John 1:31

Ver. 31. “ And neither did I know him; but that he might be manifested to Israel, I am come baptizing with water.

The word κἀγώ, and neither I, placed at the beginning and repeated, as it is in John 1:33, has necessarily an especial emphasis. The meaning is obvious; he has just said to his hearers: “ He whom you know not. ” When, therefore, he adds: “And neither did I know him,” it is clear that he means: “And neither did I, when he came to present himself to me to be baptized, know him any more than you now know him.” Weiss and Keil object to this meaning, that it cannot be applied to the two κἀγώ of John 1:33-34. We shall see that this is not correct. According to these interpreters the “ and I ” signifies: “ I, for my part, that is, according to my mere human individuality, and independently of the divine revelation.” But it is this meaning which is inapplicable to John 1:34; and besides, it is very far-fetched. John means: I did not know him absolutely when he came to present himself to me; I did not know, therefore, that He was the Messiah. But we must not neglect to draw from this only natural meaning the important consequence which is implied in it: that John also did not know Jesus as a man, as the Son of Mary; for, if he had known Him as such, it would have been impossible for him not to know Him also as the Messiah.

He could not be ignorant of the circumstances which had accompanied his own birth and that of Jesus. If, therefore, he did not know Jesus as Messiah, no more did he know Him personally. And this can be understood: having lived in the wilderness up to the time of his manifestation to Israel (Luke 1:80), he might indeed have heard the marvelous circumstances of his own birth and of the birth of the Son of Mary related by his parents, but without having ever seen Him. It must necessarily, even, have been so, in order to his not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, when He presented Himself to Him for baptism. And it is only in this way that the testimony given by him to Jesus is raised above all suspicion of bias. This is the reason why John brings out this circumstance with so much stress by the three successive κἀγώ. Here is the guarantee of the truth of his testimony. But, in this case, how can we explain the word which John addresses to Jesus in the narrative of Matthew (Matthew 3:14): “I have need to be baptized of thee.” To resolve this difficulty, it is not necessary to resort to the expedient, which was found already in the Gospel of the Hebrews and which Lucke has renewed, that of placing this conversation between John and Jesus after the baptism of the latter. We have already recalled the fact that, according to Matthew 3:6 and Mark 1:5, the baptism of John was preceded, on the part of the neophyte, by an act of confession of sins. The confession which the forerunner heard proceeding from the mouth of Jesus might easily convince him that he had to do with a more holy being than himself, who had a deep sense of sin and condemned it, as he had never felt and condemned it himself, and could thus extort from him the exclamation which Matthew relates. Not knowing Jesus personally, John received Him as he did every other Israelite; after having heard Him speak of the sin of the world, he caught sight of the first gleam of the truth; finally, the scene which followed completed his conviction.

The logical connection between this clause and the following one is this: “And that I might bring to an end that ignorance in which I still was, even as you are now, is the very reason why God has sent me to baptize.” The Baptist's ministry had undoubtedly a more general aim: to prepare the people for the Kingdom of God by repentance, or, as he has said himself in John 1:22: “to make straight the way of the Lord.” But he makes prominent here only that which forms the culminating point of his ministry, the testimony borne to the person of the Messiah, without which all his labor would have been useless. The article τῷ before ὕδατι (the water) appears to me to have been wrongly rejected by the Alexandrian authorities; there is something dramatic in it: “I am come to baptize with that water ” (pointing to the Jordan). Without the article, there would be a tacit contrast between the baptism of water and another (that of the Spirit), which is not in the thought of the context. John now explains how that ignorance ceased for him on the occasion of the baptism which he began to solemnize by the command of God.