John 3:24

Ver. 24. “ For John had not yet been cast into prison. ”

This remark of the evangelist is surprising, because there is nothing in what precedes which is adapted to occasion it. The fact of the incarceration of John the Baptist, as already accomplished, was not, in any way, implied in the preceding narrative. It is therefore elsewhere than in our Gospel that we must seek for the reason why the evangelist thinks that he must correct a misapprehension existing on this subject, as he evidently does by the remark of John 3:24. This reason is easily discovered in the narrative of our first two Synoptics: Matthew 4:12: “ Jesus, having heard that John was delivered up, withdrew into Galilee. ” Mark 1:14:

“ After that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee. ” These words immediately follow the account of the baptism and temptation; they would necessarily produce on the reader the impression that the imprisonment of John the Baptist had followed very closely upon the baptism of Jesus, and preceded even occasioned His first return to Galilee; thus precisely the opinion which the remark of John sets aside. The account in Luke 3:19-20 is different; the imprisonment of the Baptist is there evidently mentioned only by way of anticipation. Hengstenberg thought that the narrative of Matthew and Mark might be explained by the fact that the first return of Jesus to Galilee the one which John relates in John 1:44 was simply omitted by them. But we have seen (John 2:11) that the first visit of Jesus to Capernaum coincided with certain scenes of the very first period of the Galilean ministry related by the Synoptics.

It only remains, therefore, to acknowledge that frequently in the primitive oral tradition the first two returns from Judea to Galilee (John 1:44 and John 4:1-3) were blended together. From this identification would, naturally, result the suppression of the entire interval which had separated them that is to say, of almost a whole year of Jesus' ministry. To recover this ground which had disappeared, John was thus obliged expressly to restore the distinction between the two returns. He was especially obliged to do this on reaching the fact which he is about to relate, a fact which falls precisely in this interval. Hilgenfeld himself, speaking of this passage, says: “Involuntarily the fourth evangelist bears witness here of his acquaintance with the Synoptical narrative.”

There is nothing to criticise in this remark except the word involuntarily. For the intentional character of this parenthesis, John 3:24, is obvious. We have already proved in John the evident intention of distinguishing these two returns to Galilee by the manner in which he spoke of the miracle of Cana, John 2:11; we shall have occasion to make a similar remark of the same character, with reference to John 4:54. As for the way in which this confusion arose in the tradition written out by the Synoptics, we may remember that it was only after the second return to Galilee that Jesus began that uninterrupted prophetic ministry which the first three Gospels portray for us very particularly and which was the beginning of the foundation of the Church. However important were the attempts made in Judea, up to this time, in the description of the development of Jewish unbelief which John traced, they could just as easily be omitted in the narrative of the actual establishment of the kingdom of God, and of the foundation of the Church which was the result of the Galilean ministry, related especially by the Synoptics.

We can draw from this twenty-fourth verse an important conclusion with respect to the position of the author of the fourth Gospel in the midst of the primitive Church. Who else but an apostle, but an apostle of the first rank, but an apostle recognized as such, could have taken in his writing a position so sovereign with regard to the tradition received in the Church, emanating from the Twelve, and recorded in the Gospels which were anterior to his own? By a stroke of the pen to introduce so considerable a modification in a narrative clothed with such authority, he must have been, and have felt himself to be, possessed of an authority which was altogether incontestable.