this speech and says, for example, Gfrörer*), “the common Jewish opinion of the last day and the Last Judgment and the spiritual doctrine of the resurrection, which exclude each other, are directly related to each other, the Lord, who was far above his time, taught only the latter and John added the former from his stock”: even then apologetics is not helpless. No contradiction, it says, is present here; the Last Judgement and the inner-worldly historical judgement do not exclude each other, but the latter is only the completion of the former, and both join together in the continuity of the beginning and the end. Well said! This would be quite good if the question were only whether the thing itself is contradictory, and not rather whether the Lord has made the reflective distinction between a judgment on this side and one on the other.

*) The Sacred and the True p. 56-58.

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In this purity we must hold the question if its solution is to arise, for now, we see, it is nothing else than the question whether teachings on the immortality of the soul and on the resurrection fall directly within the sphere of revelation. Empirically, we must answer in the negative, for in the OT, from the standpoint of the Law, no information is given anywhere about immortality and resurrection, and the old depressed conception of the room where the Fathers are gathered creeps like a dark shadow through the light world of the Law. The prophets speak of resurrection and judgement only after this higher certainty had been born in the human breast and in its inner struggles. And when the Lord speaks of judgment and resurrection in the Synoptic Gospels, he does so in no other way than by presupposing these views as certain, long known ones.

It is also in the nature of things that revelation itself cannot directly convey any teachings. As it seizes upon human beings, it grasps them in their present, historical determinacy and, with the demand that they absolutely overcome it, elevates them into its ideal world, which presents itself to them as immediately certain. This world that exists in and of itself is always opposed to the empirically given world, but correspondingly and absolutely parallel in contrast. Thus, the law commands the killing of the inclination to serve nature and demands submission to the divine will, the prophets are raised from the fragmentation of the legal world to the immediate vision of the divine plan, and the savior brings the message that the kingdom of heaven has come for sinners. If the actual self-consciousness has already fought for the direction towards a beyond, in and of itself being world through its internal historical movement, then, of course, the revelation also seizes upon this direction and spreads accordingly. Of course, the law could not attach itself to the old shapeless shadow world of the Hebrews or even relate to it at all, but for the prophetic vision, for which the resurrection was already certain, the divine counsel developed up to the future judgment, and in the kingdom of heaven that came with it, the Lord knew himself to be the only mediator until the completion in the Last Judgment.

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For Jesus, in this view, which knew itself to be the same from the present to the consummation of the future and was sure of itself between the two limits, life and death, salvation and damnation were as much a present as a future decision. When he says that he came as a physician to the sick and sinful, but not to the righteous and healthy, it is already in the present that he exercises judgment, accepts sinners, makes them alive and rejects the pride of the righteous. The Lord could then unhesitatingly turn to the other side and speak of the judgment of the last day, without feeling the slightest need of a reflective mediation of this future with the present. Both sides, which are distinguished in the fourth Gospel and are set in relation to each other in such a way that the astonishment about them is foreseen, were so unabashedly united for Jesus’ self-awareness that the thought of astonishment about their relationship could not even arise in him. When, therefore, Gfrörer demands that only the one side, the thought of the present judgment, should be placed in the consciousness of Jesus, he is just as far from the goal as he who would now assert that only the other side, the thought of the future judgment, belongs to the Lord. No, the Lord united both sides in his consciousness, but in that unity into which the reflection on the relationship had not yet penetrated. Only later, when the congregation had already been formed and had felt the double-edged power of the spirit in itself and in its contact with the world, did self-consciousness descend into its inner world, and in it became acquainted with the ground of a judgment which even now decided on life and death. It was only then that the intelligible distinction between a present and a future judgment arose, and it could be called out to the unbelievers: do not be surprised that we speak of a present judgment, for he is already judge now who will also judge once in the consummation of time.

But if in this speech only the thought of the resurrection and the judgment remains as the original material, then it becomes even clearer how little this apologetic fragment belongs into the presupposed historical relationship.

7) The testimony of the Baptist.

5:31-36.

The following apologetic argument is only put forward by the Lord in such a way that he spurns it for his own person and sets it back infinitely against another higher one. It is the testimony of the Baptist. Because it is only the testimony of a man, says Jesus, he does not accept it and only brings it to the memory of the Jews, so that they may thereby come to faith and life, for they, as men, could be content with a testimony of their own kind, even in their highest matters, where it concerns the salvation of their souls. Even to the dullest feeling this turn of phrase must give the impression that the voice of the Lord is not to be heard here. This turn of phrase, by which a testimony is only half given, or with averted countenance, as if it were unworthy of acceptance, and yet is excluded, and at the same time again thrust upon others with a defensive hand, is truly not due to the Lord, but belongs only to the apologist, who wants to heap argument upon argument, and give the appearance of abundance, by not needing any of them at all for necessity. Do we say again that this is only the aesthetic indifference of the critic? Then say only that it is worthy of the Lord, nevertheless, to make use of a proof halfway and for the awakening of faith, of which he at the same time says that he may not use it for himself with good reason, because it is deeply beneath his glory.

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But could the Lord speak in this way about his relationship with the Baptist*)? Yes, if the preacher of repentance had come forth in his own authority and of his own accord, then the Lord could say that he could not accept his testimony, but then he could not also bring it up for the salvation of others. However, if the Baptist was sent by God, then the divine plan was revealed in his appearance, and faithful contemplation was no longer dealing with just a man, but with the divine will itself – in short, with a divine testimony. In general, however, the Lord would have lapsed into extreme Ostentation if he had wanted to detach the development of the Kingdom of God, which had him as its goal and was the divine omen of his coming, from his own person and only give it a makeshift relationship to others who might thereby be brought to faith. How different it is in the Synoptics, where the Lord refers to the promises of the prophets and does not shy away from describing the Baptist as the Elijah who was to prepare the way for him.

*) As soon as the apologist seriously elevates the pragmatic turns of the evangelist to general principles, the untrue nature of them is immediately apparent, Compare e. g. Tholuck, Comm. See, for example, Tholuck, Comm, p. 127.

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8) The testimony of works.

5:36.

The higher testimony, against which the Lord sets so far above that of John, lies in the works which he performs according to the Father’s command, and which now bear witness to him and his divine mission. After the earlier commentators had tried in vain to give the expression “works” (εργα) a closer definition, one has recently come to the correct understanding that the works are to designate all sides of the Messianic activity of the Lord. They are the totality of the individual determinations which “the work,” το εργον (C. 17, 4) sums up as the whole.

The nature of the abstract brings with it that it does not express the fullness of individual determinations as such, but a strong and healthy abstract can always awaken the view of its inner richness by uniting the actual abundance of the individual to unity. With this abstract, however, we would labour in vain if we wished to connect with it at the same time that vivid view, especially when, as here, it stands isolated and cannot enrich itself from the context. If, when we hear the word “works”, we are to list all the individual aspects of the Lord’s activity one after the other in our thoughts, this is a dead, mechanical linkage, which is always exposed to the danger of counting too many individual things or too few. And now even “the work” is so colourless and bodiless without a more detailed definition that the view dies away completely. In the midst of the vivid ramifications of the Saviour’s activity and out of the abundance of refined self-awareness, this abstract could not emerge, not to mention that it could not be understood by the Jews, who had not yet fully translated the individual pages of this work. The Lord spoke of the purpose of his mission in a more comprehensible, richly pulsating form, and when he referred to his present work, then he could point to living witnesses of his activity, then he said: Report to John what you hear and see, the blind see, the deaf hear, and the poor have the gospel preached to them, or he pointed to the Scriptures where it is written what the Son of Man is; always, at least, he spoke of his work as it was already completed in the present in living form for contemplation, or as a definite goal still awaiting him in the future. The abstraction of the works or of the work as this standing expression could then only come into use when reflection completely overlooked the historical activity of the Lord and made the attempt to summarise it into a whole. Its origin, however, is still revealed to us by the use to which this expression is put in the fourth Gospel: the apologetic interest created it in order to dispel doubts about the Messiahship of the Lord by referring to His “work”, and in such a sense the Lord must also use it here.

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9) The testimony of the divine word.

5:37-47.

The statement in vv. 37, 38 forms the transition from the preceding to the conclusion, but in this middle it is so wavering, it is so weakly expressed in it, whether it is a new argument or not, that already this character, which blurs into uncertainty, proves the artificiality of the transition. This wandering of thought from one thing to another may be characteristic of a written composition, but in the real life situation of a speaker addressing a crowd with specific needs or deficiencies, words are given a sharper and more penetrating shape. Before, the testimony of the works was spoken of; afterwards, from v. 39 on, the Lord refers to the testimony of the Scriptures; now, in the middle, the testimony of the Father is spoken of. On the one hand, this testimony lies in the works, the completion of which is entrusted to the Son, and on the other hand, it is expressed as a voice of the Father, that is, as a revelation in words. But the definition of this revelation of the Father is so ambiguous that neither the relationship to the works of the Son nor to the holy Scriptures of the OT is expressly emphasised. However, the pure revelation of the inner Word, in which the external mediation should be completely disregarded, cannot be meant either: that would be an idea that would have deserved and demanded a much more definite presentation. It therefore remains only with an echo of the saying to the two sides which include it, and the word of the Father dwelling within, which the unbelieving Jews lack, is itself the echo of the revelation given in the works of the Son and in the Scriptures.

217

Finally, who would deny the thought that the Scriptures testify of him from the Lord, who knew that the necessity of his suffering was confirmed in them, who recognised in the law and the prophets a continuing prophecy of himself (Matt. 11:13.)? But the development of this view into an apologetic argument, that is something quite different, that is a later turn, and it arose from a need which could only excite the mind later, when the work of salvation had been accomplished and the unbelief of the Jewish world had been decided. In the face of this decided obduracy, the contending congregation was then able to summon Moses as a witness to help and at the same time as the judge of his apostate people. —-

218

We thus find it confirmed, of which we have already found traces above, that the fourth evangelist puts together sayings in the same way as the Synoptics, which never owe their origin to the same occasion. But we cannot even say that he worked in the same way as the synoptics in this regard. For in the, if we may say so, cyclopean construction of the Synoptics, critical analysis finds the original granite boulders in the form that the divine nature of the Lord had given them. But if we look for the original pieces in the artificial construction of the speeches in the Fourth Gospel, we must attack the building and – it is not our fault and no one accuses us for it – strip it down to the ground before we find here a few foundation stones, which are themselves already very much worked over, as the Lord’s genuine good. In this contrast between the divine nature of the material in the Synoptic accounts and the art of the Fourth Gospel, the latter is not only to be understood as purely human wit and understanding, for it is also not without the testimony of the divine. The divine art of the spirit of the congregation has also collaborated, and as we understand the artful structure of those speeches as the self-understanding that the spirit of the community had mediated from the original words of the Lord in the struggle with the opposition of the world, its view will remain intact for us. Only we must give up trying to find in it nothing but the rock fragments of the Lord’s words or even their immediate structure.

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