John 7:19-23

“ Has not Moses given you the law? And yet no one of you keeps the law. Why do you seek to kill me? 20. The multitude answered and said: Thou art possessed by a demon; who is seeking to kill thee? 21. Jesus answered and said to them: I have done one work, and you are all in astonishment. 22. For this reason Moses has given you circumcision (not that it is of Moses, but it comes from the fathers), and on the Sabbath you circumcise a man. 23. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because I have healed a man altogether on a Sabbath? ”

This passage is an example of the skill with which Jesus handled the law. But, to understand this argument, we must guard ourselves against generalizing, as most of the interpreters do, the idea of John 7:19: No one of you fulfills the law. Thus some, as Meyer, think that Jesus means: “How will you have the right to condemn me, you who yourselves sin?” Weiss, nearly the same: “You who do not measure your conduct according to the rule of the law, how do you condemn me according to it?” But if Jesus had really violated the law, wherein would their violations justify His? Could He claim that there was no imposture in Him? Others (Hengstenberg, Waitz, Stud. u. Krit. 1881, p. 148) seek the explanation of this charge in the following question: Why do you seek to kill me? Their murderous hatred in this is the transgression of the law with which He charges them. But the expression: not to fulfill, would be too feeble to designate a desire to murder.

And with all this, no explanation is given of the meaning of the first question: Has not Moses given you the law? which appears to be absolutely idle. So we can scarcely be surprised that Bertling (Stud. u. Krit. 1880) has proposed, in spite of the authority of all the documents, to transpose the passage John 7:19-24 and place it before John 5:17! All these difficulties vanish as soon as John 7:19 is referred to its true object, which clearly appears from John 7:22-23. Jesus declares in the first place, in a purely abstract way, the fact at which He is aiming. “You yourselves, with all your respect for Moses your lawgiver, know well that occasionally you place yourselves above his law! And yet you desire to put me to death because I have thought that I could do as you do, and with much more right even than you.” These words contain the fundamental thought of the following reasoning. And it is so true that Jesus, in speaking thus, is already thinking of the act of chap. 5, that the expression: wish to kill me, reproduces the very terms of John 5:16. This question is addressed to the multitude who surround Jesus only so far as He regards it as representing the entire nation with its spiritual directors.