5:24 “I tell you the solemn truth, 1 the one who hears 2 my message 3 and believes the one who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned, 4 but has crossed over from death to life.
12:34 Then the crowd responded, 8 “We have heard from the law that the Christ 9 will remain forever. 10 How 11 can you say, ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up’? Who is this Son of Man?”
1 tn Grk “Truly, truly, I say to you.”
2 tn Or “obeys.”
3 tn Or “word.”
4 tn Grk “and does not come into judgment.”
5 tn Grk “answered and said to them.”
6 tn Grk “Truly, truly, I say to you.”
7 tn Grk “because you ate of the loaves of bread and were filled.”
8 tn Grk “Then the crowd answered him.”
9 tn Or “the Messiah” (Both Greek “Christ” and Hebrew and Aramaic “Messiah” mean “one who has been anointed”).
sn See the note on Christ in 1:20.
10 tn Probably an allusion to Ps 89:35-37. It is difficult to pinpoint the passage in the Mosaic law to which the crowd refers. The ones most often suggested are Ps 89:36-37, Ps 110:4, Isa 9:7, Ezek 37:25, and Dan 7:14. None of these passages are in the Pentateuch per se, but “law” could in common usage refer to the entire OT (compare Jesus’ use in John 10:34). Of the passages mentioned, Ps 89:36-37 is the most likely candidate. This verse speaks of David’s “seed” remaining forever. Later in the same psalm, v. 51 speaks of the “anointed” (Messiah), and the psalm was interpreted messianically in both the NT (Acts 13:22, Rev 1:5, 3:14) and in the rabbinic literature (Genesis Rabbah 97).
11 tn Grk “And how”; the conjunction καί (kai, “and”) has been left untranslated here for improved English style.
12 tn Grk “if you were of the world.”
13 tn The words “you as” are not in the original but are supplied for clarity.
14 tn Grk “because you are not of the world.”
15 tn Or “world, therefore.”
16 sn I chose you out of the world…the world hates you. Two themes are brought together here. In 8:23 Jesus had distinguished himself from the world in addressing his Jewish opponents: “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.” In 15:16 Jesus told the disciples “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you.” Now Jesus has united these two ideas as he informs the disciples that he has chosen them out of the world. While the disciples will still be “in” the world after Jesus has departed, they will not belong to it, and Jesus prays later in John 17:15-16 to the Father, “I do not ask you to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” The same theme also occurs in 1 John 4:5-6: “They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God; he who knows God listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to us.” Thus the basic reason why the world hates the disciples (as it hated Jesus before them) is because they are not of the world. They are born from above, and are not of the world. For this reason the world hates them.
17 tn Or “If I had not done.”
18 tn Grk “the works.”
19 tn Grk “they would not have sin” (an idiom).
20 tn The words “the deeds” are supplied to clarify from context what was seen. Direct objects in Greek were often omitted when clear from the context.
21 tn Or “But now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father.” It is possible to understand both the “seeing” and the “hating” to refer to both Jesus and the Father, but this has the world “seeing” the Father, which seems alien to the Johannine Jesus. (Some point out John 14:9 as an example, but this is addressed to the disciples, not to the world.) It is more likely that the “seeing” refers to the miraculous deeds mentioned in the first half of the verse. Such an understanding of the first “both – and” construction is apparently supported by BDF §444.3.
22 tn Or “power.”
23 tn Or “who delivered me over to you.”
sn The one who handed me over to you appears to be a reference to Judas at first; yet Judas did not deliver Jesus up to Pilate, but to the Jewish authorities. The singular may be a reference to Caiaphas, who as high priest was representative of all the Jewish authorities, or it may be a generic singular referring to all the Jewish authorities directly. In either case the end result is more or less the same.
24 tn Grk “has the greater sin” (an idiom).
sn Because Pilate had no authority over Jesus except what had been given to him from God, the one who handed Jesus over to Pilate was guilty of greater sin. This does not absolve Pilate of guilt; it simply means his guilt was less than those who handed Jesus over to him, because he was not acting against Jesus out of deliberate hatred or calculated malice, like the Jewish religious authorities. These were thereby guilty of greater sin.