John 4:44

αὐτὸς γὰρ κ.τ.λ. This is a well-known difficulty. As in John 20:17, we have a reason assigned which seems to be the very opposite of what we should expect. This witness of Jesus would account for His not going into Galilee: how does it account for His going thither? It seems best to fall back on the old explanation of Origen, that by ‘His own country’ is meant Judaea, ‘the home of the Prophets,’ and, we may add, the land of His birth, for centuries connected with Him by prophecy. Moreover, Judaea fits in with the circumstances. He had not only met with little honour in Judaea; He had been forced to retreat from it. No Apostle had been found there. The appeal to Judaea had in the main been a failure. True that the Synoptists record a similar saying (Matthew 13:57; Mark 6:4; Luke 4:24) not in relation to Judaea, but to Nazareth, ‘where He had been brought up.’ But as they record the Galilaean, and S. John the Judaean ministry, it is only natural that a saying capable of various shades of meaning, and perhaps uttered on more than one occasion, should be applied in different ways by them and by S. John. Origen’s explanation accounts quite satisfactorily not only for the γάρ here, but also for the οὖν in John 4:45, which means When therefore He came into Galilee, the welcome which He received proved the truth of the saying; ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ received Him whom οἱ ἴδιοι (John 1:11), the Jews of Jerusalem and Judaea, had rejected.