Yohanes 12:23

12:23 Jesus replied, ¹  “The time ²  has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ³ 

Yohanes 7:8

7:8 You go up ⁴  to the feast yourselves. I am not going up to this feast ⁵  because my time ⁶  has not yet fully arrived.” ⁷ 

[12:23]  ¹ tn Grk “Jesus answered them, saying.” The participle λέγων (legwn) is redundant in contemporary English and has not been translated here.

[12:23]  ² tn Grk “the hour.”

[12:23]  ³ sn Jesus’ reply, the time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, is a bit puzzling. As far as the author’s account is concerned, Jesus totally ignores these Greeks and makes no further reference to them whatsoever. It appears that his words are addressed to Andrew and Philip, but in fact they must have had a wider audience, including possibly the Greeks who had wished to see him in the first place. The words the time has come recall all the previous references to “the hour” throughout the Fourth Gospel (see the note on time in 2:4). There is no doubt, in light of the following verse, that Jesus refers to his death here. On his pathway to glorification lies the cross, and it is just ahead.

[7:8]  ⁴ sn One always speaks of “going up” to Jerusalem in Jewish idiom, even though in western thought it is more common to speak of south as “down” (Jerusalem lies south of Galilee). The reason for the idiom is that Jerusalem was identified with Mount Zion in the OT, so that altitude was the issue.

[7:8]  ⁵ tc Most mss (Ì^66,75 B L T W Θ Ψ 070 0105 0250 Ë^1,13 Ï sa), including most of the better witnesses, have “not yet” (οὔπω, oupw) here. Those with the reading οὐκ are not as impressive (א D K 1241 al lat), but οὐκ is the more difficult reading here, especially because it stands in tension with v. 10. On the one hand, it is possible that οὐκ arose because of homoioarcton: A copyist who saw oupw wrote ouk. However, it is more likely that οὔπω was introduced early on to harmonize with what is said two verses later. As for Jesus’ refusal to go up to the feast in v. 8, the statement does not preclude action of a different kind at a later point. Jesus may simply have been refusing to accompany his brothers with the rest of the group of pilgrims, preferring to travel separately and “in secret” (v. 10) with his disciples.

[7:8]  ⁶ tn Although the word is καιρός (kairos) here, it parallels John’s use of ὥρα (Jwra) elsewhere as a reference to the time appointed for Jesus by the Father – the time of his return to the Father, characterized by his death, resurrection, and ascension (glorification). In the Johannine literature, synonyms are often interchanged for no apparent reason other than stylistic variation.

[7:8]  ⁷ tn Or “my time has not yet come to an end” (a possible hint of Jesus’ death at Jerusalem); Grk “my time is not yet fulfilled.”