John 1:39

John 1:39. He saith unto them, Come, and ye shall see. They came therefore and saw where he abode, and abode with him that day. The seeker shall not seek in vain. They had asked where He abode; and that the answer of Jesus was a direct meeting of their request is proved by the statement immediately made by the Evangelist, that ‘they came and saw where He abode.' The nature of the intercourse is not described. We are left only to imagine from the confession of Andrew in John 1:41 what must have been the solemn teachings, the gracious communications of Himself by Jesus, the patient instructing of ignorance, the tender removal of doubts, until, in all the joy of their new discovery, they could say, ‘We have found.' This much, however, we seem entitled to infer from the thrice-repeated ‘abide' or ‘abode,' a word characteristic of the Fourth Gospel, and always full of deep and solemn import, that the Evangelist designs to convey to us something more than the thought of mere outward presence with Jesus.

It was about the tenth hour. There are four passages in which the Evangelist directly refers to the hour of the day at which an event occurred (see chap. John 4:6; John 4:52; John 19:14). But for the last of these passages it might be natural to suppose that John, like the other Evangelists, reckons time from sunrise, an hour being the twelfth part of the (varying) interval between sunrise and sunset. As, however, Mark records (chap. John 15:25) that Jesus was crucified at the ‘'third hour' (between 8 and 9 A.M.), and John expressly states that His condemnation was later than the ‘sixth hour,' the probability that the latter writer follows a different reckoning is very strong. Further investigation has shown that at the very time when this book was written a mode of computation substantially agreeing with our own was known in Asia Minor (where John wrote) and elsewhere. It is easy to see that in such a matter as this a writer naturally follows the custom of those amongst whom he lives, and whom he has immediately in view as his readers. We shall assume, therefore, in each case that the hour (of fixed length, not variable) is reckoned from midnight or noon. Here the tenth hour will no doubt be the hour between 9 and 10 A.M.