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Joh_7:47-49. The answer comes from the Pharisees in the Sanhedrim, as from that section of the council who were most zealous in watching over the interests of orthodoxy and the hierarchy.
μὴ καὶ ὑμεῖς ] are ye also—officers of sacred justice, who should act only in strict loyalty to your superiors. Hence the following questions: “Have any of the Sanhedrim believed in him, or of the Pharisees?” The latter are specially named as the class of orthodox and most respected theologians, who were supposed to be patterns of orthodoxy, apart from the fact that some of them were members of the Sanhedrim.
ἀλλά ] at, breaking off and leading on hastily to the antithetical statement that follows; Baeumlein, Partik. p. 15; Ellendt, Lex. Soph. I. p. 78.
ὁ ὄχλος οὗτος ] those people there, uttered with the greatest scorn. The people hanging upon Jesus, “this mob,” as they regard them, are there before their eyes. It is self-evident, further, that the speakers do not include their own official servants in the ὄχλος , but, on the other hand, prudently separate them with their knowledge from the ὄχλος .
ὁ μὴ γινώσκ . τ . νόμον ] because they regarded such a transgressor of the law as the Prophet, or the Messiah, Joh_7:40-41.
ἐπάρατοί εἰσι ] they are cursed, the divine wrath is upon them! The plural is justified by the collective ὁ ὄχλος , comp. Joh_7:44. The exclamation is to be regarded merely as a blindly passionate statement[273] (Ewald); as a haughty outbreak of the rabies theological, and by no means a decree (Kuinoel and others), as if the Sanhedrim had now come to a resolution, or at least had immediately, in keeping with the informal words, put in regular form (Luthardt) what is mentioned in Joh_9:22. Such an excommunication of the ὄχλος en masse would have been preposterous. Upon the unbounded scorn entertained by Jewish pride of learning towards the unlettered multitude ( öí äàøõ ), see Wetstein and Lampe in loc.; Gfrörer in the Töb. Zeitschr. 1838, I. p. 130, and Jahrb. d. Heils, I. p. 240 f.
ἐπάρατος ] (see the critical notes), not elsewhere in the N. T., nor in the LXX and Apocrypha; it is, however, classical.
[273] Not of an argumentative character, as if they had inferred their disobedience from their unacquaintance with the law (Ewald). Their frame of mind was not so reflective.