John 7:28-29

“ Jesus cried therefore, teaching in the temple and saying: You both know me and you know whence I am: and yet I am not come of myself; but he who sent me is competent, whom you know not. 29. As for me, I know him; for I come from him and he sent me. ”

Jesus taking this objection as a starting-point (therefore), pronounces a new discourse which relates, no longer to the origin of His doctrine, but to that of His mission and of His person itself. The term ἔκραξεν, he cried, expresses a high elevation of the voice, which is in harmony with the solemnity of the following declaration. The words: in the temple, call to mind the fact that it was under the eyes and even in the hearing of the rulers that Jesus spoke in this way (comp. John 7:32). Jesus enters here, as in John 7:16, into the thought of His adversaries; He accepts the objection in order to turn it into a proof in His favor. In the first place, He repeats their assertion. The repetition of their own words, as well as the two καί which introduce the first two clauses, give to this affirmation an interrogative and slightly ironical turn: “You both know me, and you know...?” This form of expression reveals an intention of setting forth a false claim on their part, for the purpose of afterwards confuting it. The third καί, and, forms an antithesis to the first two and begins the reply of Jesus.

This is, with shades of difference, the sense given by most of the interpreters. Meyer and Weiss think that it is better to see in the first two clauses a concession: “Yes, no doubt you do know my person and my origin up to a certain point; but this is only one side of the truth; there is a higher side of it which you do not know and which is this.” But it would have been difficult for His hearers to get this idea: “You know me; but you do not know me.” Jesus rejects the very premises of their argument; and to the fact alleged by them He opposes a directly contrary one: “You think you know me, but you do not know me, either as to my mission or as to my origin (John 7:29).” And as they seem to suppose that He has given Himself His commission, He adds: “I have one sending me, and this one is the veritable sender, that is to say, He who alone has the power to give ‘divine' missions.”

The adjective ἀληθινός has not here, any more than elsewhere, the sense of ἀληθής, true, as a large number of interpreters from Chrysostom to Baumlein have thought. Jesus does not mean to say that the Being who sends Him is morally true; no more does He mean that He is real (see my 2d ed.), that is, that He is not imaginary, and consequently that His mission is not fictitious and a matter purely of the imagination; this is not what ἀληθινός signifies. But the sense is: “The one sending me is the true sender.” The last words: whom you know not, are very severe. How can Jesus charge Jews with not knowing Him of whom they make it their boast to be the only worshipers? But this strange ignorance is nevertheless the true reason why they cannot discern the divine origin of His mission. At the same time He shows them thereby, with much acuteness, that the very criterion by which they intend to deny Him, as Messiah, is precisely that which marks Him as such. In fact the postulate which is laid down by the Jews themselves, in John 7:27, is found thereby to be only too fully realized! It is an argument ad hominem, which Jesus allows Himself because He finds thus the means of presenting to this company of people the notion of the Messiah in its most exalted light, as He does in the following verses.