John 8:27

Ver. 27. Criticism declares the want of understanding of the Jews which is mentioned in John 8:27 impossible. Can those of whom John speaks, then, be, as Meyer thinks, new hearers who had not been present at the previous discourses? Or must we understand with Lucke : They were not willing to acknowledge that it was the Father who really made Him speak in this way; or with Weiss: They did not understand that He had the mission to reveal the Father by declaring what He inwardly heard from Him. These are manifest tortures inflicted on the text. The ἔλεγεν cannot be taken here in the same sense as in John 6:71: to speak of. It must be observed that in this whole discourse from John 8:21, Jesus had spoken of Him who sent Him, without once pronouncing the name either of God or of the Father. Now among the multitude there might be found hearers who were unable to imagine so close a relation between a human creature and the infinite God as that of which Jesus was bearing witness, and who consequently asked themselves whether He did not mean to speak of some one of the persons who were to precede the Messiah and with whom Jesus sustained a secret relation, as the Messiah was to do with Elijah. Think of the strange misunderstandings attributed by the Synoptics to the apostles themselves! After eighteen centuries of Christianity, many things in the discourses of Jesus appear evident to us, which, through their novelty and the opposition which they encountered from inveterate prejudices, must have appeared strange in the extreme to the greater part of His hearers. No doubt, if the heart had been better disposed, the mind would have been more open.

To this want of intelligence in His present hearers, Jesus opposes the announcement of the day when the full light will come among them respecting His mission, after the great national crime which they are on the point of committing.