John 18:24 - Exposition

The οὖν £ is quite in John's style, and the verse should read, Annas therefore sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest ; i.e. to the full court of the Sanhedrin, under the presidency of Caiaphas, now got together for the judicial sifting and verdict. If John had intended a pluperfect sense to be given to the verb, why not use that tense? The relative clauses, where the aorist is used for the pluperfect, are not relevant here (Meyer). In other cases the context clearly reveals the occasion of such a sense (see Matthew 16:5 ; Matthew 26:48 ). John is not unaware of the momentous consequences of this act of Annas, seeing that he refers to them, nor of the fact of the accusation made by the false witnesses, nor of the judicial condemnation which followed Christ's own claim to be the Son of God. The subsequent narrative implies such condemnation (verses 29, 30, 35; John 19:11 ). The author of this narrative does not ignore the fact of the appearance before Caiaphas, nor the issue; but in consequence of the wide diffusion of the synoptic Gospels, he merely called attention to the facts which they had omitted so far as they bore directly on the human character of the Lord. The theological bias with which the evangelist is credited by some would be strangely subserved both by the omission of the scene before Caiaphas, and by the faithful record of this purely human and beautiful trait in the personal character of Jesus. The fact that the fourth evangelist should have recorded facts of which he was eye-witness, and omitted others which would have forcibly sustained his main thesis, is an invincible evidence of historicity.