John 7:35-36

“ Then the Jews said among themselves, Whither will he go then, that we shall not find him? Does he mean to go to those who are scattered among the Greeks and to teach the Greeks? 36. What means this word which he has said: You shall seek me and shall not find me;and where I am you cannot come. ”

These words are, of course, ironical. Rejected by the only Jews who are truly worthy of the name, those who live in the Holy Land and speak the language of the fathers, will Jesus go and try to play His part as Christ among the Jews who are dispersed in the Greek world, and, through their agency, exercise His function as Messiah among the heathen? A fine Messiah, indeed, He who, rejected by the Jews, should become the teacher of the Gentiles! The expression διασπορὰ τῶν῾Ελλήνων, literally: dispersion of the Greeks, designates that portion of the Jewish people who lived outside of Palestine, dispersed through Greek countries. Τοὺς ῝Ελληνας, the Greeks, refers to the Gentiles properly so called. The dispersed Jews will be for this Messiah the means of passing from the Jews to the Gentile peoples! They themselves, however, do not seriously regard this supposition as well founded; and they mechanically repeat the word of Jesus, as if not discovering any meaning in it. Meyer has asserted that this course of action would be impossible, if in John 7:33 Jesus really expressed Himself as the evangelist makes Him speak: “ I go to Him who sent me. ”

These last words would have explained everything. They would have understood that a return to God was the thing in question. According to Reuss also, John 7:35 contains a too flagrant misapprehension to be conceivable. But either these words: to Him who sent me had left in their minds only a vague idea, or more probably, regarding Jesus as an impostor, they see in them only a vain boast designed to cover a plan of exile, as at John 8:22, a plan of suicide. We cannot form a sufficiently accurate idea of the gross materialism of the contemporaries of Jesus, so as to fix the limits of possibility in their misapprehensions. After having passed years with Jesus, the apostles still interpreted a bidding to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees as a reproof for having neglected to provide themselves with bread it is they themselves who relate this misunderstanding in the Synoptical Gospels; how then should the Jews, to whom the idea of the departure of the Messiah was as strange as would be to us, at the present hour, that of His visible reign (comp. John 12:34), have immediately understood that, in the preceding words, Jesus was speaking to them of entering into the perfect communion with His Father?

The evangelist takes a kind of pleasure in reproducing in extenso this derisive supposition. Why? Because, like the saying of Caiaphas in chap. 12, it seemed at the time and in the regions in which John was writing and in which it was read, like an involuntary prophecy. Indeed, had not Jesus really become the Messiah of the Greeks? Was not John composing this Gospel in the country, and even in the language, of the Gentiles at the same time that the prophecy of Jesus contained in the preceding verses, and turned into ridicule by the Jews, was finding its accomplishment with respect to them in a striking and awful manner before the eyes of the whole world?