In the Gospel of John the arrest in the garden across the Kidron is told without a kiss. Judas, who knew the place because Jesus often met there with his disciples, arrives with a detachment of soldiers and police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, carrying lanterns, torches and weapons. Then John records an exchange that no other Gospel has. “Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus replied, ‘I am he.’ Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, ‘I am he,’ they stepped back and fell to the ground. Again he asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ And they said, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus answered, ‘I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.’”[1]

The scene is usually read as a theophany, and the usual reading has much in its favor. The words egō eimi, “I am,” echo the name God gave Moses at the burning bush and recur through John’s Gospel in the great sayings of self-disclosure, and the soldiers fall to the ground before them as men fall in the presence of God.[2] I accept that John meant his reader to hear the divine name. This essay is about two things John put into the same verses that the theophany does not explain, the question and a single sentence of stage direction, and about a third thing the copyists of John’s Gospel did to the verse afterward. The Gospel as Mirror reads all three as traces of a different event under John’s account, and I will try to keep the reading of the text apart from the reconstruction built on it.

A Question Only John Asks

The Synoptic Gospels identify the prisoner by a sign. In Mark, Judas has told the arresting party, “The one I will kiss is the man; arrest him,” and he goes up to Jesus, says “Rabbi,” kisses him, and the men lay hands on him.[3] The sign is needed because the arresting party does not know by sight which man it has come for. John drops the kiss and puts a question in its place, and the question has an odd shape. “Whom are you looking for?” is the kind of thing one asks when the answer is not already obvious, when more than one person could be meant or more than one could step forward. In the Synoptic version no one needs to ask it, because Judas has arranged to answer it with his lips. In John it is asked twice, and it is answered both times by a name, not by a gesture.

The answer the soldiers give repays a second look. They do not say “the man Judas will show us” or “the Galilean preacher.” They say “Jesus of Nazareth,” the designation that would later stand at the head of the placard on the cross, and they say it as a name for which they have come with orders. A designation of that kind can be carried by whoever answers to it. The arresting party had a title and a destination, and on John’s account the identification of the man depended on who said “I am he.”

Where Judas Stood

Between the first answer and the soldiers’ fall, John inserts a sentence that has no work to do in a theophany: “Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them.” The verb is the pluperfect of histēmi, “had taken his stand,” and the phrase “with them,” met’ autōn, places him among the soldiers and police, not beside the man who answered.[4] A. T. Robertson called it a vivid picture of Judas in the very act of betraying.[5] It is vivid. It is also the only sentence in the scene that tells the reader where someone was standing, and it falls exactly between the words “I am he” and their effect.

As a stage direction, the sentence changes the scene. A man comes forward and asks whom they seek; they name the title; a voice says “I am he”; John tells us that Judas was standing among the arresting party; and when the words “I am he” are spoken, the arresting party draws back and falls to the ground. The Gospel as Mirror proposes that the voice came from where Judas stood. On that reading, the soldiers fell back because the claim came from their own ranks, from the man who had brought them there, while the man who had asked the question stood before them. The book identifies that Judas with Herod, a son of Herod the Great, known in Jerusalem as Jesus Barabbas; a reader new to the argument should know that this identification is the book’s reconstruction and that the essay does not depend on it. The narrower point does not need the reconstruction. John placed Judas in the scene at the moment of the answer, and he placed him among the men who had come for Jesus of Nazareth.

The objection is obvious and strong, and I state it at full weight. John’s account intends the questioner and the answerer to be the same man. The whole Gospel has prepared the reader to hear egō eimi in the mouth of Jesus, the falling back is for John the effect of the divine name, and a reading that makes it the effect of confusion strips the scene of the meaning John gave it. I do not dispute any of this as an account of what John meant. The argument is that John’s tradition knew the event and the evangelist told it in a form that honored the man whose Gospel he was writing, while keeping, in one sentence of placement, the trace of who had answered. The hermeneutic of inversion reads such a trace as deliberate. A reader who does not accept the method will read the sentence as an incidental detail, and on that reading it is a strange detail to have kept.

What the Copyists Did

The manuscripts of John disagree about who speaks in verse five, and the disagreement shows that copyists found the verse in need of help. The current critical text, following some of the oldest witnesses, reads only “he says to them, ‘I am he,’” legei autois, egō eimi, without naming the speaker. The great majority of later manuscripts, together with Codex Alexandrinus and others, insert the name before the answer: “Jesus says to them, ‘I am he.’” Codex Sinaiticus has the name without the article. And Codex Vaticanus, the fourth-century manuscript that textual critics hold in the highest regard for the Gospels, places the name after the words of the answer: legei autois, egō eimi Iēsous, “he says to them, ‘I am Jesus.’”[6]

Robertson noticed the Vaticanus reading in 1932 and gave it the simplest gloss it admits: B adds the name, “which must mean simply: ‘I am Jesus.’”[7] A recent text-critical study of the verse describes the order as found in Vaticanus alone.[8] The standard explanation is that the name stood originally as the subject of the verb, and that the scribe of Vaticanus or its exemplar copied it a few words late, turning “Jesus says to them, ‘I am’” into “he says to them, ‘I am Jesus.’” That explanation is reasonable, and I hold it as a live possibility. It is also true that in the one manuscript editors trust above others in John, the sentence that settles the arrest reads as an unnamed speaker claiming the name.

The variants teach something even if Vaticanus is a slip. Copyists added subjects to sentences that seemed to need them. The verse as John wrote it, on the critical text, left the identity of the speaker to be supplied from the verses around it, and later hands supplied it in three different ways. The history of the text shows that the question this essay asks, who said “I am he,” was a question that the scribes of the Church felt the need to answer for their readers.

The Name in Verse Eight

When the question is asked a second time and the soldiers again say “Jesus of Nazareth,” verse eight names the answerer: “Jesus answered, ‘I told you that I am he.’”[9] A reader meeting the argument of this essay for the first time will take the verse as proof that the voice belonged to the teacher, and on a first reading that is what it says.

On the reconstruction of The Gospel as Mirror, the verse says something else without changing a letter. The book identifies the man the Gospels call Judas with the prisoner whom the oldest recoverable form of Matthew calls Jesus Barabbas, “Jesus son of the father.”[10] If that identification holds, the man standing with the soldiers bore the name Jesus in his own right, as thousands of Jewish men of his generation did, and when the narrator writes “Jesus answered,” he names the speaker truly whichever of the two men spoke. The name in verse eight cannot decide the question, because on the book’s account both men in the garden were called Jesus, and the arresting party had come for one of them by a designation, “of Nazareth,” that only one of them owned. The evangelist’s choice of the bare name is then the same choice Matthew’s scribes made when they removed “Jesus” from in front of “Barabbas”: a choice to let the name point to one man while it belonged to two.

The answer depends on the identification of Judas with Jesus Barabbas, which is reconstruction, and a reader who rejects that identification will still read verse eight as naming the teacher. The essay records the difficulty and the book’s answer to it, and leaves the verse to be weighed with the rest of the evidence.

One Man for the People

The condition attached to the answer is the center of the scene, and John prepares for it a long way back. After the raising of Lazarus, the council met in alarm at the following Jesus was gathering, and Caiaphas, the high priest that year, told them: “You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” John adds that Caiaphas did not say this on his own, but, being high priest that year, prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation.[11] When the prisoner is taken from the garden to Annas, John reminds the reader of the saying: “Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people.”[12]

The high priest’s principle was political before John made it theological. A movement whose leaders were wanted could be spared if the authorities received one man and were satisfied, and the man who answered in the garden set exactly that condition: “If you are looking for me, let these men go.” The arresting party let them go. John comments that this fulfilled the word Jesus had spoken, “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me,” and the comment repeats almost word for word a line from the prayer two chapters earlier, with one difference.[13] In the prayer, “not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost.”[14] At the arrest the exception has gone. John’s own cross-reference, on the reading of the book, marks the moment at which the one who had been counted as lost stepped into the place of the one who was kept, so that no one who belonged to the teacher’s company was lost after all.

Soldiers Sent for a Bandit

John’s account of who came to the garden adds a further detail that bears on whom the authorities expected to find. Judas brings a speira, the term for a Roman cohort, and when the arrest is made John says that the speira and its chiliarchos, the tribune who commanded it, together with the Jewish police, seized the prisoner and bound him.[15] A cohort at full strength numbered several hundred men, and John may be using the word loosely for a detachment. Even so, he puts Roman soldiers under a Roman officer in the garden, and commentators have long found the detail hard to fit a scene that the Synoptics present as the Temple authorities arresting a teacher accused of blasphemy. The Romans sent troops under a tribune against armed men. Mark preserves the prisoner’s own complaint: “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit?” The word is lēstēs, the term Josephus uses for the Jewish insurgents of the period, and the term John uses for Barabbas.[16] An armed detachment, a question that presupposed more than one possible answer, and a condition that the others go free together describe the arrest of a leader with followers, in the dark, by men who knew his title and had been told where to find him.

What John Meant and What John Kept

The theophany reading and the reading of The Gospel as Mirror occupy different ground, and the difference deserves stating. John meant his readers to see the divine name spoken in the garden and armed men falling before it. The question is whether he also kept details that his meaning did not require, and whether those details describe something else. The question that presupposes more than one answer, the placement of Judas among the soldiers at the moment of the answer, the copyists’ three attempts to name the speaker, Vaticanus’s “I am Jesus,” the condition that the others be let go, John’s repetition of the prayer without its exception, and the Roman cohort sent for a man with followers: none of these is needed for a theophany, and each of them fits a scene in which one man answered to another man’s name.

At the source tier, John’s arrest contains a question no other Gospel has, a sentence placing Judas among the arresting party between the answer and its effect, and a condition that the others go free; the manuscripts of verse five name the speaker in three different ways and in Vaticanus read “I am Jesus”; verse eight names the speaker Jesus; and John ties the scene to Caiaphas’s principle of one man for the people. At the inference tier, the identification of the prisoner in John depended on a spoken answer, and the text of that answer troubled its copyists. At the reconstruction tier, the book proposes that the teacher asked the question and the man known as Judas answered it, claimed the title the soldiers had come for, set the condition, and was taken. The strongest evidence against that reconstruction is the Synoptic kiss, which identifies the man arrested as the man kissed, and verse eight, which names the answerer as Jesus, though on the book’s reconstruction that name belonged to both men in the garden. The strongest evidence for it is a sentence about where Judas stood, which John had no reason to write unless it mattered where Judas stood.

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[1]John 18:1–8. Biblical quotations follow the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

[2]Exod 3:14; compare John 8:24, 28, 58; 13:19.

[3]Mark 14:43–46; compare Matt 26:47–50; Luke 22:47–48.

[4]John 18:5. The verb is heistēkei, pluperfect of histēmi.

[5]A. T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament, vol. 5, The Fourth Gospel (Nashville: Broadman, 1932), on John 18:5.

[6]See the critical apparatus at John 18:5 in Eberhard Nestle and Kurt Aland, eds., Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), and Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), on John 18:5. The witnesses for each reading should be confirmed against the printed apparatus, since secondary accounts of it differ.

[7]Robertson, Word Pictures, vol. 5, on John 18:5–6.

[8]“A Text-Critical Analysis of John 18:5,” Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/119939748/A_Text_Critical_Analysis_of_John_18_5, n. 8.

[9]John 18:7–8.

[10]Matt 27:16–17, where some early manuscripts read “Jesus Barabbas”; see Metzger, Textual Commentary, on Matt 27:16–17.

[11]John 11:47–53; the quotation is from 11:50.

[12]John 18:13–14.

[13]John 18:8–9.

[14]John 17:12.

[15]John 18:3, 12.

[16]Mark 14:48; John 18:40; on lēstai as Josephus’s term for insurgents, see Josephus, Jewish War 2.253–254, 264–265.