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Joh_5:8-9. Comp. Mat_9:6; Mar_2:9; Mar_2:11.
περιπάτει ] walk, go; hitherto he had lain down there, Joh_5:6. The command implies the man’s faith, which had been recognised by Christ.
καὶ ᾖρε ] simply and emphatically told in the very words which Jesus had spoken.
Some (Strauss) quite arbitrarily regard this story as a legendary exaggeration of the healing of the paralytic in the Synoptics (Matthew 9; Mark 2); time, place, circumstances, and what ensues, especially its essential connection with the healing on the Sabbath-day, are all original and independent, as is also the whole account, so full of life and psychologically true, and very different from that in the Synoptics. Notwithstanding, Baur again (p. 243 ff.) would make the story in John a composition out of synoptical materials, appealing especially to Mar_2:9-10; and Hilgenfeld, Evang. 269 f., adopts the same course, finding the “inner peculiarity” of the narrative in the idea that the omnipotence of the Logos cannot be controlled by any earthly law or human custom; whilst Weisse (Evangelienfr. 268) sees in the man’s lameness the helplessness of one morally sick, and attributes the origin of the entire narrative to what was originally a parable. Thus they themselves complete the fiction, and then pass it on off the evangelist, while the simplest as well as the most distinctive and characteristic historical features are now interwoven into his supposed plans. See, on the contrary, Brückner, in loc.