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

The light of the world. Κόσμος is here, as in John 17:11, and elsewhere, the world of humanity in its obscuration. The true light, which enlightens the human night, the antitype of the temple light and of all lamps and night lights, is the personal truth and purity, which enlightens and sanctifies, or delivers from walking in religious and moral darkness. The substance or New Testament fulfilment of the pillar of fire.

Shall in no wise walk in the darkness [οὐ μὴ περιπατατήσῃ ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ].—According to the reading περιπατήσῃ,^[FN39] this is assuring: He shall surely not walk. A stronger expression of the assurance which is implied in the light of Christ; not to be understood as a demand, for this is precluded by the words: He that followeth Me. Darkness; the sphere of error, of delusion, of blindness. A fundamental conception of John.

Shall have the light of life.—Σκοτία, the fear of death, had literally brought the adulteress to the verge of bodily death itself. Hence the light of life is here not the life as light, but the light as life, as giving, securing, and sustaining the true life. He shall have it for a sure possession of his own, for the following of Christ by faith causes an enlightenment from Him which proves itself as a living light, the life turning into light, the light turning into life, a fountain of life; as the water which He gives becomes a fountain within.

John 8:13. Thy Witness is not true.—The Pharisees who were present rejected the great utterance of Jesus respecting Himself, “but, prudently enough avoiding the matter of it, they dispute its formal validity.” Meyer. In reference to the matter of it they perhaps felt half bound by the preceding hypocritical act of homage on the part of their fellows. Jesus Himself also seemed to them to have formerly, chap, John 5:31, suggested to them this rule which they now stated. But (says Lücke) the case is different. Matters of conscience, of the inmost sense of God and of divine things must be juged of otherwise than matters of outward experience. As God can only reveal and bear witness to Himself (ὁ δὲ θεὸς αὐτὸς ἑαυτῷ ἁξιόπιστος μάρτυς, says Chrysostom), so the divine life and light in the world are only their own evidence. “Lumen,” says Augustine, “et alia demonstrat et se ipsum. Testimonium sibi perhibet lux, aperit sanos oculos, et sibi ipsa testis est.” Yet the times differ. Christ must be first accredited and introduced by the Father on the testimony of Scripture and miracle; afterwards His own testimony of Himself is valid. The connection also in that place and in this is very different. There Christ professed Himself the awakener of the dead, and as such the Father had accredited Him by the miraculous raising of the sick. Here He presents Himself as the sure guide through the darkness of this world to the true life, and His credential in this character must be the certitude of His own conviction. The proof of the truth of this conviction lies in the fact that He is clear respecting the course of His own life, His origin and His goal, and this proof He soon states further on. [Comp. my note on John 5:31, p192.—P. S.]

John 8:14. Though I bear witness of myself, etc.—Even when I am in this situation, as I am just now. He hereby intimates, that in other respects He quotes also another witness (the Father), as immediately afterwards in John 8:17.

For I know whence I came.—The clear consciousness of His origin and appointment on the one hand, and of His destination on the other (His ἀρχή and His τέλος), gives Him also a clear knowledge of His path, clearness respecting His own way and His guidance of others. He comes from the Father and goes to the Father ( John 16:28). Therefore He reveals the Father and is the way to the Father. Or He is in His essence pure person, He goes to the perfection of His personality, therefore He is in His holy personal conduct the quickener and restorer of erring souls to personal life.

But ye know not [ὑμεῖς δέ οὐκ οἵδατε] whence I come, and whither I go.—In the former case the aorist (ἧλθον), now the present (ἕρχομαι, ὑπάγω). They could not know whence He had come, but they ought to have seen whence He still at present came, to wit, that He was sent by God. And from His appearance they might then have inferred His origin. No more did they know whence He was going, though they fully intended to put Him to death; that Isaiah, they did not know that by the sacrifice of His life in death He would rise to glory. The reading: or [ῆ instead of καί, and] whither I go, is improbable, because the knowledge of Christ’s end depends upon the knowledge of His spiritual origin. Grotius accounts for Christ’s testifying of Himself from His being sent of God: “Legationis injunctæ conscius est Isaiah, cui injuncta Esther, reliqui ab ipso hoc debent discere.” A true point, but not the whole thought. Cocceius observes that no other man knows whence He comes and whither He goes, and in this respect Christ stands above others, and may testify of Himself. Unquestionably His clear divine-human consciousness was the bright star of salvation in the night of the world.

John 8:15. Ye judge according to the flesh [κατὰ τὴν σάρκα].—Tholuck (after De Wette): “The loose and floating progression of ideas looks as if the ideas were inaccurately reproduced.” Hardly! The train of thought is similar to that at John 7:24; except that here the emphasis falls on the judging itself. Ye already judge persons and actions according to the flesh, according to their outward, finite appearance, and according to finite standards (κατ’ ὅψιν, John 7:24). He means, therefore, primarily, judging by a false outward standard, but, in connection with it, judging by a false inward estimate (so Chrysostom, De Wette: after a carnal, selfish manner). Ye judge (condemn) the internal character of the Son of Man from His humble form; I judge (condemn) no person. Meyer justly observes that the addition: according to the flesh, is not to be here supplied (as Augustine and others would have it; Lücke: as ye do), but the κρίνειν is emphatic in the sense of κατακρίνειν. This is supported by the turn in John 8:16. The sentence, however, probably includes a reference to their theocratic judicial office, which in the affair of the adulteress had shown a thirst for reprobation, while His office consists not only in. not judging, but in delivering and saving. Hence modifications of the sentence: I judge no one. Now (νῦν, Augustine and others) is not untrue to the sense, but superfluous. So is the explanation: I have no pleasure in judging (De Wette). The maxim of Christ, however, is founded of course on the fact that He distinguishes between the original nature or essential constitution of persons and their caricature in sin (which Meyer disputes). It is just this which makes Him Redeemer.

John 8:16. But even if I myself judge.—Meyer supposes that this also means condemn, and that the Lord would say that there are “exceptions to that maxim of not judging.” But the exceptions would destroy the positiveness of the previous sentence. He judgeth no man (unfavorably), but He does judge in general, and in the special sense judges in condemnation of sin in every man. Thus in His decision respecting the adulteress and her accusers He judged. Thus He judges or forms His estimate of them and of Himself. But all His judging is κρίσις ἀληθινή (see the critical notes), the real, essential estimation (of persons), discrimination (of sinner and sin), and separation (of believer and unbeliever). The ground of this judgment, of His being thus true, is that the Father by the actual course of things executes these same decisions, separations, and judgments, which the spirit of Christ passes.

John 8:17. In your law.—From this turn it clearly appears that Christ was including judgment respecting Himself. After He has declared that His own testimony is alone sufficient for the declaration that He is the light of the world, He returns to the assurance that after all He is not limited to His own testimony, but has the Father also for a witness. In your law, i.e., in the law in which ye make your boast, and the very letter of which also binds you; not in the law which is nothing to Me (whether in the antinomian interpretation of Schweizer, or the doctrinal interpretation of De Wette). Comp. John 5:39; John 7:22; John 8:5; John 8:45-47; John 10:35.—Tholuck: In this way of speaking of the νόμος we must by no means fail to perceive a characteristic of John.—The testimony of two men is true. A free quotation from Deuteronomy 17:6. Two men is emphatic.

John 8:18. I am he who beareth witness, etc.—He produces two significant witnesses: His own consciousness and the power of the Father working with Him. Paulus would take the ἐγώ to mean: I, as one who knows Himself; Olshausen: I, as Son of God. But it means also in particular: I, as the one sent by the Father. That which makes two witnesses valid in law, is the agreement of two consciences in a public declaration under oath. And if there may be two false witnesses it must be one of those abnormal, horrible exceptions for which human society cannot provide. But when the power of God in the miracles of Christ and His word in the Old Testament agree with the word of Jesus, it is a harmony of testimonies, in which the testimony of the Father Himself joined with the testimony of Him whom He has sent must be acknowledged.

John 8:19. Where is thy Father?—An intentional misapprehension and malicious mockery. Therefore no doubt also a feint, as if they were inquiring after a human father of Jesus (Augustine, and others); the use of ποῦ instead of τίς is not against this. The Pharisees well knew that God is invisible; if their question had referred to God, it must have been: Where then does God, Thy Father, testify of Thee? They seem, in mockery, to look about for a human father of Jesus as His witness. This reference of the word to a human father does not necessarily involve, as Tholuck thinks, the calumnious intimation that He was a bastard (Cyril); for the thing in hand is not any exact information concerning His birth, but the presentation of His Father as a witness. Yet the irony might possibly have gone even to this wicked extent.

If ye had known me, etc.—Because they did not and would not perceive the divine Spirit in the words and life of Jesus, they were blind to the Spirit of God in His miracles, as well as to the testimony of God concerning Him in the Scriptures; and this proved that they did not know God Himself any more than they knew Jesus. Comp. John 16:9.

John 8:20. In the treasury.—Ἐν τῷ γαζοφυλακίῳ. We must in the first place distinguish between the treasury-hall, the γαζοφυλάκιον, which was in the court of the women (i.e., the court beyond which the women did not venture, but where the men also stopped or passed, see Mark 12:41), and the treasure-chambers of the temple, γαζοφυλάκια. Then we must again distinguish between the more special term γαζοφυλάκιον, applied to the thirteen chests, and the same term in its more general application to the whole hall of the chests, which was also called γαζοφυλάκιον, (see Tholuck, p241, where Meyer’s translation: at the money chests,—is also set aside). The evangelist names this locality, because it was the most public, here everybody deposited his temple gifts. The locality gives the bold words of Christ concerning Himself and concerning the Pharisees their full force; yet “no one laid hands on Him, for His hour had not yet come,” John 7:30. “The refrain of the history with an air of triumph.” Meyer.

John 8:21. Again therefore he said to them, I go away, and ye will seek me, and will die in your sin [ἐν τῇ ἁμαρτίᾳ ὑμῶν ἁποθανεῖσθε].—As He had said before, John 7:33. Not a new discourse, placed by Ewald and Meyer, contrary to the usual view, on one of the subsequent days. It seems unnecessary to assume (with Tholuck) a special occasion for this discourse; for the occasion in the preceding mockery of the Pharisees stands out strongly enough (hence the οὗν). The mockery of unbelief stands entirely on a line with persecution; mockery therefore is here to the Lord a new signal of approaching death, as persecution was at John 7:34. But for this reason He here declares still more strongly than He did there, both His freedom in His death and their condemnation. In the former case: Ye will not find me; now: Ye will die in your sin. The seeking again denotes the seeking of the Messiah amidst the impending judgments; not a penitent seeking of the Redeemer, but a fanatical chiliastic seeking of a political deliverer. Hence without any finding of Christ. And the not finding Isaiah, positively, a dying in sin. Lücke: The thing meant is natural dying in the state of sin, not a dying on account of sin or by reason of sin. But the former idea cannot here be kept apart from the latter. The sins are their sins as a whole, sealed by their unbelief and their murderous spirit towards the Messiah; the dying is dying in the whole sense of the word: perishing in woe, irremediable death, utter ruin in this world and in that which is to come; and lastly the persons meant are the people as a whole, deceivers and deceived. But as the ὑμεῖς does not mean every single Jew, so the sin of obduracy is not foretold of all, nor the prospect of death extended to hopeless damnation in every case. Only the sin and death of the nation as a body are without limit.

The extension of the condemnation into the future world Jesus declares in the words: “Whither I go, ye cannot come.” As they now could not spiritually roach Him, so hereafter even as suppliants they could not reach Him on the throne of His glory nor beyond in His heaven. A distinct opposite of hell is not to be thought of (as Meyer holds); a place of punishment is no doubt at least implied.

John 8:22. Will he kill himself?—Formerly He said: “Where I am;” now he says: “Whither I go.” Hence they now (the Jews in the Judaistic sense) give their mockery another and a more biting form. “The irony of John 7:35, rises to impudent sarcasm.” Tholuck. They assume that He spoke of His death; and as He called this a ὑπάγειν, they mock, because they have no conception of the element of voluntary departure in the violence of death: “Will He kill Himself?” They think He has set Himself far above them in saying that they could not reach Him; they revenge themselves by suggesting that He will sink far below them. An orthodox Jew, they would say, utterly abhors suicide. According to Josephus, De Bello Jud. III:8, 5, the self-murderer goes to the σκοτιώτερος ᾅδης. Thus, according to the orthodox Jewish doctrine, to which the Pharisees bore allegiance, the suicide falls to the lowest hell of Hades, and is separated by a great gulf from Abraham’s bosom ( Luke 16:26), into which they hoped to go. Concerning a peculiar interpretation of Origen, see Lücke, p. John 207: [that Jesus would kill Himself, and so go to the place and punishment of suicides, to which the Jews could not go, because their sin did not subject them to it.—Tr.]

John 8:23. Ye are from beneath; I am from above.—Jesus meets their mockery with a calm assertion which turns the point of it against themselves. For from beneath hardly means here merely from the earth (Meyer), as in John 3:31; but, as in John 8:44, it denotes the diabolical nature which they have shown, and by virtue of which they belong to that dark nether world. They therefore could go thither, where they are spiritually at home; He could not, since He is from above, from heaven ( John 3:3). The antithesis in these words is that of hades and heaven, says Origen; in the moral sense, says Stier; on the contrary Tholuck, with Meyer, makes the antithesis heaven and earth. But the parallel κόσμος οὗτος does not prove this; for that expression denotes not the visible world in itself, but the old bad nature of the world.

The more obscure first sentence He explains by the second: Ye are of this world.—Κόσμος οὗτος, also, according to the Jewish Christology, denoted pre-eminently the ancient heathen world, which was to come into condemnation. I am not of this world. Therefore in spirit and life belonging to the αἰὼν ὁ μέλλων, the new and higher world. The former antithesis denotes the principle of the life; the latter, the sphere of life corresponding.

John 8:24. I said therefore unto you, that ye will die in your sins.—That is to say, the words: “ye will die in your sins,” and the words: “ye are of this world,” or “from beneath,” are equivalent. Their being from beneath as to the principle of their life is the reason why they will die in their sins (Crell. Other views of the connection see in Tholuck). Meyer: “Observe that in this repetition of the denunciation the emphasis, which in John 8:21 lay upon in your sins, falls upon will die, and thus the perdition itself comes into the foreground, which can be averted only by conversion to faith.”

Yet they must not understand Him that they are in a fatalistic sense from beneath, or of this world, and therefore cannot but die in their sins. Hence He adds the condition: If ye believe not that I am He. There Isaiah, therefore, no lack of clearness in the connection (as Tholuck supposes). The expression: “that I am He,” is mysteriously delivered, without mention of the predicate. Meyer: “To wit, the Messiah, the self-evident predicate.” But the matter was not so simple; otherwise Christ would have previously named Himself the Messiah. And this He would not do, because their conception of the Messiah was distorted. They must, therefore, step by step perceive and believe that He is what He professed to be: the one sent of the Father, the Son of Prayer of Manasseh, the Quickener, the Light of the world; last: the one from above. They must believe in Him according to His words and His deeds; His higher existence, His real being, which stood before their eyes, and the real nature of which they criticised away, they must believe; not till then could they receive the word that He was the Messiah. The predicate Isaiah, therefore, the representation of Himself which Jesus gives in the context. According to Hofmann (Schriftbeweis, I:62), an imitation of the Old Testament אֲנִי הוּא. Undoubtedly correct in the view that both here and there the self-evidencing living presence of the divine person must be above all things acknowledged without prejudice.

This mysterious import of the word is indicated also by the question of the Jews: “Who art thou?” ( John 8:25). They wished to draw the last decisive word from Him. The answer of Jesus which follows speaks to the same point. Luther takes the σὺτίς εἰ as contemptuous; so does Meyer. But it is rather a sly question, to decoy or force Jesus to an avowal. Comp. John 10:24. If we compare the expression ὅτι ἐγώ εἰμι with that in John 7:39 : οὕπω γὰρ ἧν πνεῦμα ἅγιον,—we might naturally translate: that I am here. That He is present as He is present in the fulness of His divine-human life,—this they must believe and apprehend before they will rightly apprehend Him as the Messiah.

John 8:25. Even the same that I said unto you from the beginning. [So the E. V. renders τὴν ἀρχὴν ὅ τι καὶ λαλῶ ὐμῖν Comp. Text. Notes.—P. S.].—This passage has been a crux interpretum, because the progressive unfolding of the idea of the Messiah by Christ in His presentation of Himself has not been appreciated. The interpretation depends not merely on the sense of τὴν ἀρχήν, but also on that of the expression ὅ τι καὶ λαλῶ ὑμῖν.

[To state the points more fully, the interpretation depends: 1) On the construction of the whole sentence—whether it be interrogative, or exclamatory, or declarative; 2) on the sense of τὴν ἀρχήν, whether it be taken substantively (principium, the beginning, the Logos), or adverbially (in the beginning, from the beginning, first of all, to start with, or omnino, generally); 3) on the ambiguity of ὅτι (conjunct.) and ὅ, τι (relative); 4) on the meaning of λαλῶ as distinct from λέγω; 5) on the proper force of καί. I remark in the premises that we must take τὴν ἀρχήν adverbially, and write ὅ, τι, since ὅτι (quoniam, quia) gives no good sense.—P. S.]

1. Constructions which take the sentence as a question.

(a) Cyril, Chrysostom, Matthæi, Lücke (more or less equivalent): Why do I even speak to you at all? [Cur vero omnino vobiscum loquor? cur frustra vobiscum disputo?—P. S.] (Comp. John 10:25). This is grammatically possible, for τὴν ἀρχήν can mean omnino (in certain circumstances), and ὅ τι can mean why. But such a sentence would be contradicted by Christ’s going on to speak, and it would be too “empty” (Meyer).

[With this agrees in sense Ewald’s explanation, with this difference that he takes the sentence as an indignant exclamation: That I should have to speak to you at all! (Dass ich auch überhaupt zu euch rede!) But this leaves the position of τὴν ἀρχήν before ὅτι (as Ewald writes instead of ὅ, τι) unexplained.—P. S.]

(b) Meyer (and Hilgenfeld): What I originally (from the first) say to you, that do ye ask? or (Do you ask), what I have long been telling you? The objection to this is that Christ had from the first not presented Himself as Messiah. Besides, there is no: Do ye ask?—in the sentence.

2. Constructions which connect with this sentence the πολλὰ ἕχω following [ John 8:26, and put only a comma, instead of a period, after λαλῶ ὑμῖν]. Some manuscripts, Bengel, Olshausen. Hofmann: “For the first, for the present, since He is engaged in speaking to them, He has many reproving and condemning things to say to them.” This would be an entire evasion of the question they had put.^[FN40]

3. Constructions which take the sentence as a declaration.

(a) Augustine (similarly Bede, Rupert, Lampe, Fritzche): Principium (the Logos, the Word) me credite, quia (ὅτι) et loquor vobis, i.e. quia humilis propter vos factus ad ista verba descendi. [Wordsworth: “I am what I am also declaring to you, the Beginning;” comp. Revelation 21:6, ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ τέλος.—P. S.] Untenable both in point of grammar and of fact; τὴν ἀρχήν is adverbial, and Jesus could not present Himself to these adversaries as the divine Logos. [A reference to the Logos would require λέγω instead of λαλῶ.—P. S.]

(b) Calvin, Beza, Grotius, Baumgarten-Crusius, Tholuck: “I am^[FN41] what I told you in the beginning (and tell you until now).” But (1) He had not given them from the beginning a definite description of Himself; (2) τὴν ἀρχήν ought not to stand first; not to say that we ought rather to have ἐλάλησα [instead of λαλῶ].

(c) Luthardt: “From the beginning I Amos, that [ὅτι] I may even speak to you.” Obscure, and in part incorrect; for Jesus did not exist merely to speak to the Jews (see Meyer).

(d) Bretschneider: “At the outset I declared concerning Myself what I say also now.” But there is no λελάληκα.

(e) De Wette: “First of all, or above all, I am what I even say to you”.^[FN42] Luther: “I am your preacher; if ye first believe this, ye will also know by experience who I Amos, and in no other way.” (Ammon: He is to be known, above all things, from His words). But, in the first place, τὴν ἀρχήν must mean for the first thing, to begin with; and secondly, Christ says not that they must know Him from His words, but He refers to accounts which He actually gave of Himself.

(f) Winer: “I am wholly such as I represent Myself in My words.” See the grammatical objection against wholly in Meyer.

(g) “To begin with, for the first, I am that which I even say to you;” or, “First of all, I am the very thing I am declaring unto you.” Erasmus, Bucer, Grotius,^[FN43] et al, Leben Jesu, II, 963, Brückner.^[FN44] For the first thing, they must receive with confidence His descriptions of Himself as the fountain of life, the light of the world, etc., which He openly and familiarly talks (λαλῶ) to them; then they will come to a full knowledge of His character; for all depends on their ceasing to determine His character by their crude notion of the Messiah, ceasing to require in Him such a Messiah as they have imagined, and beginning to determine their ideas of the Messiah from His revelation of Himself, and to correct and spiritualize them accordingly. When Tholuck objects that, upon this interpretation, Jesus would be drawing them first to a lower view of Himself, and afterwards to a higher, he is mistaken; for the issue here is between a designation of Himself by the New Testament thing that He Isaiah, and a designation of Himself by the theocratic name, which in its rabbinical form had to be regenerated by the New Testament spirit, and the course of thought is not from lower to higher, but from the more general to the more specific.

John 8:26. I have many things to say and to judge of you.—Περὶ ὑμῶν is emphatic. Because He has so much to say and to judge of them, so much to clear up with them, He cannot go on to the final, decisive declaration concerning Himself. It must first be still more clearly brought out, what they are, and where they stand. Tholuck, therefore, groundlessly remarks, quoting an opinion of Maldonatus: “This expression also disturbs the clearness of the course of thought.” The opinion, of course, has in view also what follows.