John 19:35 - Exposition

He that hath seen hath borne , and is now bearing, herein and hereby, witness, and his witness is veritable —the highest and surest kind of witness, that of direct observation, staggering, confounding the ordinary sense, but proving that the Son of God died in his human body— and he knoweth, by his own inward experience, that he saith true things, that ye also £ may believe . A vehement effort has been made to sever this testimony from the evangelist, and refer it to a third person ἐκεῖνος , and suppose that it took place during John's absence from the cross (so Weisse, Schweizer, Hilgenfeld, and others); but, as Meyer, Godet, etc., affirm there is no necessity whatever for such an interpretation. ἑκεινος is used of the subject of the sentence when it is clear from the context that the speaker himself is that subject (see John 9:37 ). Concerning a third person, the writer could not have written, "He knoweth that he saith true things, that ye may believe," but rather, "We know that he saith true things, that we may believe." But John here speaks strongly of his own invincible conviction, and, as in John 21:24 , it is here given to induce a stronger faith on the part of his readers—not of himself and his readers in the supernatural death, in the signs that accompanied it, adapted to convince the bystanders of its marvel, and to fill up the prophetic picture, Hilgenfeld, with strange perversity, urges that the clever forger of the narrative "falls out of his part" and forgets himself. The symbolical and allegorical explanations are numerous. E.g. Toplady's well-known hymn, "Rock of Ages," contains the words—

"Let the water and the blood,

From thy riven side which flowed,

Be of sin the double cure,

Cleanse me from its guilt and power."