Jesus’ mission in Judea (Jn 3:22–36) finds little attention paid to the geographical setting of this mission. Connected with this lack of interest is the question regarding a ‘Jew’ with whom the disciples of John the Baptist are reported to be in controversy according to John 3:25. A look at the geographical structure of Jesus’ mission in John 2:13–4:54 may throw new light on these issues. Apparently, the mission of Jesus in this section of the Fourth Gospel follows a geographical scheme similar to the one outlined in Acts 1:8: the disciples are to be the witnesses of Jesus in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and until the end of the earth. Different from this outline, Jesus’ mission, according to John, leads him to Galilee. All God’s people are to hear his preaching and come to faith before the great controversies with the leaders of the Jewish people in John 5–10. If a mission of Jesus in Judea forms part of his mission to Israel, the Ἰουδαῖος of John 3:25 should be understood rather as a ‘Judean’.
Jesus’ activity in Judea (Jn 3:22–36)
Recent publications on 3:22–36 are partly centred around the structure of the passage in its context (Nicklas
The geographical setting of the scene in Judea has not aroused particular interest in recent literature. One might even be astonished that an activity of Jesus in this part of Israel is mentioned, because, according to 2:13–3:21, Jesus found himself already in Jerusalem, the capital of Judea (Kysar
A related problem presents itself in the occurrence of a ‘Jew’ (Ἰουδαῖος) in 3:25 with whom the disciples of John are reported to be in dialogue about baptism. Generally, authors do not relate this person to the setting of the scene in Judea.
The first three verses of 3:22–36 are characterised by a contrast between Jesus’ coming to Judea with his disciples and John the Baptist practising his ministry in Ainon near Salim. The text does not indicate the concrete area of Jesus’ activity in Judea, but it may be deduced from the nature of Jesus’ activity: he would practice baptism in Judea where there was enough water to baptise, and this would traditionally be the case in the Jordan Valley. For Ainon near Salim authors are uncertain, but today it is situated preferably in Samaria.
A baptismal activity of Jesus is never mentioned in the New Testament except in 3:22 and may go back to tradition (Pryor
What about Jesus’ arrival in Judea according to 3:22? In my view, this information forms part of the geographical framework of John 2–4 (Beutler
In 2:13, a first Passover is mentioned together with the fact that Jesus and his disciples went up to Jerusalem for this occasion. Here, the cleansing of the temple takes place according to 2:14–22. Thus, we find Jesus active in the centre of Jewish faith and religion. In 2:23–25 the faith of many Jerusalemites, because of Jesus’ signs, is reported, but also Jesus’ lack of confidence in them, because their faith was only founded on his miraculous deeds.
The Nicodemus incident in 3:1–21 shows Jesus in dialogue with a recognised representative of the Jewish religion – even a member of the Sanhedrin – as it seems in 3:1, addressed by Jesus as ‘the teacher of Israel’ (3:10). In this whole section, we find Jesus in dialogue with a recognised representative of Judaism in the heart of Israel, the holy city of Jerusalem.
Jesus’ move to Judea in 3:22 means the first step outside this centre of Jewish belief. He and his disciples move towards the Land of Ioudaia (εἰς τὴν Ἰουδαίαν γῆν). The expression is striking, because it remains unique in the New Testament. In John, the term Ἰουδαία seems to refer to Judea, the territory of the tribe of Judah. This becomes evident by the concept of ‘Land’, which is added in 3:22 and in comparison with other parts of Israel such as Samaria and Galilee, to which Jesus moves afterwards (4:3–42–54 ). In 3:22 the double term might point also to the rural area outside Jerusalem belonging to the Southern part of Israel.
In fact, there seems to be in John 2–4 a move of Jesus away from the centre of Israel and more and more to the periphery. The movement starts in 2:13–3:21 where we see Jesus active in Jerusalem and in conflict or dialogue with the representatives of the city: the population, as such, in 2:23–25, and, in 3:1–21, Nicodemus as a recognised representative of the Jews’ leading group in the city. Whilst the response of the population, according to 2:23–25, remains rather ambiguous, Nicodemus’ response seems to be missing. We see him asking a number of questions, which are answered by Jesus successively, but do not hear whether Jesus’ explanations had any positive effect on him. Only later we will see that Nicodemus pleads for Jesus in the Sanhedrin without fear of personal consequences (7:50–52) and that he takes part in the burial of Jesus after his execution as a criminal (19:39ff.), thus taking a personal risk in his identification with Jesus.
Jesus’ activity in Jerusalem is followed by his move towards Judea in 3:22. In the whole section, Jesus is presented only in his baptismal activity (3:23); that means in his deeds, but not in the proclamation of his message. He remains rather the object of discussions amongst John the Baptist’s disciples and the mysterious Ἰουδαῖος (3:25ff.) and subsequently of the Baptist’s words about himself and about Jesus in 3:27–30 and 3:27–36 respectively. As a whole, Jesus cannot look back to his activity in Jerusalem and Judea as being particularly successful. Not by chance, the whole section of 3:22–36 ends with the statement that nobody accepts the witness of the One who came from above (3:32), although the door also remains open to an answer of faith (3:33, 34ff.).
Jesus is on the move again in chapter 4. Firstly, we are told why Jesus is leaving Judea and making his way towards Galilee passing by Samaria (4:1–3). He is leaving Jerusalem and Judea, because he has to fear the hostility of the Pharisees who heard that he had made more disciples than John the Baptist. According to John, the Pharisees are the main adversaries of Jesus. This corresponds with the fact that they were the only Jewish group, which remained after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD.
Samaria, as such, does not seem to be an independent target of Jesus’ mission in Israel right from the beginning, but Jesus interrupts his travel to Galilee in order to meet the woman from Samaria and subsequently her fellow citizens and bring them to faith in him (4:4–42). Even if this whole section might have been inserted subsequently into the context between 4:1 and 4:43, it makes good sense and rounds up Jesus’ program of proclaiming his message to all parts of historical Israel including the former Northern Kingdom.
There is even a certain emphasis on the encounter of Jesus with the woman at the well and the inhabitants of Sychar as taking place in Samaria. After the mentioning of Samaria at the beginning of the episode in 4:4 and of Sychar as a ‘town of Samaria’ in 4:5, the woman is introduced as a ‘woman from Samaria’ in 4:7. She is portrayed again this way twice in 4:9, before a comment about the lack of communication between Judeans and Samaritans. At the end of the story, ‘many Samaritans’ come to believe in Jesus and ask him to stay with them (4:39ff.). Thus, the whole narrative shows a strong insistence on the activity of Jesus in Samaria as such. Whilst Jesus found little acceptance in Jerusalem and Judea and had to leave that part of the country fearing for his life, he was welcomed in Samaria and found faith.
This movement continues with Jesus’ arrival in Galilee. Right from the beginning, Galilee was named as the destination of Jesus’ travel to the North (4:1–3). Here, Jesus had already worked his first sign (2:1–11). The place is called twice ‘Cana in Galilee’ (2:1, 11), which sounds intentional. ‘Cana in Galilee’ will also be the place of his second sign and is mentioned as such in 4:46. Again there is emphasis on this location at the end of the narrative and the whole section of John 2–4 in 4:54: ‘This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.’ We may notice again Jesus’ movement from Judea to Galilee as important for the narrator.
Thus, we are enabled to understand more easily the debated paragraph of 4:43–45. At first sight the sense seems to be clear: Jesus moves from Samaria to Galilee and is welcomed there, mainly because of the signs which he had worked in Jerusalem and of which many Galileans had been witnesses. In this case (different from 2:23–25), the reaction of the Galileans appears in a positive light. The official’s faith in 4:46–54 would then be an example of the positive reception of Jesus in Galilee. A problem poses itself in verse 44 where, as the reason for Jesus’ departure for Galilee, the saying that a prophet has no honour in his own country is quoted. The debate about this verse has been treated by the present author elsewhere.
Judea remains a country, which occurs again in the Gospel of John more than once. Chapter 7 begins with a remarkable notice, which fully confirms the perspective of 4:1–3 and 4:43–45: ‘After this Jesus went about in Galilee; he would not go about in Judea, because the Jews sought to kill him.’ Jesus’ brothers try to encourage him to go to Judea, nevertheless, in order to manifest himself there before his disciples, but Jesus refuses to do so for the moment (7:3). We may observe the correspondence of ‘Judea’ and ‘Jews’ (Judeans?) in verse 1, which will be discussed in the next section.
This correspondence occurs also in the remaining text (11:7ff.) According to 10:40, Jesus finds himself in an area on the other side of the Jordan. It is there that he hears about the serious illness of his friend Lazarus in Bethany near Jerusalem. After waiting three days, Jesus decides to go and see his friend: ‘Let us go into Judea again.’ The disciples try to warn him: ‘Rabbi, the Jews were but now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?’ As at the beginning of chapter 7, Jesus answers with a reference to the hour in which his destiny will fulfil itself. What occurs to us is the repeated correspondence between Judea and the ‘Jews’ (Ἰουδαῖοι), which still has to be explained.
The preceding study of Judea in the Gospel of John may throw light on a particularly difficult expression in the section of 3:22–36: the Ἰουδαῖος mentioned in verse 25. His occurrence seems to have intrigued interpreters from the beginning, as is manifest from the variants and conjectures in this place.
The translations
Here we come back to our study of ‘Judea’ in the Gospel of John. It was Lowe (
An exception seems to be the Ἰουδαῖοι of 6:41, 52 as the critical listeners to Jesus during his discourse on the bread of life in John 6. These are the only instances where we find such Ἰουδαῖοι without any recognisable connection with Judea or Jerusalem.
All these feasts are feasts of the Ἰουδαῖοι, according to John (see 2:13; 5:1 – feast without name; 6:4; 7:2; 11:55).
If we move back from these considerations to the meaning of Ἰουδαῖος in 3:25, it becomes more plausible that the term should mean ‘Judean’. Beyond John 6 this meaning is always recommended where we find Ἰουδαῖοι in John, together with a reference to the area of Judea, in our case mentioned in 3:22.
If the Ἰουδαῖοι in the Gospel of John are almost always rendered by the translations and commentaries as ‘Jews’, this is because, outside the Gospel of John and perhaps some gospel text,
It is probable that the first readers of John were still aware of the particular meaning of Ἰουδαῖοι in John. Reading John 9 from this perspective makes sense. The Ἰουδαῖοι would then stand for a group located in and around Jerusalem who distinguished themselves by their opposition to Jesus and his claims. It was only at a later time that the readers of the whole New Testament came across the passages about the Ἰουδαῖοι in the Gospel of John. Quite naturally, they interpreted those passages of the Fourth Gospel in the sense of the remainder of the New Testament. The consequences were extremely serious. It was no longer a group of leading Jews or Judeans in Jerusalem who opposed Jesus, tried to stone him and eventually brought him to the cross with the cooperation of the Roman occupying power, but the ‘Jews’ as such. In rendering the Ἰουδαῖοι of John as ‘Jews’, our language runs the risks of contributing to anti-Judaism with all the pernicious consequences of which we are aware (cf. again Lowe
If we return to our verse 3:25, it is appropriate to see in the Ἰουδαῖος of this verse a ‘Judean’, an inhabitant of the ‘Land of Judea’, mentioned in 3:22. Since the disciples of John the Baptist are represented as being in controversy with him, he might even be an adherent of Jesus with his differing understanding of baptism. What cannot be attributed to him is a particular connection with Judaism.
It is astonishing to see that modern translations and commentaries are rather unaware of the geographical connotation of the Ἰουδαῖος of 3:25. One exception is found in the commentary of Wengst (
The best and most detailed study of the meaning of the Ἰουδαῖος in 3:25 has been published by the American author Mark Appold in his contribution to the recent volume
At one point, a further development of the approach of Mark Appold (
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationship(s) that may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.
Further references to the Gospel of John will be indicated only by chapters and verses.
See the literature quoted in Beutler (
Schnelle (
Cf. more recently Moloney (
Murphy-O’Connor (
See the discussion in Beutler (
The list ranges from Holtzmann (
These authors range from Hoskyns (
See the discussion in Nicklas (
See for example the Jerusalem Bible, Popular Edition (1974), the German Einheitsübersetzung (1979) or the New Revised Standard Version (1989).
See for instance Schnackenburg (
They are listed in Lowe (
This fact is also seen by Lowe (
Now also in Beutler, J., 2012,
Only in John 10:22 the expression is missing.
See Beutler (
Lowe (
My contribution there makes part of a seminar on ‘Anti-Judaism in the Fourth Gospel’ from January 2000 at Leuven University and published one year later in the Netherlands as J. Beutler, 2012,
See page 45 their reference to the ‘Life’ of Josephus. References that are more precise are given by Lowe (
This development is also seen by Neyrey (
This perspective underlies the commentary of Beutler (