John 4:22

ye know not what Or, that which ye know not. 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 that of the Jews might well be called ignorance.

we know what we worship Or, we worship that which we know. 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."

salvation is of the Jews Literally, the salvation, the expected salvation, is of the Jews; i.e. proceeds fromthem (not belongs tothem), in virtue of the promises to Abraham (Genesis 12:3; Genesis 18:18; Genesis 22:18) and Isaac Genesis 26:4). 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.