John 19:32-34

“ The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first, then of the other who was crucified with him. 33. But, when they came to Jesus, seeing that he was already dead, they did not break his legs; 34, but one of the soldiers pierced his side with his spear, and immediately there came thereout blood and water. ”

The word: they came, is more naturally explained if we hold with Storr, Olshausen and Weiss that they were different soldiers from those who had accomplished the work of crucifixion. They had been sent especially for this purpose with the necessary instruments.

If the purpose for which the limbs of the condemned were broken was that of which we have spoken, this treatment was made useless with respect to Jesus by the fact of His death. The spear-thrust of the soldier was, therefore, as it were, only a compensation for the operation which was omitted; it signified: If thou art not dead already, here is what will finish thee. It would be absurd to demand examples for such an act, which had in it nothing judicial.

The verb νύσσειν indicates a more or less deep thrust, in contrast to a cut. This term is sometimes used in Homer to designate mortal wounds.

Is the fact of the outflowing of the blood and water to be regarded as a natural phenomenon? In general, undoubtedly, when a dead body is pierced, no liquid comes forth from it; nevertheless, if one of the large vessels is reached, it may happen that there will flow from the wound a blackish blood covered with a coating of serum. Can this be what John calls blood and water? This is improbable. Ebrard accordingly supposes that the lance reached the deposits of extravasated blood. Gruner (Commentatio de morte Jesu Christi vera, Halle, 1805) also has this opinion. He thinks that the lance pierced the aqueous deposits which, during this long-continued torture, had been formed around the heart, and then the heart itself. William Stroud (London, 1847) alleges phenomena observed in cases of sudden death in consequence of cramp of the heart. These explanations are all of them quite improbable. The expression: blood and water, naturally denotes two substances flowing simultaneously, but to the eyes of the spectators distinct, a thing which has no place in any of these suppositions. Baur, Strauss, etc., conclude from this that there is a necessity for a symbolic interpretation, and find here again the purely ideal character of the narrative. The author meant to express by this fact of his own invention the abundance of spiritual life which will, from this moment, flow forth from the person of Christ (Baur); the water more especially represents the Holy Spirit, the blood the Holy Supper, with an allusion to the custom of mixing the wine of this sacrament with water (Strauss, in his new Life of Jesus). But what idea must we form of the morality of a man who should solemnly affirm that he had seen (John 19:35) that which he had the consciousness of having beheld only in idea. In favor of this allegorical explanation an appeal has been made to the words in 1 John 5:6: “ He came not by water only, but by water and blood. ” But these words do not have the least connection with the fact with which we are occupied.

The water of which John speaks in his epistle denotes, as John 3:5, baptism: Jesus did not come, like the forerunner, only with the baptism of water, the symbol of purification, but with the blood which brings the expiation itself. In our view there remains but one explanation: it is that which admits that this mysterious fact took place outside of the laws of common physiology, and that it is connected with the exceptional nature of a body which sin had never tainted and which moved forward to the resurrection without having to pass through dissolution. At the instant of death, the process of dissolution, in general, begins. The body of Jesus must have taken at that moment a different path from that of death: it entered upon that of glorification. He who was the Holy One of God, in the absolute sense of the word, was also absolutely exempt from corruption (Psa 16:10). This is the meaning which the evangelist seems to me to have ascribed to this unprecedented phenomenon, of which he was a witness.

Thus is explained the affirmation, having somewhat the character of an oath, by which, in the following verse, he certifies its reality; not that the affirmation of John 19:35 refers only to this fact; for it certainly has reference to the totality of the facts mentioned John 19:33-34 (see below). Weiss holds that there is a natural phenomenon here which cannot be certainly explained; but he thinks that John saw in the blood the means of our redemption and in the water the symbol of its purifying force. In this case, a grossly superstitious idea must be imputed to the apostle: by what right? The text says not a word of such a symbolic sense. According to Reuss, also, the blood designates the redemptive death, and the water baptism, and we have here a mystical explanation of a fact which struck the author. All this has no better foundation than the opinion of those who think that the evangelist wished to combat the idea that Jesus was not really dead (Lucke, Neander), or the idea that He had only an apparent body (Olshausen). The first of these ideas is entirely modern; the second ascribes to the author an argument which has no force, since the Docetae did not in the least deny the sensible appearances in the earthly life of Jesus.

The absence of all corruption in the Holy One of God implied the beginning of the restoration of life from the very moment when, at death, in the case of every sinner the work of dissolution which is to destroy the body commences.