The Witness of Two People
John 17–18 Jesus now reverts to the topic of testimony. The shifts back and forth between Jesus as witness and Jesus as judge would appear sudden and awkward if the dispute in chapter Matthew 5 had not already prepared readers for the irony of Jesus’ dual role, which in turn reflects Yahweh’s functioning as both witness and judge in the trial scenes of Isa. 40–55.
Having stressed his self-authenticating witness, Jesus can now return to the conventions of ordinary Jewish trials—In your law it is written that the witness of two people is true. As he did in John 5:31–7, he again accommodates himself to the law’s requirements (cf. Deut. 19:15). But the concession to the opponents’ standard of judgement (‘your law’) is ironic. The law required two witnesses, not including the accused, and an appeal to God is not envisaged as one of these. The force of Jesus’ mention of the law appears to be that if the law demands two human witnesses, then he will supply two divine witnesses—himself and the Father. In the end, however, Jesus’ witness to himself and his and the Father’s joint witness amount to the same thing because of the unity between the Son and the Father who sent him. It should be noted that, in speaking of himself, Jesus uses a periphrastic construction with ἐγώ εἰμι—I am the one who witnesses about myself—in order to stress his identification with the role of the witness. Again Isa. 40–55 may well provide the background. Isa. 43:10 LXX, which employs the ‘I Am’ formulation, also speaks of two witnesses, Yahweh and Israel, the servant, who has just been portrayed as a light to the nations (Isa. 42:6). Through his claims here to be both the light of the world and the one who bears witness, Jesus can also be seen as taking on the role envisaged for the servant in God’s lawsuit with the world.
Lincoln, Andrew T. The Gospel according to Saint John. London: Continuum, 2005. Print. Black’s New Testament Commentary.
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