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Joh_3:22-23. After this i nterview with Nicodemus[168] ( μετὰ ταῦτα ) Jesus betook Himself with His disciples from the capital into the country of Judea, in a north-easterly direction towards Jordan. Ἰουδαίαν is, as in Mar_1:5, Act_16:1, 1Ma_2:23; 1Ma_14:33; 1Ma_14:37, 2Ma_5:23; 2Ma_5:3 Esr. Joh_5:47, Anthol. vii. 645, an adjective.
ἐβάπτιζεν ] during His stay there (Imperf.), not Himself, however, but through His disciples, Joh_4:2. Baur, indeed, thinks that the writer had a definite purpose in view in this mode of expression; that he wished to bring Jesus and the Baptist as closely as possible together in the same work. But if so, the remark of Joh_4:2 would be strangely illogical; see also Schweizer, p. 194. The baptism of Jesus, besides, was certainly a continuation of that of John, and did not yet possess the new characteristic of Mat_28:19 (for see Joh_7:39); but that it already included that higher element, which John’s baptism did not possess (comp. Act_19:2-3),—namely, the operation of the Spirit, of which Christ was the bearer (Joh_3:34), for the accomplishment of the birth from above,—is manifest from Joh_3:5, a statement which cannot be a prolepsis or a prophecy merely.
ἦν δὲ καὶ Ἰωάνν ., κ . τ . λ .] but John was also employed in baptizing, namely in Aenon, etc. This name, usually taken as the intensive or adjectival form of òÇéÄï , is rather = òéï éåï , dove spring; the place itself is otherwise unknown, as is also the situation of Salim, though placed by Eusebius and Jerome eight Roman miles south of Scythopolis. This is all the more uncertain, because Aenon, according to the mention of it here (comp. Joh_4:3), must have been in Judaea, and not in Samaria, and could not therefore have been the Ainun discovered by Robinson (Later Explorations, p. 400). Ewald thinks of the two places ùÑìçéí åòéï in Jos_15:32. So also Wieseler, p. 247. In no case could the towns have been situated on the Jordan, for in that case the statement ὍΤΙ ὝΔΑΤΑ ΠΟΛΛᾺ would have been quite out of place. Comp. Hengstenberg, who likewise refers to Jos_15:32, while Pressel (in Herzog’s Encykl. XIII. 326) prefers the statement of Eusebius and Jerome. For the rest, the narrative of the temptation, which Hengstenberg places in the period after Joh_3:22, has nothing to do with the locality in this verse; it does not belong to this at all.
The question why John, after the public appearance of Jesus, still continued to baptize, without baptizing in His name, is answered simply by the fact (against Bretschneider, Weisse, Baur) that Jesus had not yet come forth as John expected that the Messiah would, and that consequently the Baptist could not have supposed that his work in preparing the way for the Messiah’s kingdom by his baptism of repentance was already accomplished, but had to await for that the divine decision. This perseverance of John, therefore, in his vocation to baptize, was by no means in conflict with his divinely received certainty of the Messiahship of Jesus (as Weizsäcker, p. 320, thinks), and the ministry of both of them side by side must not be looked upon as improbable, as “in itself a splitting in sunder of the Messianic movement” (Keim).
[168] To interpose a longer interval, e.g. a return to and sojourn in Galilee, is quite gratuitous. Not before Joh_4:3 does Jesus return to Galilee.