Note 17 — Chapter VII · DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

From v. 16, even those commentators who pretend to some ability in this department, lose all hope of showing that the remainder of the discourse may have been spoken by Jesus. Not only does Paulus make this confession, but even Olshausen, with a concise statement of his reasons.17 At the above verse, any special reference to Nicodemus vanishes, and there is commenced an entirely general discourse on the destination of the Son of God, to confer a blessing on the world, and on the manner in which unbelief forfeits this blessing. Moreover, these ideas are expressed in a form, which at one moment appears to be a reminiscence of the Evangelist’s introduction, and at another has a striking similarity with passages in the first Epistle of John.18 In particular, the expression, the only begotten Son, ὁ μονογενὴς υἱὸς, which is repeatedly (v. 16 and 18) attributed to Jesus as a designation of his own person, is nowhere else found in his mouth, even in the fourth gospel; this circumstance, however, marks it still more positively as a favourite phrase of the Evangelist (i. 14–18), and of the writer of the Epistles (1 John iv. 9). Further, many things are spoken of as past, which at the supposed period of this conversation with Nicodemus were yet future. For even if the words, he gave, ἔδωκεν, refer not to the giving over to death, but to the sending of the Messiah into the world; the expressions, men loved darkness, ἡγάπησαν οἱ ἄνθρωποι τὸ σκότος, and, their deeds were evil, ῆν πονηρὰ αὐτῶν τὰ ἔργα (v. 19), as Lücke also remarks, could only be used after the triumph of darkness had been achieved in the rejection and execution of Jesus: they belong then to the Evangelist’s point of view at the time when he wrote, not to that of Jesus when on the threshold of his public ministry. In general the whole of this discourse attributed to Jesus, with its constant use of the third person to designate the supposed speaker; with its dogmatical terms only begotten, light, and the like, applied to Jesus; with its comprehensive view of the crisis and its results, which the appearance of Jesus produced, is far too objective for us to believe that it came from the lips of Jesus. Jesus could not speak thus of himself, but the Evangelist might speak thus of Jesus. Hence the same expedient has been adopted, as in the case of the Baptist’s discourse already considered, and it has been supposed that Jesus is the speaker down to v. 16, but that from that point the Evangelist appends his own dogmatic reflections.19 But there is again here no intimation of such a transition in the text; rather, the connecting word for, γὰρ (v. 16), seems to indicate a continuation of the same discourse. No writer, and least of all the fourth Evangelist (comp. vii. 39, xi. 51 f., xii. 16, xxxiii. 37 ff.), would scatter his own observations thus undistinguishingly, unless he wished to create a misapprehension.20