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John 12:34-36  New English Translation

34 Then the crowd responded,[a] “We have heard from the law that the Christ[b] will remain forever.[c] How[d] can you say, ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up’? Who is this Son of Man?” 35 Jesus replied,[e] “The light is with you for a little while longer.[f] Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you.[g] The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. 36 While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become sons of light.”[h] When Jesus had said these things, he went away and hid himself from them.

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Footnotes

  1. John 12:34 tn Grk “Then the crowd answered him.”
  2. John 12:34 tn Or “the Messiah” (Both Greek “Christ” and Hebrew and Aramaic “Messiah” mean “one who has been anointed”).sn See the note on Christ in 1:20.
  3. John 12:34 tn Probably an allusion to Ps 89:35-37. It is difficult to pinpoint the passage in the Mosaic law to which the crowd refers. The ones most often suggested are Pss 89:36-37; 110:4, Isa 9:7, Ezek 37:25, and Dan 7:14. None of these passages are in the Pentateuch per se, but “law” could in common usage refer to the entire OT (compare Jesus’ use in John 10:34). Of the passages mentioned, Ps 89:36-37 is the most likely candidate. This verse speaks of David’s “seed” remaining forever. Later in the same psalm, v. 51 speaks of the “anointed” (Messiah), and the psalm was interpreted messianically in both the NT (Acts 13:22, Rev 1:5; 3:14) and in the rabbinic literature (Genesis Rabbah 97).
  4. John 12:34 tn Grk “And how”; the conjunction καί (kai, “and”) has been left untranslated here for improved English style.
  5. John 12:35 tn Grk “Then Jesus said to them.”
  6. John 12:35 tn Grk “Yet a little while the light is with you.”
  7. John 12:35 sn The warning Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you operates on at least two different levels: (1) To the Jewish people in Jerusalem to whom Jesus spoke, the warning was a reminder that there was only a little time left for them to accept him as their Messiah. (2) To those later individuals to whom the Fourth Gospel was written, and to every person since, the words of Jesus are also a warning: There is a finite, limited time in which each individual has opportunity to respond to the Light of the world (i.e., Jesus); after that comes darkness. One’s response to the Light decisively determines one’s judgment for eternity.
  8. John 12:36 tn The idiom “sons of light” means essentially “people characterized by light,” that is, “people of God.”sn The expression sons of light refers to men and women to whom the truth of God has been revealed and who are therefore living according to that truth, thus, “people of God.”
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