John 6:41,42

“ The Jews therefore murmured concerning him, because he said: I am the bread which came down from heaven. 42. And they said: Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we ourselves know? How then does he say:I came down from heaven? ”

The term: murmured, must denote an unfavorable whispering which made itself heard in the circle of hearers. The objective words περὶ αὐτοῦ, concerning Him, are explained by the following words: The term ᾿Ιουδαῖοι, the Jews, might refer to the emissaries of the Sanhedrim, who, according to the Synoptics, had come from Judea to watch the words and actions of Jesus in Galilee. But the following words: we know, are more easily explained in the mouths of the Galileans themselves. John applies to them here this title, which is customary in his Gospel (Introd., vol. I., p. 128), because of the community in unbelief which, from this time, unites them with the mass of the Jewish nation which persists in remaining Jewish and refuses to become believing. It is impossible for them to recognize a heavenly being, who has become incarnate, in Him with whose human filiation they are perfectly acquainted.

The pronoun ἡμεῖς, we, does not necessarily indicate a personal acquaintance, from which it might be inferred that Joseph was still living. This expression may signify: “We know the name of his parents.” Νῦν, now, may be read with some Alexandrian documents, instead of οὖν, therefore: it means: in this state of things. Criticism has asked how the people could be ignorant of the miraculous birth of Jesus, if this were a real fact, and why Jesus did not notice this point in His reply. But Jesus' birth had taken place in Judea; thirty years separated it from the period in which we now find ourselves. During the long obscurity which had enveloped the childhood and youth of Jesus, all had passed into oblivion, and that, probably, even in the places where the facts had occurred; how much more in Galilee, where the mass of the people had always been ignorant of them. Assuredly, neither the parents of Jesus, nor Jesus Himself could make allusion to them in public; this would have been to expose the most sacred mystery of family history to a profane, and, in addition to this, useless discussion. For the miraculous origin of Jesus is not a means of producing faith; it can be accepted only by the heart already believing. As Weiss says: “It is not really these scruples which are the cause of their unbelief. And this is the reason why Jesus does not stop to refute them.” Instead, therefore, of descending to this ground, Jesus remains in the moral sphere, and discovers to the Galileans, as He had done to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, chap. 5, the true cause of their unbelief.