John 5:47

Ver. 47. On the other hand, unbelief towards Moses carries naturally in its train the rejection of Jesus. The essential antithesis is not that of the substantives, writings and words, but that of the pronouns, his and my. The former is only accidental; it arises only from the fact that the Jews knew Moses by his writings and Jesus by His words. This charge of not believing Moses, addressed to people whom the alleged violation of one of the Mosaic commandments threw into a rage, recalls that other saying of Jesus, so sorrowful and so bitter (Matthew 23:29-32): “ Ye build the tombs of the prophets, and ye bear witness thus that ye are children of those who killed them. ” The rejection of a sacred principle shelters itself sometimes under the appearances of the most particular regard and most ardent zeal for the principle itself. From this coincidence, there result, in the religious history of humanity, those tragic situations, among which the catastrophe of Israel here announced certainly holds the foremost place.

As regards the historical reality of this discourse, the following appear to us to be the results of the exegesis:

1. The fundamental thought is perfectly suited to the given situation. Accused of having done an anti-Sabbatical work, and even of ascribing to Himself equality with God, Jesus justifies Himself in a way at once the most lofty and the most humble, by averring, on the testimony of His consciousness, the absolute dependence of His work, relatively to that of the Father.

2. The three principal parts of the discourse are naturally linked together, as they start from the central idea which we have just indicated: 1. Jesus affirms the constant adapting of His activity to that of the Father, and declares that from this relation of dependence between Him and God will proceed yet far more considerable works. 2. He proves this internal relation, which it is impossible for men to test, by a double testimony of the Father: His miracles, a specimen of which is at this very moment before their eyes, and the Scriptures.

3. He closes by showing them, in their secret antipathy to the moral tendency of His work, the reason which prevents them from trusting the divine testimony, and by declaring to them their future condemnation in the name of that Moses whom they accuse Him of despising.

Instead of the abstruse metaphysics which has been charged upon the discourses in John, there remains for us only the simple expression of the filial consciousness of Jesus. This latter displays itself gradually in a series of views of imposing grandeur, and of an unique elevation. What renders this feature more striking, is the naive and almost child-like simplicity of the figures employed to describe this communion of the Son with the Father. Such a relation must have been lived, in order to be expressed, and expressed in this way.

Strauss has acknowledged, up to a certain point, these results of exegesis. “There is not,” he says, “in the tenor of the rest of the discourse, anything which causes difficulty, anything which Jesus could not Himself have said, since the evangelist relates, in the best connection, things...which, according to the Synoptics also, Jesus ascribes to Himself.” The objections of Strauss bear only on the analogies of style between this discourse, that of John the Baptist (chap. 3), and certain passages of the first Epistle of St. John (Introd., pp. 106, 107). Strauss concludes by saying: “If, then, the form of this discourse should be ascribed to the evangelist, it might be that the substance of it belonged to Jesus.” We believe that we may conclude by saying: Jesus must have really spoken in this way. The principal theme bears the character of most perfect appropriateness. The secondary ideas are logically subordinated to this theme. No detail turns aside from the idea of the whole, or goes beyond it; finally, the application is of a thrilling solemnity, as it should be in such a situation, and closes by impressing on the whole discourse the seal of reality.

Renan considers that the author of this narrative must have derived the substance of his account from tradition, which is, he says, extremely weighty, because it proves that a part of the Christian community really attributed to Jesus miracles performed at Jerusalem. As to the discourse in particular, see his summary judgment respecting the discourses of the fourth Gospel (p. lxxviii.): “The theme cannot be without a certain degree of authenticity; but in the execution, the fancy of the artist gives itself full play. We feel the factitious action, the rhetoric, the studied diction.” But factitious action betrays itself by commonplaces without appropriateness; have we met with them? Rhetoric, by emphasis and inflation; have we found a redundant word, a word which does not express an original thought? Studied diction, by the ingenious antithesis or the striving after piquancy; has the discourse which we have just studied offered us anything like this? The substance and the force equally exclude the idea of an artificial work, of a composition in cold blood.

Finally, let us notice an assertion of Reville, trenchant and bold like those which so often come from the pen of this critic: “This book,” he says, in speaking of the fourth Gospel, “in which Judaism, the Jewish law, the Jewish temples, are things as foreign, as indifferent, as they could be to a Hellenistic Christian of the second century...” And one ventures to write words like these in the face of the last verses of this chapter, in which Jesus so identifies His teaching with that of Moses, that to believe the one is implicitly to believe the other, and to reject the second, is virtually to reject the first, because Jesus is in reality nothing but Moses completed. The agreement of the law and the Gospel does not appear more clearly from the Sermon on the Mount, than from the passage which we have just studied. But we know that the Sermon on the Mount is universally regarded as that which has most authenticity in the Synoptic tradition.