John 12:16

Ver. 16. “ Now the disciples did not understand these things at the moment; but when Jesus had been glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of him and that they had done these things to him. ”

It was only afterwards, when after the ascension, and when enlightened by the Holy Spirit, they retraced the earthly life of their Master, that they discerned the meaning of this event and recognized in it the fulfillment of a prophecy. In the light of the heavenly elevation of Jesus, they understood this fact which had prefigured it (these things). There is, therefore, no reason to turn aside from the natural sense of ἐδοξάσθη, was glorified, and to refer this term, as Reuss does, to the death of Jesus, as the transition to His exaltation. What a charlatan the pseudo-John of Baur, who, by means of this want of understanding invented by him, would give himself the appearance of having himself been one of these disciples whom the ascension had enlightened! We are surprised at the expression “ that they had done these things to him ”; for, in the scene related by John, the apostles had done nothing to Jesus. So many take ἐποίησαν in the sense in which it is found in John 12:2: “ They (indefinite) had done to him,” and assign as subject to this verb the multitude (John 12:12-13).

But the subject of they had done cannot be different from that of they understood and they remembered. John wished to set forth precisely the fact that the disciples understood afterwards what they had done themselves in the fulfillment of a prophecy of which no one of them dreamed. The co- operation of the disciples, indicated by John, is described in detail in Luke 19:29-36 and the paral lels. We find here a new proof of the abridged character of his narrative and his thoroughly conscious relation to the narrative of the Synoptics. We see from the words: they had done these things to him, how arbitrary is the idea of Keim, according to which John's narrative tends to make the disciples and Jesus passive in this scene, and this because the author wished to give utterance to his repugnance to the idea of the Jewish Messiah!