⚠ There is no verse 4 on this page, and that gap is a decision, not an " error. The traditional text (KJV, RV60, the Byzantine majority) reads at this point: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” The earliest and best Greek manuscripts do not have it — not a shorter version, but its complete absence — and the oldest witnesses that do include it disagree with each other on the wording, the classic signature of a later explanatory gloss that grew in the margin before it grew into the text. KJV and RV60 print it in full; ASV, NIV, ESV and NVI all omit it to a footnote. This translation follows the modern critical text and omits it too — but keeps the traditional NUMBERING, so “verse 5” here is still verse 5 everywhere else. The gap explains the sick man’s answer at v7 either way: whether or not a verse ever said an angel stirred the water, he clearly believed something like it, and that belief, not the mechanism, is what the story needs.

⚠ The pool’s own name is a second, smaller textual fork — and the SBLGNT text this translation follows does NOT resolve it the same way it resolved v4. RV60 and NIV read Bethesda (“house of mercy”), the majority-text reading, and so does this translation, following SBLGNT’s own printed text here; NVI instead reads Betzatá, the reading of the earliest manuscripts (the same family that drops v4). SBLGNT is not one consistent voice siding with “early” or “late” throughout — it makes its own editorial judgment verse by verse, and this is one of the places it lands on the later, more familiar side. Archaeologists have in fact excavated a five-porticoed pool near St. Anne’s Church in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter that matches the description exactly — one of the few Johannine settings with a confirmed physical match.

Every previous friction in John has been misunderstanding, argument, or a temple cleared with a whip of cords aimed at animals, not people. Here, for the first time, the text says plainly that people are out to hurt Jesus over what he has done — and it is worth noticing what actually triggers it. Not the healing. The man carrying his mat on the Sabbath (v10) is the first complaint; only after Jesus explains himself (v17) does the charge escalate to something capital (v18). The Sabbath violation is what starts it. The claim about the Father is what makes it lethal.

John does not report this as the Jews’ overreaction; he states it as the accurate reading of what Jesus said. Ison heauton poiōn tō theō — ISOS is the ordinary Greek word for EQUAL, used elsewhere of equal shares, equal wages, equal weights. Calling God “my own Father” (idion, one’s very own, not the more general “our Father”) claimed a unique sonship; John's own narration then supplies the conclusion the hearers drew, without correcting it. Every version checked here — KJV, ASV, NIV, ESV, RV60, NVI — renders it the same way: equal with God. The chapter's long discourse that follows (vv19–47) reads as an answer to this charge, not a retraction of it — the Son does nothing BUT what the Father does, which is a claim to unity of action too total for a mere prophet or agent to make.

The sentence that opens the defense sounds like a concession — the Son can do NOTHING of himself — and John lets it stand as the frame for everything after it: not independence from the Father but total identity of action with him, which is a larger claim than independence would have been, not a smaller one. A slave who does nothing without orders is a slave; a son who does nothing but what he sees his father doing, in a culture where a son learned a trade by watching, is claiming to BE what the father is.

⚠ V23's “honor the Son just as they honor the Father” sets a bar the Old Testament never sets for any angel, any prophet, any king: undivided honor, not honor-once-removed on the Father's behalf. The verse's second half makes the claim symmetrical rather than optional — refusing honor to the Son is defined here as refusing it to the Father, not as a lesser offense.

⚠ This is the formula John 4 planted and told readers to watch for. At 4:23, of true worshippers, Jesus said “an hour is coming, and now is.” Here at v25 the identical construction, erchetai hōra kai nyn estin, is applied to something far larger: the dead hearing the Son's voice and living. Then, three verses later, the SAME phrase loses its second half — v28 says only “an hour is coming,” dropping “and now is.” That is not carelessness. V25's hour is already arriving: people spiritually dead, hearing and believing, in Jesus's own present tense ministry. V28's hour is still future: bodies in tombs, a general resurrection to life or to judgment. The chapter holds both an ALREADY and a NOT-YET hour inside five verses, using the same formula to mark the difference.

V30 opens “I can do nothing of myself” — the same claim v19 opened with, now bracketing the whole discourse on judgment (vv19–30) inside an inclusio. Between the two matching sentences: the Father raising the dead and giving life, all judgment handed to the Son, honor owed the Son as the Father, and an hour already here and an hour still coming. The frame insists that everything inside it is still, somehow, the Son doing nothing of himself.

Then the case for witnesses opens on a rule with teeth: “if I testify about myself, my testimony is not true” — not merely unpersuasive, but by the legal standard behind it (Deuteronomy 19:15, no charge established on a single witness), inadmissible. Jesus does not claim an exception. He calls a first witness instead: John the Baptist, “the lamp, burning and shining” — a borrowed light, deliberately not the sun John's own Gospel already reserved for the Word (1:5, 9). The crowd's enthusiasm for John is named for what it was: willing to rejoice FOR AN HOUR, not believe.

Two further witnesses, both outranking a prophet's word: the WORKS themselves (ta erga, the same word used of the Bethesda healing that started the chapter), and the Father directly — though the Father's own testimony is immediately qualified in the harshest terms available: his hearers have never heard his voice or seen his form, and do not have his word remaining in them, evidenced by the plainest fact in the room — they do not believe the one he sent. The chain of witnesses (John, the works, the Father) is not building toward more proof; it is building toward the accusation that no amount of testimony will be enough.

Eraunate tas graphas is grammatically ambiguous in a way no punctuation in the original manuscripts could resolve: for a contract verb like this one, the second-person plural present indicative (“you search”, a statement) and the present imperative (“Search!”, a command) are IDENTICAL in form. KJV and RV60 both read it as a command: “Search the scriptures” / “Escudriñad las Escrituras.” ASV, NIV, ESV and NVI all read it as a statement of what they are already doing. This translation follows the statement reading, on the strength of what v40 says next — “you are NOT WILLING to come to me” reads as the second half of a diagnosis (you study hard, and still will not come) rather than a second, unrelated command.

V43's line — “if another comes in his own name, that one you will receive” — has no named referent in the chapter and the Gospel never resolves it later either; readers from the earliest centuries have proposed the Pharisaic movement generally, specific revolutionary or messianic claimants of the period, and (reaching further forward) an eschatological deceiver in the manner of 1 John 2:18's “many antichrists.” The text supports the general shape of the claim — a self-authorized rival will be more welcome than the Father-sent one was — without naming who. V44 gives the mechanism: glory circulated among people who already agree with each other is easy to receive and worth nothing outside the circle; glory sought FROM God is available only from outside it, and asks more.

The closing turn is aimed at the group's own ground, not outside it: not Jesus versus Moses, but Moses AGAINST them, on their own reading of him — “in whom you have hoped.” The logic runs backward from where a reader expects: not “believe me, therefore you should believe Moses less,” but the reverse — a genuine belief in Moses'’ writings would already have produced belief in Jesus, so its absence is evidence the first belief was never as solid as claimed. The chapter that opened with a man unable to get himself into a pool for thirty-eight years closes with a much larger diagnosis of an inability to move.