John 5:3,4

“ In these porches lay a great number of sick persons, blind, lame, withered, [waiting for the movement of the water. 4. For an angel descended from time to time into the pool and troubled the water; whosoever then first entered in after the troubling of the water, was healed of whatever disease he had].”

The spectacle which this portico surrounding the pool presented is reproduced in some sort de visu by Bovet, describing the baths of Ibrahim, near Tiberias: “The hall where the spring is found is surrounded by several porticos, in which we see a multitude of people crowded one upon another, laid upon pallets or rolled in blankets, with lamentable expressions of misery and suffering..... The pool is of white marble, of circular form and covered by a cupola supported by columns; the basin is surrounded on the interior by a bench on which persons may sit.” Ξηροί, impotent, properly denotes those who have some member affected with atrophy, or, according to the common expression, wasting away. The end of John 5:3 and the 4th verse are wanting in the larger part of the Alexandrian MSS., and are rejected by Tischendorf, Lucke, Tholuck, Olshausen, Meyer.

The large number of variants and the indications of doubt by which this passage is marked in several MSS., favor the rejection. The defenders of the authenticity of the passage, for example Reuss, explain the omission of it by the Alexandrian authorities by a dogmatic antipathy which, they hold, betrayed itself in the similar omission Luke 22:43-44 (the appearance of the angel at Gethsemane). This supposition would not, by any means, apply either to the Sinaitic MS., which has the passage in Luke entire, or to the Alexandrian which, in our passage, reads the fourth verse. The Vatican MS., alone presents the two omissions together; which evidently is not enough to justify the suspicion expressed above.

I held with Ewald, in my earlier editions, that the true reading is the one presented by the Cambridge MS., and by numerous MSS. of the Itala, which preserve the close of John 5:3 while omitting the whole of John 5:4. The words: waiting for the movement of the water, if they are authentic, may indeed easily have occasioned the gloss of John 5:4. And John 5:7 seems to demand, in what precedes, something like the last words of John 5:3. Still it seems to me difficult to understand what should have occasioned the omission of these words in so large a number of documents, if they had originally formed part of the text. I am inclined, therefore, to hold with Weiss, Keil, etc., that they, as well as John 5:4, were added. The whole was at first written on the margin by a copyist; then this marginal remark was introduced into the text, as is observed in so many cases. This interpolation must be very ancient, for it is found already in one of the Syriac Versions (Syr sch), and Tertullian seems to allude to it (de Bapt., c. 5). It was the expression of the popular opinion respecting the periodical movement of the water. According to the authentic text, there is nothing supernatural in the phenomenon of Bethesda. The whole is reduced to the intermittence which is so frequently observed in thermal waters. It is known that these waters have the greatest efficacy at the moment when they spring up, set in ebullition by the increased action of the gas, and it was at this moment that each sick person tried to be the first to feel its influence. Hengstenberg, who admits the intervention of the angel, extends the same explanation to all thermal waters. But it would be necessary, in this case, to hold a singular exaggeration in the terms of John 5:4. For after all no mineral water instantaneously heals the sick and all the kinds of maladies which are here mentioned.