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Joh_4:1-3. Ὡς οὖν ἔγνω , κ . τ . λ .] οὖν , igitur, namely, in consequence of the concourse of people who flocked to Him, and which had been previously mentioned. Considering this concourse, He could not fail to come to know ( ἔγνω , not supernatural knowledge, but comp. Joh_4:53; Joh_5:6; Joh_11:57; Joh_12:9) that it had reached the ears of the Pharisees, how He, etc. This prompted Him, however, to withdraw to Galilee, where their hostility would not be so directly aroused and cherished as in Judaea, the headquarters of the hierarchy. To surrender Himself to them before the time, before His hour arrived, and the vocation of which He was conscious had been fulfilled, was opposed to His consciousness of the divine arrangements and the object of His mission. He contented himself, therefore, for the present with the interest which He had already excited in Jndaea on behalf of His work, and withdrew, for the time being, to His own less esteemed country.[181] As to the date of this return, see Joh_4:35; it is an arbitrary invention to say (Lange, L. J. II. p. 515), that upon leaving Judaea He gave up baptizing because John’s imprisonment (?) brought a ban of uncleanness upon Israel (515 sq.). The performance of baptism must be supposed as taking place subsequent to this, when conversions are spoken of (e.g. Joh_4:53), comp. Joh_3:5; and Mat_28:19 does not contain a wholly new command to baptize, but its completion and extension to all times and nations.
οἱ Φαρισ .] It is only this party, the most powerful and most dangerous of the Jewish sects, that is still named by John, the evangelist who had become furthest removed from Judaism.
ὅτι Ἰησοῦς , κ . τ . λ .] a verbatim repetition of the report; hence the name (1Co_11:23), and the present tenses. Comp. Gal_1:23.
ἢ Ἰωάννης ] whom they had moreover less to fear, on account of his legal standpoint, and his declarations in Joh_1:19 ff., than Jesus, whose appearance was in Jerusalem at once so reformatory, miraculous, and rich in results, and who was so ominously attested by John.
Joh_4:2 is not to be put in a parenthesis, for the construction is not interrupted.
καίτοι γε ] quanquam quidem, and yet; see Baeumlein, Partik. p. 245 ff.; Klotz, ad Devar. p. 654 f. The thing is thus expressed, because “semper is dicitur facere, cui praeministratur,” Tertullian. A pretext for this lay in the fact that John did himself baptize. But why did not Jesus Himself baptize? Not because it was incumbent on Him only to preach (1Co_1:17); there must have been a principle underlying His not baptizing, seeing that John, without limitation, made it so prominent (against Thomas, Lyra, Maldonatus, and most); not, again, because He must have baptized unto Himself (so already Tertull. de bapt. 11), for He could have done this; not even for the clear preservation of the truth: “that it is He who baptizes all down to the present day” (Hengstenberg), an arbitrarily invented abstraction, and quite foreign even to the N. T. Nonnus hits upon the true reason: οὐ γὰρ ἄναξ βάπτιζεν ἐν ὕδατι . Bengel well says: “baptizare actio ministralis, Act_10:48, 1Co_1:17; Johannes minister sua manu baptizavit, discipuli ejus ut videtur neminem, at Christus baptizat Spiritu sancto,” which the disciples had not power to do until afterwards (Joh_7:39). Comp. Ewald. For the rest, Joh_4:2 does not contain a correction of himself by the evangelist (Hengstenberg and early expositors),—for we must not omit to ask why he should not at once have expressed himself correctly,—but, on the contrary, a correction of the form of the rumour mentioned in Joh_4:1. Comp. Joh_3:26. Nonnus: ἐτήτυμος οὐ πέλε φήμη . In this consists the historical interest of the observation (against Baur and Hilgenfeld), which we are not to regard as an unhistorical consequence of transporting Christian baptism back to the time of Jesus.
[181] According to Hofmann, Schriftbew. II. 1, p. 168 f., whom Lichtenstein follows, Jesus withdrew, because He was apprehensive lest what had come to the Pharisees’ ears should be made use of by them to throw suspicion on the Baptist. But this is all the less credible, when we remember that Jesus certainly, as well as John himself (Joh_3:30), knew it to be a divine necessity that He should increase and the Baptist decrease, and therefore would hardly determine his movements by considerations of the kind supposed. He could more effectually have met any such suspicions, by testifying on behalf of the noble Baptist in the neighbourhood where he was, than by withdrawing from the scene. No; Jesus went out of the way of the danger that threatened Himself, and which He knew it was not yet time for Him to expose Himself to; comp. Joh_7:1, Joh_10:40, Joh_11:54. Nonnus: φεύγων λὐσσαν ἄπιστον ἀκηλήτων Φαρισαίων . Still, however, we must not, with Hengstenberg and most others, suppose that this retirement to Galileo arose from the fact that John had already fallen a prey to pharisaic persecution, and that Jesus had all the more reason to apprehend this persecution. There is no hint whatever of the supposed fact that the Pharisees had delivered John over to Herod. This explanation is based merely upon an attempt at harmonizing, in order to make this journey back to Galilee the same with that named in Mat_4:12. See on Joh_3:24.