Fragments on John

Contents

Staged from OCR; the Latin and Eusebian pieces (Preuschen CVII-CIX, which are also in Eusebius, Church History 6.25 and Pamphilus) are not included.

Reading pages: 1–15 · 16–35 · 36–54 · 55–76 · 77–115 · 116–137

1. 1On John 1:1: the Son is called Word as maker of all; ‘was’ (not ‘became’) signifies his eternal existence before the incarnation; he was in the beginning of all creatures, and is the Wisdom ‘created as the beginning of God's ways’ in relation to creation.
2. 2On John 1:3–4: the Word is not originate but is life by essence, begotten of the living Father; by relation he gives life and light to rational creatures, as the word of the Lord ‘came’ to the prophets.
3. 3On John 1:5: the darkness cannot overtake the light because it is dissolved at its approach, as in Paul and the repentant robber; God permitted evil so that the greatness of virtue might be shown.
4. 4On John 1:6: John is called ‘a man’ as one made in God's image; ‘came to be’ need not mean coming into existence.
5. 5On John 1:7: John came so that all might believe, as far as lay in him, as the sun rises to light all even if not all receive its light.
6. 6On John 1:8–9: John was a light but not the true light; ‘true’ here contrasts not with false but with image, and ‘coming into the world’ may be read of the light or of every man.
7. 7On John 1:12: believing ‘in his name’ gives the aptitude to become God's children, but those who progress to believe ‘in him’ become children in act.
8. 8On John 1:13: those born of God believe and do righteousness, unlike those ‘of bloods’ who trust in sacrifices, those ‘of the will of the flesh’ who seek to appear righteous by outward circumcision, and those ‘of the will of a man’ who practice merely philosophical virtue.
9. 9On John 1:14: ‘only-begotten from the Father’ means that the Son is from the Father's essence; he is full of grace and truth because he forgives all sins and fulfills every shadow of the law.
10. 10On John 1:15–16: Jesus came after John in birth and baptism but was before him as God and maker; all the saints receive only a part from his fullness, and will see God more fully hereafter, as far as creatures can.
11. 11On John 1:16: virtue is partly our own choice and partly God's gift; God adds his grace to what we achieve by free choice, and this is ‘grace for grace.’
12. 12On John 1:17: the law was given by God through Moses, but grace and truth came through Christ, who, coming after the law and prophets, came before them as the cause of all inspired Scripture.
13. 13On John 1:18: God is invisible not because unseen but because by nature incorporeal; the pure in heart approach him with the mind, but no one ‘ever’ sees him while bound to material life; he alone fully knows himself.
14. 14On John 1:18: ‘in the bosom of the Father’ expresses the Son's intimacy with the Father in human terms, as the faithful rest in Abraham's bosom; no one sees God by his own power, but God reveals himself as creatures can receive him.
15. 15On John 1:23: John is the prophet of God, the lamp before the light, and the voice before the Word, calling the desert of souls ignorant of God to make straight the way of the Lord.
16. 16On John 1:26–27: the Word stands among all as the reason within us, yet unknown when inactive; the sandal thong that John cannot loose is the incomprehensible manner of the Word's union with a body.
17. 17On John 1:29: the present ‘takes away’ means that Christ took away, takes away and will take away the sin of those who come to him.
18. 18On John 1:31–33: John knew Christ only by revelation; his seeing the Spirit descend as a dove and the heavens open was an intellectual, not sensible, vision; the Spirit remained on Jesus alone because he alone was sinless; and divine things must be understood spiritually.
19. 19On John 1:41: Andrew's bringing Peter to Jesus preceded the later call by the lake in Matthew; ‘come and see’ invites to the practical life and the contemplation that follows it.
20. 20On John 1:42: Peter is named from the rock, which is Christ, as the Savior's word to him shows.
21. 21On John 1:43–44: Philip, found and called to follow Jesus, comes from Bethsaida, ‘house of hunters,’ like the hunters God sends in Jeremiah.
22. 22On John 1:45: Philip does not claim that the prophets wrote ‘son of Joseph from Nazareth,’ but that this man is the one they foretold.
23. 23On John 1:46: Nathanael's question about Nazareth, and Philip's invitation to see for himself.
24. 24On John 1:49: Nathanael confesses Jesus as Son of God and king of Israel, the race that sees, since only the Only-begotten sees into hearts.
25. 25On John 1:48–50: allegorically, Philip hunts souls for the Word; Nathanael, ‘gift of the Lord,’ is first taught the incarnation, then called to see, and is praised as a true Israelite whose mind sees God.
26. 26On John 2:1: Christ, maker of man and woman, who brought Eve to Adam and forbade separating what God joined, honors marriage by attending the wedding; the mention of his mother refutes the Manichaeans.
27. 27On John 2:7–9: the evangelist carefully notes that servants, not disciples, drew the water and filled the jars to the brim, leaving no room for slander about the miracle.
28. 28On John 2:11: the disciples' faith was confirmed, for turning water into wine is a change of essence possible only to the Creator.
29. 29On John 2:12: Jesus' ‘brothers’ were sons of Joseph by a former wife, and brothers by law, since the betrothed Mary was legally Joseph's wife, while she remained a virgin.
30. 30On John 2:13–18: the Passover had become a feast ‘of the Jews,’ given to luxury and trade; Jesus' driving out the whole crowd alone with a whip was a miracle requiring divine power.
31. 31On John 2:23–25: Jesus did not entrust himself to those who believed only from signs, since as God he knows the hidden depths of the heart, as only God can.
32. 32On John 3:1–2: Nicodemus believed in Jesus' name as a teacher but came by night, not yet enlightened by the sun of righteousness; the Pharisees are named ‘the separated.’
33. 33On John 3:3–4: ‘from above’ also means ‘again’; the birth from above comes through virtue and the commandments; Nicodemus's words held an unwitting truth, that one must put off the old man and become like a child by disposition.
34. 34On John 3:5: to be born of water and Spirit is to be born from above; the water may be the Spirit itself, or cleansing teaching, but the body too is sanctified by the washing of regeneration, water made holy by invocation and joined to teaching and the Trinity; and ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘kingdom of heaven’ name the same reality.
35. 35On John 3:8: the Spirit visits only the virtuous; it is a willing, acting essence, not merely an activity of God, as the Scriptures show; one who reads Scripture without understanding hears only its voice.
36. 36On John 3:12: the ‘earthly things’ are heavenly gifts accessible to men on earth, known in part; the ‘heavenly things’ are those of perfection in the age to come.
37. 37On John 3:14–15: as Israel was healed by looking at the bronze serpent at God's command, so all who look in faith to the lifted-up Son are freed from the spiritual serpents of sin and have eternal life.
38. 38On John 3:17–18: the Son sent into the world was not the body from Mary, formed here, but God the Word and true light, so the name ‘Son’ belongs to the Word.
39. 39On John 3:17–19: Christ came both to judge and to save, but judges for the sake of saving, as a physician cuts to heal; the believer is not judged, the unbeliever is self-condemned.
40. 40On John 3:19–21: the coming of the light removes the plea of ignorance and brings a judgment by works; men love darkness because their works are evil, by their own choice, not by nature, as some heretics claim.
41. 41On John 3:19: ‘rather than’ is not comparative; men by free choice loved darkness and did not love the light at all, as with ‘lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.’
42. 42On John 3:26–28: ‘all’ means ‘many’; no one has a divine gift except from heaven, given to those prepared by faith; John testifies again that he is only the forerunner.
43. 43On John 3:29–30: the rational soul is a bride that bears virtues only from Christ the bridegroom; John is the bridegroom's friend who rejoices to send his disciples to him; Christ ‘increases’ and John ‘decreases’ as the morning star fades before the sun, not by any change in either.
44. 44On John 3:31–32: the earthly-minded speak from the earth with a wisdom James calls demonic; Christ, and the prophets inspired by him, speak heavenly things from above; ‘what he has seen and heard’ refers to the incarnate economy.
45. 45On John 3:32–34: no one receives Christ's testimony in its full greatness, yet believers receive it as far as they can and set their seal that God is true.
46. 46On John 3:34: the prophets had the Spirit in part, but Christ, its source, gives it without measure; and the Jews who read the Scriptures without examination did not receive their testimony to Christ.
47. 47On John 3:31–34: against heretics who ascribe the Old Testament to a different God and apply ‘he who is from the earth’ to John and the prophets, the fragment shows that John was sent by the Father of Christ and that the prophets bear witness to Christ.
48. 48On John 3:35–36: the Father loves the Son as Father, not as he loves the world; he gives all things into the Son's hand not to add to the Son but to heal creatures who strayed through sin, a gift fulfilled when every knee bows to him.
49. 49On John 3:36: ‘the wrath of God’ means the punishments he sends on the wicked, not a passion in the impassible God.
50. 50On John 4:6: Jesus' weariness at noon shows that he had a true human body subject to common sufferings; he rested by the well also to meet the woman.
51. 51On John 4:8–9: the origin of the Jews' avoidance of Samaritans is found in Kings and Chronicles; Jesus worked feeding miracles only when needed to show his divinity, and otherwise let the disciples buy food, so as to show his humanity too.
52. 52On John 4:12–14: Jesus answers the Samaritan's challenge about Jacob not by direct comparison but by promising water that quenches thirst forever, his teaching, which heals unbelief and cleanses the soul.
53. 53On John 4:12: allegorically, Jacob's well is the writing of Moses, from which Jacob, his sons and his flocks, the simple, drank.
54. 54On John 4:13–14: the law, Jacob's well, was given until the time of reformation, so its drinkers thirst again for the gospel, whose water becomes in them a spring leaping to eternal life.
55. 55On John 4:15–18: allegorically, the woman's ‘husband’ is the law; her five husbands are the five books of Moses received only in their sensible sense, and the sixth, not her husband, is her half-assent that Jesus is a prophet.
56. 56On John 4:22: ‘salvation is from the Jews’ refers to Christ himself, the salvation of the nations.
57. 57On John 4:31–34: the disciples, recalling how Daniel and Elijah were fed, wondered whether someone had brought Jesus food; but his food is the benefit of those who come to him.
58. 58On John 4:44: Judea, where prophets were dishonored and killed, is the ‘homeland’ Jesus left for Galilee.
59. 59On John 5:2–8: Jesus healed only one man at the sheep pool, the most hopeless, to show his power without seeking glory; the pool's healing is explained as God's cooperation with the people's belief.
60. 61On John 9:6–7: Christ's spittle mixed with earth figures the divine meaning of Scripture clothed in historical letter; the blind must be anointed with the letter and wash in Siloam, the Sent One, to see; the distance to the pool made the miracle widely known.
61. 62On John 9:8: begging figures the search for truth among Greeks and barbarians who lack it; Jesus freed the blind man from both blindness and begging, granting him the means of salvation.
62. 63On John 9:16: priests who ‘profane’ the sabbath are from God, so sabbath-breaking proves nothing; ‘such signs’ distinguishes Christ's true and great signs from the lying wonders of the lawless one; Samson's deeds are not called sins.
63. 64On John 9:14–15: the evangelist distinguishes the ‘opening’ of the eyes from the ‘seeing,’ as in Tobit; the healed man answers his kindly neighbors fully but the malicious Pharisees briefly.
64. 65On John 9:21: the parents sinned by exposing their son; Christ opened the eyes of a grown man, who could speak for himself.
65. 66On John 9:27: the healed man rebukes the Pharisees for asking again when they will not believe, and invites them to become Jesus' disciples.
66. 67On John 9:30: it is no wonder that men do not know where Jesus is from, since they do not see his source, the Father.
67. 68On John 9:31: the claim that God does not hear sinners is no doctrine of Scripture; God hears those who turn to repentance, though he may not grant sinners such works as Christ's.
68. 69On John 9:35–37: Jesus ‘found’ the man cast out by the unbelievers and asked whether he believed in the Son of Man, leading him from the border of unbelief to faith in the Son of God.
69. 70On John 9:2–3 (cited at 9:39): the Jewish opinion that blindness came from the man's or his parents' sin, which Jesus rejected.
70. 71On John 9:37–38: the healed man had seen Jesus with the eyes of the soul as well as the body, and so believed and worshiped; a second piece, by a hostile later writer, accuses Origen of falsifying the text in his allegory of the stoning.
71. 72On John 10:31–32: ‘again took up stones’ points back to their earlier slanders, which are stones thrown at him; Scripture mixes history with spiritual exercise, and Christ's ‘good works’ are to be read spiritually, like the wine at Cana and the cleansing of the temple.
72. 73On John 10:39–40: Jesus withdrew so as not to reveal his divinity too openly; his going beyond the Jordan recalls the tribes settled there, Joshua's crossing, and Elijah's ascent.
73. 74On John 10:39–40: anagogically, the word of Christianity escapes those who try to seize and refute it; Jesus withdraws to the Jordan, ‘descent,’ where the better baptism, in Spirit and fire, is given.
74. 75On John 11:1: the Lazarus of John is not the beggar of Luke's parable, since this Lazarus had wealthy sisters; Bethany means ‘house of obedience,’ and even a friend of Jesus may fall sick in his absence.
75. 76On John 11:2: Mary of Bethany is the same as the sinful woman of Luke who anointed Jesus, her name withheld to encourage penitents; Mary and Martha may figure contemplation and action, and the ‘few things’ needed are the commandments of love.
76. 77On John 11:11–17: Lazarus's death is a figure of the soul unenlightened by God; Jesus rejoiced to strengthen the disciples' faith; Thomas understood that Christ would descend to the souls; the four days signify the material body and its sins, which Jesus, buried only three days, did not reach.
77. 79On John 11:18–32: Bethany and Jerusalem, fifteen stades apart, figure obedience and peace; Martha, the active life, runs to Jesus, while Mary, the contemplative, waits at home until called, and falls at his feet.
78. 80On John 11:26–27: Jesus asks Martha whether she believes so that her faith may be made known, and she confesses that she has long believed him to be the Christ, the Son of God.
79. 81On John 11:32: Jesus is everywhere present, but Mary and Martha had not yet progressed so far as to know his presence.
80. 82On John 11:34–35: ‘Where have you laid him?’ is a figure of not acknowledging the dead in sin; Jesus weeps when any friend of his lies in a tomb.
81. 83On John 11:38–39: Jesus groans in spirit from afar and within himself near the tomb; he commands others to remove the stone from a tomb, while Jacob himself rolled the stone from the well.
82. 84On John 11:51: one who prophesies is not thereby a prophet, as Balaam shows; Caiaphas may have prophesied by a power not his own, as demons too foretell; and the Pharisees took his words in their own sense.
83. 85On John 11:54: Jesus' withdrawal teaches not to rush into danger; anagogically, the Word left the Jews for the desert of the nations, Ephraim, ‘fruit-bearing,’ born after Manasseh, ‘forgetfulness.’
84. 86On John 12:26: to follow Christ is to serve him, and the servant will be where the Word is, not locally but spiritually, though perhaps also in pure ethereal regions where the risen saints contemplate the Word.
85. 87On John 12:27: Christ's soul was troubled in human fashion, not from fear of death but over the contest with Satan's powers, and only for an instant, ‘now’; he prays for the contest in which evil is defeated.
86. 88On John 12:31: Christ's suffering on the cross, triumphing over the powers and reconciling all things, is the judgment of this world.
87. 89On John 12:31–34: the passion revealed those who will judge the world and cast out its ruler; the crowd, knowing only that the Christ remains for ever, did not understand his death and first coming.
88. 90On John 12:35: the light, like the mina and the kingdom, was among the Jews for a little while; because they did not walk in it, it was taken and given to the nation bearing its fruits, the light of the world.
89. 91On John 12:39–40: Scripture shows that we are free to become righteous or unrighteous; the one who blinds and hardens is the evil one, ‘the god of this age,’ while Christ heals those who turn; those who ‘could not believe’ could still be healed by coming to Jesus.
90. 92On John 12:44–45: believing in Christ is the first stage, open to many; beholding the Word and the Father in him is the second, granted only to the pure in heart after long exercise, as Jesus taught Philip and the Jews who believed.
91. 93On John 12:46: those who would not walk in the light of Christ's teaching were overtaken by darkness; as the sun exposes diseased eyes, Christ, the intelligible sun, exposed the blindness of those who refused him.
92. 94On John 12:49–50: ‘say’ may denote command and ‘speak’ teaching; God's commandment is itself eternal life, as is knowing the true God and Christ.
93. 104On John 14:2–3: the Father has already prepared the goods by foreknowledge, yet Christ becomes their preparer by opening the way to heaven, and at his second coming will take his own to be with him.
94. 105On John 20:24–28 (heading unclear): Thomas doubted not from disbelief but from caution against an apparition; his name, ‘Twin,’ is interpreted because he was twofold in the word, like Christ who spoke in parables to outsiders and explained all to his disciples.
95. 107On John 1:2–3: the evangelist's words fit the Word's cooperation with the Father, through whom all things were made.
96. 108On John 1:4: the life in the Word also gives knowledge, as Paul and the repentant robber were enlightened to know him.
97. 109On John 1:7: the prophets bore witness so that the Hebrews might believe, John so that all nations might believe.
98. 112On John 1:15 and 1:5: Scripture's past tenses here stand for the future.
99. 115On John 1:32–33: not all present at Jesus' baptism perceived the Spirit, as not all disciples shared the sight of the transfiguration or the risen Lord.
100. 116On John 1:51: the angels ascending and descending are seen with the mind; ‘Amen’ means ‘so be it’ or ‘truly,’ as the Psalms and the parallel sayings in Matthew and Luke show.
101. 117On John 2:15: the whip of cords was the transgressors' own sins, the cords with which they are bound and by which the just Judge drove them out.
102. 134On John 11:9: the twelve hours of the day figure the twelve patriarchs and apostles, whose sun and day is Christ.
103. 135On John 11:53–54: when the plot to kill him was settled, Jesus withdrew to Ephraim, since his hour had not yet come, sparing his disciples.
104. 137On John 17:11: believers are one by agreement and by likeness, one body in Christ the head as all mankind is one in Adam.