[B-Greek] Jn 2:25 AUTOS DE IHSOUS OUK EPISTEUEN AUTON AUTOIS

Webb webb at selftest.net
Tue Feb 20 14:50:00 EST 2007


I think something significant drops out if one translates AUTOS DE IHSOUS
OUK EPISTEUEN AUTON AUTOIS as "Jesus didn't trust them. I would render it:

"But Jesus himself wasn't entrusting himself to them."
Or maybe, in order to remove the stylistic clumsiness of the two instances
of "himself":
"But as for Jesus, he wasn't entrusting himself to them."

Later in John, the crowds attempt to crown Jesus as king by force (see Jn
6:15), but Jesus refuses to be conscripted in that way. I suspect that John
is giving us a hint of that same dynamic in Jn 2:25. 

As for Jn 2:23, POLLOI EPISTEUSAN EIS TO ONOMA AUTOU, "lots of people
believed in his name", I think it doesn't mean that people emotionally
"trusted Jesus". In context, I think it means that people were forming an
opinion that Jesus was someone special and positively gifted by God in a
religious sense, and that they were more or less associating themselves with
him by embracing that opinion. 
To give a modern example, you could ask somebody, "Do you believe in
Benjamin Creme?" You could also ask, "Do you trust Benjamin Creme?" The
answers to these two questions would probably be the same 95% of the time,
but they are not the same question. I think John is affirming that people
"believed in" Jesus in the sense I just mentioned, not that they "trusted"
him. 
Of course, literally it says that they "believed in his name". By this, John
could even be saying that they believed that in some way his divine gifting
was expressed in his literal name, Jehoshua', "YHWH Saves". In other words,
they could be thinking/believing/hoping that Jesus was a divinely appointed
savior for Israel.

Webb Mealy





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