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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - John 9:22 - 9:22
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Had agreed - that (συνετέθειντο - ἵνα)
The sense is, had formed an agreement in order to bring about this end, viz., that the confessor of Christ should be excommunicated.
Confess (ὁμολογήσῃ)
See on Mat 7:23; see on Mat 10:32.
He should be put out of the synagogue (ἀποσυνάγωγος)
The literal rendering cannot be neatly given, as there is no English adjective corresponding to ἀποσυνάγωγος, which means excluded from the synagogue: as nearly as possible - that He should become banished from the synagogue. The adjective occurs only in John's Gospel - here, Joh 12:42; Joh 16:2. Three kinds of excommunication were recognized, of which only the third was the real cutting off, the other two being disciplinary. The first, and lightest, was called rebuke, and lasted from seven to thirty days. The second was called thrusting out, and lasted for thirty days at least, followed by a “second admonition,” which lasted for thirty days more. This could only be pronounced in an assembly of ten. It was accompanied by curses, and sometimes proclaimed with the blast of the horn. The excommunicated person would not be admitted into any assembly of ten men, nor to public prayer. People would keep at the distance of four cubits from him, as if he were a leper. Stones were to be cast on his coffin when dead, and mourning for him was forbidden. If all else failed, the third, or real excommunication was pronounced, the duration of which was indefinite. The man was to be as one dead. No intercourse was to be held with him; one must not show him the road, and though he might buy the necessaries of life, it was forbidden to eat and drink with him. These severer forms appear to have been of later introduction, so that the penalty which the blind man's parents feared was probably separation from all religious fellowship, and from ordinary intercourse of life for perhaps thirty days.