Summary
Chapter summary
Third sign. The lame man at Bethesda. Sabbath controversy. 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' Jesus' discourse on the Son who does nothing of himself. The four witnesses. John, the works, the Father, the Scriptures. 'Ye search the scriptures … and they are they which testify of me.'
Context
Gospel · John — John overview
- A. 1–9 Thirty-Eight Years Beside the Pool of Bethesda
- B. 10–18 A Sabbath Healing Stirs the Rulers
- C. 19–30 The Son Does What He Sees the Father Doing
- D. 31–47 Four Witnesses: John, the Works, the Father, and Moses
The outline
A.Thirty-Eight Years Beside the Pool of Bethesdavv. 1 to 9
Read vv. 1 to 9 →B.A Sabbath Healing Stirs the Rulersvv. 10 to 18
Read vv. 10 to 18 →C.The Son Does What He Sees the Father Doingvv. 19 to 30
Read vv. 19 to 30 →D.Four Witnesses: John, the Works, the Father, and Mosesvv. 31 to 47
Read vv. 31 to 47 →
The world behind this chapter
John 5The history
The pool John describes with five covered colonnades was long treated as a symbolic invention until it was excavated near the Church of St. Anne in Jerusalem: two large reservoirs side by side, with porticoes on the four outer sides and one on the dividing partition between them — five. It is one of the details that convinced many readers this author knew the pre-70 city firsthand.
The sick gathered there because the water was believed to be healing when it stirred. Whatever caused the stirring, the crowd's behaviour is well attested for healing pools across the Roman world, and the man's complaint that he has nobody to put him in when it moves describes a scramble, not a queue.
The offence taken is not about the healing but about the mat. Carrying an object from one domain to another was one of the thirty-nine categories of work the teachers had defined as forbidden on the Sabbath, and telling a man to pick up his bed put Jesus in the position of instructing someone to break it.
The answer he gives steps into an existing debate. Jewish teachers had long discussed how God can be said to rest on the Sabbath while still sustaining the world, giving life and judging; the usual answer was that God is exempt. Jesus says, my Father is working until now, and I am working — and John notes precisely why that escalated the case.
What it meant to them
The rest of the chapter is a legal defence built the way Jewish law required, since a claim needed the support of two or three witnesses. Jesus calls four: John the Baptist, the works themselves, the Father, and the Scriptures.
The closing charge would have cut readers who prized their study: you search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me — yet you refuse to come to me. Moses himself is named as the accuser. This was written for people who had been told they were the ones abandoning Moses.
Sources cited
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament
- The Mishnah (Danby translation), tractate Shabbat
The text of this chapter
This site records the readings below for this chapter. Spelling and word-order differences that change no meaning are passed over.
John 5:4
The angel who troubled the water at Bethesda
The explanation that an angel stirred the pool and healed the first one in is missing from the earliest manuscripts of John, and looks like a note explaining local belief that a copyist folded into the text.
What the manuscripts read here →
This page draws on Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory; John Calvin, Commentaries; John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament and Matthew Henry, Complete Commentary.