Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
John 5:1-18, The pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath
At a pool with five porches, Jesus heals a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years and tells him to pick up his mat. It is the Sabbath, and the dispute that follows turns on Jesus calling God his own Father.
John 5:1-18, in every translation this tool compares.
At a festival in Jerusalem, Jesus goes to a pool near the Sheep Gate called Bethesda, with five porches where many sick people lie. He asks a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years whether he wants to be well; the man says no one helps him into the water when it is stirred. Jesus tells him to get up, take his mat and walk, and he does. Because it is the Sabbath, the Judeans object to his carrying the mat and then to Jesus, who answers that his Father is still working and so is he, which they hear as making himself equal with God.
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The pool had twin basins with five porches, four around the sides and one across the middle (Keener and his notes; the ESV Study Bible). Healing shrines, above all those of Asclepius, usually had pools, and in later times this pool served pagans as a healing shrine; Price and House, in the Zondervan archaeology handbook, report a votive foot dedicated there by a Roman woman named Pompeia. Keener thinks popular religion probably already treated it as a place of healing, Wright says it was at one stage dedicated to Asclepius, and Keener's notes place the pagan shrine in later centuries. The verse about an angel stirring the water is missing from the earliest manuscripts, though the sick man's words show that people believed something like it (the ESV Study Bible; Keener; Wright). Everyone agreed that God went on working on the Sabbath to sustain the world, so claiming that right sounded like claiming to be equal with God (Keener and his notes). Carson, Moo and Morris note that 5:2 says there is a pool, which some take as proof that John wrote before AD 70, but John often uses the present tense of the past.
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on John 5:1, 5:1-9a (introduction), 5:2, 5:3, 5:4, 5:5, 5:9b-10, 5:11-13, 5:17 and 5:18
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on John 5:1, 5:2, 5:3, 5:10, 5:17 and 5:18
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on John 5:2 and 5:3
- N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part One, comment on John 5:1-9a
- J. Randall Price and H. Wayne House, Zondervan Handbook of Biblical Archaeology, ch. 12, John 5:2 The Pool of Bethesda
- D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament, ch. 5, John, Date
