[This is part of an ongoing series, begun earlier this year, of non-technical commentary on the Gospel according to John. To see all posts, click here.]

These few short verses (2:23-25) provide a transition between where we left off with the Temple narrative and the Nicodemus narrative to come.

In the first place, it is easy to see how they complete the Temple narrative that preceded it. There is cohesion between v. 13 where the Temple narrative is set up by John and introduces that “it was almost time for the Jewish Passover” and that Jesus went to Jerusalem (TNIV) and v. 23 where it talks further about Jesus’s time in Jerusalem during the Passover festival.

The passage goes on say that at this time many people saw the signs he was performing and the result was that people believed in his name. Notice that the “signs” is plural and yet John has only discussed one so far (turning the water into wine, 2:11). Evidently Jesus had already performed more than one sign but, in keeping with John’s purposes (see 20:30-31), he only has given us the one. But while Jesus is in Jerusalem during the festival many believe because of the signs.

It then talks about Jesus’s not entrusting himself to the people who believed in him because he knows what is in people. There is something spurious about the faith of those who so far are believing in him (remember there is a progression of faith through the Gospels) and Jesus won’t find himself ensnared by the will of people, only the will of his Father.

In the second place (back to talking about the transitionary nature of the passage), the text introduces us to the narrative that follows: Jesus’s encounter with Nicodemus.

Some translations preserve the consistency in wording that, in the Greek text, lead me to see the connection with the Nicodemus narrative (remember, translations choose what to  lose. Some help us here, some don’t). The ESV, which tries to preserve the wording says:

But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man. (John 2:24-25 ESV, bolding mine)

The ESV, while it gains something, also loses something (namely, making clear that the original text is not talking about men only – further discussion of which will be found in my forthcoming review of a book on translation). But, look at the the first verse of chapter 3:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews… (John 3:1 ESV, bolding mine).

Whatever we are to understand about the Nicodemus narrative (and that will be the next John post in which we’ll test this), we will need to interpret it in light of 2:24-25 and possibly see Nicodemus as representative of this type of person that Jesus won’t entrust himself to.

I see John as a clever and skilled writer. This is one example of that skill. He interweaves narratives and discourses which filter into his main purposes and highlight the awesomeness of Jesus.

Two nights ago I began a study on the Gospel according to John at my church. It was a good evening (I believe) where we dealt with a number of introductory matters.

Of course, first we introduced the study and how we would proceed.

Next we talked about the Gospel according to John as a whole. We discussed things like the group’s impressions of the book coming into the study, how it differs from the Synoptics, what its purpose is, who wrote it and when, etc.

Finally we talked about how we are going to go about interpreting this book and most of what we talked about pertains to the Bible as a whole. So, we talked about what follows from God being the Author of the Bible and what follows from humans being authors of the Bible. What sort of gaps do we have to traverse to get back to a 1st c. understanding of the NT (e.g. historical, cultural, linguistic, etc.)? Where does John fit in redemptive-history and what difference does that make to how we connect it to the rest of Scripture and how we apply it today? And how does application work? I concluded this section by talking about a hermeneutic of humility and a hermeneutic of faith. I’ll share more on those in a future post.

We spent an hour and a half on those things and it amazes me that we really only scratched the surface on a lot of those topics. We could easily have taken three or four hours (or longer, really). But I think it was as much as many in the church need to set the stage for getting into the text of John and surely things will come up as we go along that need to be addressed about interpretation.