John 4:22

Ver. 22. “ Ye worship that which ye do not know; we worship that which we know, because salvation comes from the Jews. ”

The antithesis, which is so clearly marked between ye and we proves, whatever Hilgenfeld may say, who wrongly cites Hengstenberg as being of his opinion (comp. the Commentary of the latter, I. pp. 264-269), that the ye denotes the Samaritans and the we Jesus and the Jews. After having put His impartiality beyond suspicion by the revelation of the great future announced in John 4:21, Jesus enters more closely into the question proposed to Him and decides it, as related to the past, in favor of the Jews. “It is at Jerusalem that the living God has made Himself known; and that because it is by means of the Jews that He intends to give salvation to the world.” God is known only so far as He gives Himself to be known. The seat of the true knowledge of Him can, therefore, only be where He makes His revelation; and this place is Jerusalem. By breaking with the course of theocratic development since the time of Moses, and rejecting the prophetic revelations, the Samaritans had separated themselves from the historic God, from the living God. They had preserved only the abstract idea of the one God, a purely rational monotheism. Now the idea of God, as soon as it is taken for God Himself, is no more than a chimera. Even while worshiping God, therefore, they do not know what they worship. The Jews, on the contrary, have developed themselves in constant contact with the divine manifestations; they have remained in the school of the God of revelation, and in this living relation they have preserved the principle of a true knowledge. And whence comes this peculiar relation between this people and God? The answer is given in what follows. If God has made Himself so specially known to the Jews, it is because He wished to make use of them, in order to accomplish the salvation of the world. It is salvation which, retroactively in some sort, has produced all the previous theocratic revelations, as it is the fruit which, although appearing at the end of the annual vegetation, is the real cause of it. The true cause of things is their aim. Thus is the ὅτι, because, explained.

This passage has embarrassed rationalistic criticism, which, making the Jesus of our Gospel an adversary of Judaism, does not allow that He could have proclaimed Himself a Jew, and have Himself united in this we His own worship and that of the Israelitish people. And indeed if, as d' Eichthal alleges (Les Evangiles I. p. xxviii.), the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, “from one end to the other of His preaching, seems to make sport of the Jews,” and consequently cannot “be one of them,” there is a flagrant contradiction between our passage and the entire Gospel. Hilgenfeld thinks that, at John 4:21, Jesus addresses the Jews and the Samaritans taken together, as by a kind of prosopopoeia, and that at John 4:22, by the words: we worship that which we know, he designates Himself, (with the believers) in opposition to these Jews and Samaritans. We have already seen at John 4:21 that this explanation cannot be sustained, and this appears more clearly still from the words of John 4:22: “Because salvation comes from the Jews,” which evidently prove that the subject of “ we worship ” can only be the Jews. D'Eichthal and Renan make use here of different expedients. The enigma is explained, says the first, when it is observed that this expression is only “the annotation, or rather the protest, which a Jew of the old school had inscribed on the margin of the text, and of which an error of the copyist has made a word of Jesus” (p. xxix., note). And this scholar is in exstacies over the services which criticism can render to the interpretation of the sacred writings! Renan makes a similar hypothesis. “The 22d verse, which expresses an opposite thought to that of John 4:21; John 4:23, seems an awkward addition of the evangelist alarmed at the boldness of the saying which he reports” (p. 244, note). Arbitrariness could not be pressed further. The critic begins by decreeing what the fourth Gospel must be; an anti-Jewish book. Then, when he meets an expression which contradicts this alleged character, he rejects it with a stroke of the pen. He obtains, thus, not the Gospel which is, but that which he would have. But is it supposed that the first Jew whom one might meet was in possession of the authentic copy of our Gospel, to modify it according to his fancy; or that it was very easy for any chance foreigner, when this writing was once spread abroad, to introduce an interpolation into all the copies which were in circulation among the Churches? As for Renan's hypothesis, it supposes that the evangelist thought he knew more than the Master whom he worshiped; which is not very logical. The alleged incompatibility of this saying with John 4:21; John 4:23, and with spirit of the fourth Gospel in general, is an assertion without foundation. (See Introduction, p. 127-134.)

At John 4:21 Jesus has transferred the question to the future, when the localized worship of ancient times should no longer exist. In John 4:22, He has justified the Jews, historically speaking. At John 4:23 He returns to the future announced in John 4:21, and describes all its grandeur.