John Chapter 18
This picks up at the end of Jesus' prayer for his disciples in the upper room.
2021-2, At the end of Chapter 14, Jesus says "Rise, let us go from here." Now, at the beginning of 18, John tells us they "went out" after the prayer. Why would they have stayed all that time between these two phrases? Or did they? Perhaps the Upper Room had a dining room and another room, and they went in there for a bit before leaving. I guess it really isn't that big a deal...
They go out, cross Kidron, and arrive at Gethsemane. Judas knows the place, and shows up there with "a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees". They had lanterns, torches, and weapons. Here is the verse:
3 So Judas, having procured a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees, went there with lanterns and torches and weapons. [Jhn 18:3 ESV]
2021 - So in John's gospel, the Pharisees are there, too. John puts them in the Garden at the arrest but he doesn't mention them again after that. No....it does not say the Pharisees are there. It says some officers from them are there. The Temple Guards are a good possibility here, the same guards that refused to arrest Jesus when they were sent to the Temple to get him. Some officers of that guard. So after reading this, I don't think any chief priests or elders were there at the arrest either. It was the Temple guards - all Jewish, some of their officers, a mob of rabble, and Judas. That is who made the arrest. That's why Jesus asks why they didn't just arrest him in the temple! Going back and re-reading about the arrest in all four gospels, they all say that Judas arrived with an armed "multitude" in Mark, with an armed "great multitude" in Matthew, a "multitude" in Luke, and armed "soldiers and officers" in John. Matthew and Mark say these were sent from the chief priests and elders. Luke doesn't say who sent them. John says chief priests and Pharisees sent them. So there it is all laid out. I think this is the right way to understand it. The Chief Priests, Elders and Pharisees (Scribes would have had not authority here) decide the time has come to arrest Jesus - in the middle of the night. They call some officers of the Temple Guard, and tell them to get some soldiers and go arrest Jesus. Could have been others around, but it could also be that as the soldiers marched through the streets on their way to get Jesus that a mob fell in behind and went with them, taking up whatever weapons they could, thinking they would "help out" the Temple guards since this must be a matter of importance to the Jews. Imagine this rabble...they were still out in the middle of the night, likely drunk, with no idea where they were going, but excited about the opportunity to commit some violence. When they got to the garden, they probably didn't even recognize who was being taken. Not like they had street lights. And this is who came to arrest Jesus. Soldiers and drunks with weapons.
2022 - Look closely at vs 3...Judas procured those soldiers from the chief priests and the Pharisees. Since when have Roman soldiers been at the beck and call of ANY Jew? It was not Roman soldiers who arrested Jesus. It just could not have been.
2024 - I think it is that word "cohort" that implies Roman soldiers. I see no way at all that Roman soldiers would have been under the command of the temple guards. Cohort is used in NASB95. ESV says "a band of soldiers". That's really my only argument, I don't know enough Greek to argue on that basis. There are places where we are obviously talking about Roman soldiers - a contingent of Romans about squad size, as in Acts 10:1, where Cornelius is a Centurion over a cohort. But in context, I don't see that meaning here.
2026 - The LSB renders it "having received a Roman cohort and officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees". In John, the word is "speiran". The word Roman is strictly supplied. It is not in the text of John. The word is used 7 times in the mGNT. Two of those are in this chapter of John, vs 3 and 12. In the other five verses where it is used, context emphatically implies that it is Roman soldiers involved, because they name the Italian Cohort, they say the soldiers inside the palace, the Tribune of the cohort. I just do not believe that Roman soldiers were sent by Jews to arrest Jesus. The command structure would not have allowed it. The disdain Romans had for Jews would not have allowed it. There is just far too much interpretation being applied here.
2022 - This one:
4 Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, "Whom do you seek?" [Jhn 18:4 ESV].
Here is another instance of John explaining what is going on to us in a sort of aside.
Well...MSB note on John 18:3 says the soldiers with Judas were a Roman cohort. Why would the Romans go with him??? The NASB actually translates it "having received the Roman cohort". Roman is italicized in NASB, perhaps to say that all the original text really says is "cohort". Why then would we think it was Roman? They don't even know about this arrest! I think this was a cohort of the Temple guard. I looked at the interlinear. The word Roman is not there. It says Judas had obtained a "speira". It is used only 7 times in the KJV and is translated "band" each and every time. Not cohort. There's quite a bit more on the word in the BLB interlinear, but I don't see anything there that nails it down as always and only a Roman Cohort. I will therefore maintain that there were no Roman soldiers present...and move on!
John says nothing about a kiss. Nothing at all. In John's description, Jesus goes forward and asks the soldiers who they came for. They say Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answers "I am he". The power of his words causes them to "draw back and fall to the ground". 2021 - I suspect that the phrase "I am he" correlates all the way back to the OT phrase "I am that I am". I think only John tells us this.
2021-2, He says "ego eimi", the very same phrase that caused the Pharisees to pick up stones to kill him earlier. This is an unmistakable declaration.
2022 - This is the sentence without a predicate. All it says is "I am..." The "he" that we see in English versions is not actually there. It is only implied. "ego eimi" without a predicate must be equivalent to the Hebrew phrase "I am" has sent me that God gave to Moses.
This exchange is repeated after they all stand back up. Jesus asks that those with him be allowed to leave since it is just him that they came for. John says this was scripture fulfilled:
9 This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken: "Of those whom you gave me I have lost not one." [Jhn 18:9 ESV]
This verse is ONLY about the 11, and though Jesus said it many times (Jn 6:39, 40, and 44; 10:28; and 17:12) all are in the New Testament. John says this is Jesus keeping his promise to them. It does not refer back to any OT prophecy.
2023 - So the entry yesterday - or least my thought yesterday - where in Jesus' prayer he says he has kept all BUT ONE - is first about the apostles. About the 12. And that one had to be lost because OT prophecy said he would be betrayed by one of his own. And no matter what about perseverance, no one betrays the Son of Man and still gets into heaven. So this verse confirms that "lost salvation" is only about the 12. And again, we have to wonder how much of what Jesus has said in 13-18 is about JUST the 12 and how much is for all of us.
2024 - If John tells us specifically, categorically that Jesus asked that the others be allowed to leave to fulfill the prophecy that he would lose none of those given to him, then this is not about losing salvation at all. These 11 are the "successors" of Jesus in bringing the good news to the world. God gave them to him for that purpose, and in his own power he has kept Satan from undoing any of the others as he has undone Judas. Not only does Jesus not lose them here, but they are faithful unto death - all of them - and the "endure to the end". These 11 do that, as history shows us. This is not at all about perseverance of the saints in Calvinistic terms. It is about the 11. I have never been as "certain" of this concept as now. I expect a lot of things Jesus said will need to be understood differently once this is accepted as the correct interpretation.
2021 - Reading the MSB notes, Jesus has used this phrase before to indicate that he was God. The phrase carried power and knocked everyone down. This should have gotten the attention of everyone present - even the drunks. MSB says Jesus asked them twice who they were after to establish with certainty that they were not after the disciples. So he asked them twice, and he demonstrated that they ought to pay real close attention. Had some or all of the disciples been arrested also, they too might have been crucified or killed by the mob. So Jesus is making certain that the prophecy mentioned in Jn 18:9 is fulfilled. This verse was NEVER about perseverance of the saints.
2022 - This verse:
12 So the band of soldiers and their captain and the officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him. [Jhn 18:12 ESV]. Hmm...a "band" of soldiers and their captain...and then separately the officers of the Jews. Once again, it is the word "speira" that is translated "Roman cohort". Here are the possibilities as found in BLB for Strong's G4686:
anything rolled into a circle or ball, anything wound, rolled up, folded together
a military cohort
the tenth part of legion
about 600 men i.e. legionaries
if auxiliaries either 500 or 1000
a maniple, or the thirtieth part of a legion
any band, company, or detachment, of soldiers
It looks to me like we have to choose whether these were Romans or not. The word was apparently commonly used to describe various assemblies of Roman soldiers. Likely that was even the most common use. But I still have a big problem with a Roman speira being assigned to the command of the Jews in the middle of the night. I think we ought to read it as shown in 2.2 above. ANY detachment of soldiers. Back is Jn 7.32, they sent "the Pharisee's officers" to arrest Jesus, and when they come back without him, in Jn 7:45, they are still called officers. You can't (or at least you don't) have officers who command no one. There had to be soldiers - there had to be "bands, companies, and/or detachments" of soldiers that these officers commanded. In 7, they were still trying to be low key, so they only sent the officers. In the garden in the middle of the night, they sent a whole detachment. After all, Jesus was known always to have the 12 with him, and very often he was surrounded by disciples. They had to assume there would be resistance. These were not Romans. It is a mistranslation.
But...if I say that, am I not saying there are errors in the Bible? NO! God forbid! There can be errors in translation. The original Greek text does NOT say Romans, and I do not think it should have been translated that way. And how about this...here is the KJV:
3 Judas then, having received a band [of men] and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons. [Jhn 18:3 KJV]. This is the right translation. KJV doesn't even "assume" they were men. What it says is "speira". Some soldiers.
Later the same day, 2022. I continued to look at this passage. There is almost no difference in the TR and the mGNT on this verse. The works "ek ton" are used twice in the mGNT, and only once in the TR. The first time they are used in the mGNT, the are translated "from the". A simple conjunction and a definite article. So leaving them out certainly does not do away with the possibility that they mean Roman cohort instead of band of soldiers. I found that the NLT, the LSB, and the two versions of the NASB are the only ones who make this a Roman thing. None of the Synoptics use the word "speira" at all. They all use some form of "ochlos" which means crowd. The Synoptics don't tell us that any soldiers were present at all, nor do they specifically say that none were there. Matthew uses "ochlos" also. No mention of soldiers, just a crowd. Same with Mark. "Ochlos" is the word. So why am I making such a big deal about this? Because this is a fine example of the difference between translations and interpretations. Translations, as much as possible, do a word by word translation, and work very hard at not adding anything to the text that isn't certainly there. So when the four "interpretive" Bibles referenced above say a cohort of Roman soldiers, they introduce all kinds of things into this story that are not there. They have Jewish religious officials ordering Roman troops around in the middle of the night. That means we have Romans conspiring with Jews to arrest Jesus before the fact. Certainly Herod's and Pilate's actions and words indicate that there was no love lost at all between these two groups. Why also did these Roman troops, after arresting Jesus, allow him to be taken to the back yard of the high priest's son, rather than to a Roman holding cell until morning? Just look at the mess we have put the "Bible" in if we interpret instead of translate.
Now, let's think about what is going on in the SBC since the meeting in Anaheim. Let's start with what these verses mean?
12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. [1Ti 2:12 ESV]. Interestingly, every Bible available to me, including the four mentioned above, put this the same way.
What does this one mean?
2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, [1Ti 3:2 ESV]. Can any divorced man be above reproach?
Did you know that the English word pastor does not appear in the NT in either the KJV or the ESV? It shows up a lot in the Spanish translation - the RVR60. It shows up 13 times in 12 verses in this version. There, it is the translation of the Greek word "poimen", which is a masculine noun meaning herdsman or shepherd. In fact, everywhere RVR60 has the word pastor, the mGNT has shepherd. Every time. Every time it is "poimen". Every time it is a masculine noun. It ALWAYS refers either to shepherd as a metaphor, or when specific, it refers to Jesus himself as the Good Shepherd. There is only this verse that allows for any wiggle room on "pastors":
25 For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. [1Pe 2:25 ESV]. This is obviously a reference specifically to Jesus, and is not about "qualifications" for any office. The word here translated Overseer is the Greek "episkopos". It is also sometimes translated Bishop. So if you want to debate the meaning of the word "Pastor", as used by the church, and whether or not in might include women, this is the only place you can connect it at all to a discussion of church officials. You have to take it out of context, where it specifically refers to Jesus and ONLY Jesus, and you have to say that because it is the same sentence with Shepherd and has the word "and" in between poimen (which is Spanish Bibles is the word pastor) and episkopos - and you declare that the two are now equivalent - so poimen means the same as episkopos, and then you have to note that episkopos is sometimes used of church offices, that means that a pastor and an episkopos is the same thing, so we can look at where and how "episkopos" is used in order to determine whether or not it is ok to give women the title of pastor as it applies to women's positions in the church. And we have to do ignore that the NT NEVER translates episkopos - even in the RVR60, as pastor. Never ever not even once in any version of the Bible.
This is surely shaky ground.
So what I predict will happen is that the committee studying whether or not the "title" pastor can be given to a woman will say that the Bible does not address it at all. They will say that Pastor, as a title, is an invention of the early church, and that it came into wider and wider use in some early century AD. And then they will say that because the early church did it, and they were closer to the source material than we are, then since we have one place where we think that maybe this one church had a woman "pastor", then it is ok for everybody everywhere today to apply the title pastor to women.
In the church that I go to, we already are giving the title of "Teacher" to women in xx classes. Bot back up and look at 1Ti 2:12, where ALL translations agree on what it says. If our church will bend that inarguable verse to let women teach men, then just how big a problem do you think they are going to have with women pastors? And how long until we go from there to women preachers in the SBC.
This is all about interpretation. It has never been about translation. Translations are as close as English can get to the oldest copies of scripture that we have - which are in Greek for the NT. And even here, "word for word" is often impossible to do in a way that makes any sense at all, and we know the word makes sense.
(((Note also that the "overseer", the episkopos in 1Ti 3:2, must be the husband of one wife. So if an episkopos is a pastor, then the episkopos must have a wife. Pretty sure that doesn't mean it is ok for a woman to marry a woman, and be an overseer.)))
The only way to stay true to the word is to translate, and NEVER EVER to interpret! In the Bible, women are never to be in authority over men IN THE CHURCH. At home, we all know what happens, but NOT at church. If we exclusively translate, and never "add" to what is there by reinterpreting what the word meant when it was written by the original author, and we ALWAYS consider context, and the weight of other translated scripture on the one we are trying to understand, we will not get into any trouble. We get into trouble when we try to decide how Paul would write it if he were living in our century instead of in the century when he did in fact do his writing. And that is called interpretation. We ought to all be pretty informed about how that works since we are not today in a recession!!!!
Jesus is taken to the house of Annas, father-in-law of the high priest Caiaphas who was high priest that year. But they took him to a residence. Just a house. He was not taken to jail or to court at this hour. He was in the hands of a mob in a rich man's back yard, with no hope of outside help to stop this injustice. But he knew this when he surrendered to them.
2026 - Why would Roman soldiers have taken a Roman prisoner to the house of a Jewish high priest? We have no evidence in the Bible that the Romans wanted Jesus dead. None at all. And Romans didn't work under Jewish authority, but the other way around. These were Temple guards, as the ones previously sent to arrest Jesus in the Temple, who refused to do so.
2026 - On the same subject, look at Pilate's response to Jesus in vs 35. "Am I a Jew", spoken I'm sure quite derisively of Jews. No. Not a ROMAN cohort at all.
As I read it, John was recognizable by the high priest. So he went on into the courtyard with Jesus. Seems as if the high priest was being careful as to just who got into the yard and could testify to the events there. Peter was not let in. But John sent word to a servant girl to open the gate for Peter. She was being careful not to let anyone in who was loyal to Jesus. So she asks Peter if he is a follower of Jesus, and Peter says no. Looked at several other translations. All make it clear that he would not have gotten inside if he had admitted to being a disciple. Maybe this is how he justified denying Christ. He wanted to get in and see what was happening. To be closer by denying, however, may be a very poor strategy. To "win some" by joining the other team is not a good strategy. Think of the implications. Peter purposely associated himself with the crowd in order to get in and see what was going to happen. How many churches try to make themselves appear secular in order to reach a larger audience? Is this the same thing, or is it qualitatively different?
Then this verse:
18 Now the servants and officers had made a charcoal fire, because it was cold, and they were standing and warming themselves. Peter also was with them, standing and warming himself. [Jhn 18:18 ESV]
This is phrased as if Peter was over by the fire with the bad guys, but John was not with them. John was standing elsewhere? Apart, in the cold, exposing himself to accusation or questioning? Taking a stand apart?
After being questioned by Annas, Jesus is sent bound to the high priest Caiaphas. As this occurs, Peter is still by the fire, and again he is questioned about his association with Jesus. Again, in order to remain where he is, Peter denies any association with Jesus. This time, he is likely thinking that if they find out as he stands among them, they might take direct action against him. So this denial is not aimed at getting closer to events, but is protecting his own skin. But then an eye witness, a relative of Malchus, says he actually saw Peter with Jesus in the garden that very night. Peter's third denial is the most incriminating yet. He lies to an eye witness. He is found out at this point. They had to know he was lying, and that he was in fact a disloyal, cowardly disciple. He was an abject failure of a disciple at this point. This is when the rooster crowed.
So he lied to get in, he lied to stay warm, and then he lied to stay hidden. This will preach.
Also, he lied to get in, he lied to stay in, he lied to stay hidden. The clear and unmistakable indication is that Peter WAS a disciple, but that he was weak, and concerned at this time with himself more than with eternity. But there is never an indication at all that he "disowned" Jesus. He never renounced his citizenship. He just claimed to be Canadian instead of American. Maybe that is the key. Claiming to be from Canada may keep you alive to fight another day. It feels, it looks cowardly and wrong, but it keeps you alive. And in Peter's case, it was forgivable.
Jesus is taken from Caiaphas' house to Pilate. Pilate tells them not to bother him, but to judge Jesus by their own laws. But they reply that Roman law precludes their putting him to death. There is a very interesting note in MSB about this. Jesus had predicted that in death, he would be raised up or lifted up. If the Jews executed him, he would be thrown down and stoned to death. They may have preferred that Jesus be crucified because of this verse:
23 his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance. [Deu 21:23 ESV] So their plan may have been to bring God's curse on Jesus because he stayed on the cross all night. But Jesus dies in daylight, and Joseph takes his body down before nightfall. Every part of their plotting was foiled.
There is a lot of detail in vss 33-38 about Pilate's "private" questioning of Jesus. This is written as if it was done away from the screaming crowd, back inside Pilate's grounds someplace. This is verified in vs 38b, where it says Pilate "...went back outside". So who recorded the private questioning of Jesus? How do we know what was said there? John would not have been in there. Where did John get the information?
Pilate offers Jesus, the people demand Barabbas instead. What a malleable mob they are. They accept as fact the lying conspiracies of the elite. Sound like anything else we know about?