ἠγνόουν : they had heard the statement before, and had not forgotten the fact, and their Master had spoken too explicitly for them to be in any doubt as to His meaning. What they were ignorant of was the why, the δεῖ. With all He had said, Jesus had not yet been able to make that plain. They will never know till the Passion has become a fact accomplished. ῥῆμα, a solemn name for the utterance (vide Matthew 4:4) = the oracular, prophetic, and withal weird, mysterious word of doom. ἐφοβοῦντο, they feared to ask, they did not wish to understand, they would live on in hope that their Master was under a hallucination; true to human nature.

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Old Testament