John 5:4 BSB — MannaFest

John 5:4

BSB

Parallel translations (2) ▾

ASV

KJV

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

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A note on the manuscripts

Most scholars agree

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 it changes: No doctrine whatsoever. Nothing in Christian teaching depends on whether an angel periodically stirred a pool in Jerusalem.

The manuscripts, and the case each way →

Commentary

7 voices

Ambrose of Milan

On the Holy Spirit 1.8.88 (397)

What did the angel declare in this type but the descent of the Holy Spirit, which was to come to pass in our day and should consecrate the waters when invoked by the prayers of the priest? That angel, then, was a herald of the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as by means of the grace of the Spirit medicine was to be applied to our infirmities of soul and mind. The Spirit, then, has the same ministers as God the Father and Christ.

The record, by era

The Puritans and the Awakening4 voices

John Wesley

1703–1791

Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755)

An angel - Yet many undoubtedly thought the whole thing to be purely natural. At certain times - Perhaps at a certain hour of the day, during this paschal week, went down - The Greek word implies that he had ceased going down, before the time of St. John's writing this.

Matthew Henry

1662–1714

Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710)

The sermon was Christ's vindication of himself before the sanhedrim, when he was prosecuted as a criminal for healing the man on the sabbath day, in which, 1. He asserts his authority as Messiah, and Mediator between God and man,

Matthew Henry

1662–1714

Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710)

How it was called: It was a pool (a pond or bath), which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda--the house of mercy; for therein appeared much of the mercy of God to the sick and diseased. In a world of so much misery as this is, it is well that there are some Bethesdas--houses of mercy (remedies against those maladies), that the scene is not all melancholy.

Matthew Henry

1662–1714

Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710)

Secondly, It was a type of the Messiah, who is the fountain opened; and was intended to raise people's expectations of him who is the Sun of righteousness, that arises with healing under his wings.

The Nineteenth Century2 voices

Adam Clarke

1762–1832

Commentary on the Bible (1832)

Angel - “Of the Lord,” is added by AKL, about 20 others, the Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic, Vulgate, Anglo-Saxon, and six copies of the Itala: Cyril and Ambrose have also this reading. If this reading be genuine, and the authorities which support it are both ancient and respectable, it destroys Dr. Hammond’s conjecture, that, by the angel, a messenger only, sent from the Sanhedrin, is meant, and that these cures were all performed in a natural way.

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown

1802–1910

Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)

We have heard of many waters having a medicinal virtue; but what water was ever known to cure instantaneously a single disease? And who ever heard of any water curing all, even the most diverse diseases--"blind, halt, withered"--alike?

Voices on this verse

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Hebraic traditional view

The mat, the carrying rule, and where the ways part

“It is the sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.” The objectors stand on a real rule with a prophetic root: Jeremiah 17:21-22 forbids bearing burdens through Jerusalem's gates on the Sabbath, and the tradition codified carrying between domains as the last of the thirty-nine categories of forbidden labor (Mishnah Shabbat 7:2). The tradition's own case law even makes the fine distinction the scene turns on: one who carries out a living person on a bed is exempt FOR THE PERSON, “because the bed is secondary to the person” (Mishnah Shabbat 10:5); it is the mat alone the rule could name. Note also what no one disputes: the healing itself. Jesus healed by a word; a thirty-eight-year lameness was chronic, not mortal (mortal danger overrides the Sabbath, Mishnah Yoma 8:6), so on the tradition's categories the man could have waited one more day. Jesus refuses the wait.

At verse 18 the scene reaches the real parting of the ways, and honesty requires it be said plainly: Jesus “said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.” Here the difference is not over practice but over an essential of the Christian faith. Judaism then and now confesses the one God and reads such a claim by a man as blasphemy; Christian confession holds that Jesus' claim is true, that the Son does what the Father does (5:19-29). The two readings cannot both be right, and this page presents each side in its own words, with respect and without blur.

Sources: Mishnah Shabbat 7:2 (carrying, the last category) · Mishnah Shabbat 10:5 (the person exempt, the bed secondary) · Mishnah Yoma 8:6 (danger to life overrides the Sabbath)