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Joh_7:5-6. For not even His brothers, whom we might have expected to have been foremost, etc.; otherwise they would not have urged Him to the test of a public appearance. They urged this upon Him all the more, because He had absented Himself from the previous Passover at Jerusalem,—a fact which could not have been unknown to them.
ἐπίστ . εἰς αὐτ .] in the ordinary sense; they did not believe in Him as the Messiah. To take the words to mean only the perfect self-surrender of faith, which they had not yet attained to (Lange, Hengstenberg), is an inference necessitated by the mistaken notion that these brothers were not literally brothers (see on Mat_12:46; Act_1:14; Mar_3:31; 1Co_9:5). Nonnus admirably says: ἀπειθέες οἷάπερ ἄλλοι , Χριστοῦ παμμεδέοντος ἀδελφειοί περ ἐόντες . See Joh_7:7.
ὁ καιρὸς ὁ ἐμός ] cannot mean the time to make the journey to the feast (Luther, Jansen, Cornelius a Lapide, and most expositors); the antithesis ὁ καιρὸς ὁ ὑμ . demands a deeper reference. It is, according to the context, the time to manifest myself to the world, Joh_7:4, by which Jesus certainly understood the divinely appointed yet still expected moment of public decision concerning Him (comp. Joh_2:4), which did come historically at the very next Passover, but which He now felt in a general way was not yet come. Thus the explanation of Chrysostom, Euthymius Zigabenus, Lampe, and most others, who refer the words to the time of His passion, is not wrong, only that this is not actually expressed, but was historically the fulfillment of what is here said. The corresponding ὁ καιρὸς ὁ ὑμέτερος in like manner means the time for showing themselves openly to the world, which the brothers might do at any time, because they stood in no opposition to the world (Joh_7:7; Joh_15:19).