Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

John 5:2

ἔστι δὲ ἐν τοῖς Ἱεροσολύμοις. From the use of the present tense Bengel concludes that this was written before the destruction of Jerusalem [“Scripsit Johannes ante vastationem urbis”]. But quite probably John considered the pool one of the permanent features of the city. Its position is more precisely defined in the words ἐπὶ τῇ προβατικῇ, rendered in A.V [53] “by the sheep market” and in R.V [54] “by the sheep gate”. Others read κολυμβήθρᾳ, and render “by the sheep- pool a pool ”; Weiss, adopting this reading, supplies οἰκία or some such word: “there is by the sheep-pool a building”. But this does some violence to the sentence; and as the “sheep gate” is mentioned in Nehemiah 3:32; Nehemiah 12:39, the reading, construction, and rendering of R.V [55] are to be preferred. ἡ ἐπιλεγομένη Ἑβραϊστὶ Βηθεσδά. The pool has recently been identified. M. Clermont Ganneau pointed out that its site should not be far from the church of St. Anne, and in 1888 Herr Shick found in that locality two sister pools, one fifty-five and the other sixty feet long. The former was arched in by five arches, while five corresponding porches ran alongside the pool. By the crusaders a church had been built over this pool, with a crypt framed in imitation of the five porches and with an opening in the floor to get down to the water. That they regarded this pool as that mentioned here is shown by their having represented on the wall of the crypt the angel troubling the water. [Herr Shick's papers are contained in the Palestine Quarterly, 1888, pp. 115 134, and 1890, p. 19. See also St. Clair's Buried Cities, Henderson's Palestine, p. 180.] The pool had five porches. Bovet describes the bath of Ibrahim near Tiberias: “The hall in which the spring is found is surrounded by several porticoes in which we see a multitude of people crowded one upon another, laid on couches or rolled in blankets, with lamentable expressions of misery and suffering”. Here lay πλῆθος τῶν ἀσθενούντων, and these were of three kinds, τυφλῶν, χωλῶν, ξηρῶν.

[53] Authorised Version.

[54] Revised Version.

[55] Revised Version.

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Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

John 5:2

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