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Joh_18:4-5. This advance of Judas occasioned ( οὖν ) Jesus to come forth, since He knew all that was about to come upon Him, and consequently was far removed from any intention of withdrawing Himself from His destiny, of which He was fully and clearly conscious.
ἔρχεσθαι , of destinies, happy (Mat_10:13) and unhappy (Mat_23:35; Aesch. Pers. 436, 439; Ellendt, Lex. Soph. I. p. 686 f.), in the classics more frequently with the dative (Thuc. viii. 96. 1) than with ἐπί .
ἐξῆλθεν (see the critical notes): from the garden, Joh_18:1, Nonnus: κῆπον ἐάσας . The context yields no other meaning, and Joh_18:26 is not opposed to it. Hence not: from the garden-house (Rosenmüller, Ewald), or from the depth of the garden (Tholuck, Maier, De Wette, Luthardt), or from the circle of disciples (Schweizer, Lange, Hengstenberg).
εἱστήκει δὲ καὶ Ἰούδας , κ . τ . λ .] Tragic moment in the descriptive picture of this scene, without any further special purpose in view. Tholuck arbitrarily remarks: John wished to indicate the effrontery of Judas; and Hengstenberg: he wished to guard against the false opinion that the ἐγώ εἰμι was intended to convey to the officers something unknown to them. This he could surely have been able to express in few words.
The kiss of Judas (Mat_26:47 ff.), instead of which John gives the above personal statement (as Strauss indeed thinks: in order to the glorification of Jesus), is not thereby excluded, is too characteristic and too well attested to be ascribed to tradition, and cannot have followed (Ewald) the question of Jesus (Joh_18:4), but, inasmuch as the immediate effect of the ἐγώ εἰμι did not permit of the interruption of the kiss, must have preceded, so that immediately on the exit of Jesus from the garden, Judas stepped forward, kissed Him, and then again fell back to the band. Accordingly, John, after the one factor of the betrayal, namely the kiss, had been already generally disseminated in tradition, brings into prominence the other also, the personal statement; hence this latter is not to be ascribed merely to the Johannean Jesus (Hilgenfeld, Scholten).