Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary

John 4:22

ὃ οὐκ οἴδ. That which ye know not. The higher truth having been planted for the future, Christ proceeds to answer her question as to the present controversy. The Samaritan religion, even after being purified from the original mixture with idolatry (2 Kings 17:33; 2 Kings 17:41), remained a mutilated religion; the obscurity of the Pentateuch (and of that a garbled text) unenlightened by the clearer revelations in the Prophets and other books of O.T. Such a religion when contrasted with the Jewish, which had developed in constant contact with Divine revelation, might well be called ignorance.

ἡμεῖς κ.τ.λ. We worship that which we know. The abstract form conveyed by the neuter should be preserved in both clauses (Acts 17:23). The first person plural here is not similar to that in John 3:11 (see note there), though some would take it so. Christ here speaks as a Jew, and in such a passage there is nothing surprising in His so doing. As a rule Christ gives no countenance to the view that He belongs to the Jewish nation in any special way, though the Jewish nation specially belongs to Him (John 1:11): He is the Saviour of the world, not of the Jews only. But here, where it is a question whether Jew or Samaritan has the larger share of religious truth, He ranks Himself both by birth and by religion among the Jews. ‘We,’ therefore, means ‘we Jews.’

ὅτι. The importance of the conjunction must not be missed: the Jews know their God because the salvation of the world issues from them. Their religion was not, like the Samaritan, mere deism, but a παιδαγωγός leading on to the Messiah (Galatians 3:24).

ἡ σωτηρία ἐκ τ. Ἰ. ἐ. The salvation, the expected salvation, is of the Jews; i.e. proceeds from them (not belongs to them), in virtue of the promises to Abraham (Genesis 12:3; Genesis 18:18; Genesis 22:18) and Isaac (Genesis 26:4): comp. Isaiah 2:3; Obadiah 1:17. This verse is absolutely fatal to the theory that this Gospel is the work of a Gnostic Greek in the second century (see on John 19:35). That salvation proceeded from the Jews contradicts the fundamental principle of Gnosticism, that salvation was to be sought in the higher knowledge of which Gnostics had the key. Hence those who uphold such a theory of authorship assume, in defiance of all evidence, that this verse is a later interpolation. The verse is found in all MSS. and versions. See Introduction, Chap. II. 2. For τῶν Ἰουδαίων see on John 13:33.

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Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary

John 4:22

Old Testament

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