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Joh_4:17-18. The woman is taken aback; her light, naive, bantering manner is now completely gone, and she quickly seeks to shun the sensitive point with the answer, true only in words, οὐκ ἔχω ἄνδρα ; but Jesus goes deeper still.
καλῶς ] rightly, truly; Joh_8:48; Mat_15:7; Luk_20:39. How far truly, what follows shows,—namely, only relatively, and therefore the approval is only apparent, and in some degree ironical.
ἄνδρα οὐκ ἔχω ] “a husband I have not;” as it is the conception of ἀνήρ which Jesus has to emphasize, it stands first.
πέντε γὰρ , κ . τ . λ .] It is doubtful whether she really had five successive husbands, from whom she had been separated either by death or by divorce, or whether Jesus included paramours, using ἄνδρας in a varying sense according to the varying subjects; or whether, again, He meant that all five were scortatores (Chrysostom, Maldonatus, and most others). The first supposition is to be adopted, because the present man, who is not her husband, stands in contrast with the former husbands. She had been therefore five times married (such a history had already seared her conscience, Joh_4:29; how? is not stated), and now she was either a widow or a divorced wife, and had a paramour ( νόθον ἀκοίτην , Nonnus), who lived with her as a husband, but really was not her husband (hence the οὐκ ἔστι is emphatically put first). To interpret the story of the five husbands as a whole as a symbolical history of the Samaritan nation (according to 2Ki_17:24 ff.; Josephus, Antt. ix. 14. 3 : πέντε ἔθνη … ἕκαστον ἴδιον θεὸν εἰς Σαμαρ . κομίσαντες ), either as a divinely intended coincidence (Hengstenberg, Köstlin, comp. Baumgarten and Scholten), or as a type in the mind of the evangelist (Weizsäcker, p. 387), so that the symbolic meaning excludes any actual fact (Keim, Gesch. J. p. 116), or again as fiction (B. Bauer), whose mythical basis was that history (Strauss), is totally destitute of any historical warrant. For the man whom the woman now had must, symbolically understood, represent Jehovah; and He had been the God of the Samaritans before the introduction of false gods, and therefore it would have been more correct to speak of six husbands (Heracleon actually read ἕξ ). But how incredible is it, that Jesus would represent Jehovah under the similitude of a paramour (for the woman was now living in concubinage), and the “fivefold heathenism” of the nation under the type of real marriages!
For the rest, the knowledge which Jesus had of the woman’s circumstances was immediate and supernatural. To assume that He had ascertained her history from others (Paulus, Ammon), is opposed to the Johannean view; while the notion that the disciples introduced into the history what they afterwards discovered (Schweizer, p. 139) is psychologically groundless, if once we admit that Jesus possessed a knowledge of the moral state of others (and here we have not merely a knowledge of outward circumstances,—against De Wette) beyond that attainable by ordinary means.[189] Lange invents the strange and unnecessary (Joh_2:24 f.) addition, that “the psychical effects produced by the five husbands upon the woman were traceable in her manner and mien, and these were recognised by Jesus.”
ἀληθές ] as something true. See Winer, p. 433 [E. T. p. 582]. Comp. Plato, Gorg. p. 493 D: τοῦτʼ ἀληθέστερον εἴρηκας ; Soph. Phil. 909; Lucian, D. M. vi. 3; Tim. 20.
[189] We must not therefore suppose, as Ewald does, that Jesus named simply a round number of husbands, which in a wonderful manner turned out to be right.