Jump to The gist Going deeper In the modern world The tidbit This week
The most exclusive sentence in the Gospels is not said to a crowd, and it is not said in an argument.
John 14:1–7 · Majority Standard Bible
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe in Me as well.
In My Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?
And if I go, I will prepare a place for you. I will come back and welcome you into My presence, so that you also may be where I am.
You know the place where I am going and you know the way.”
“Lord,” said Thomas, “we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?”
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
If you had known Me, you would know My Father as well. From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.”
The gist
No one comes to the Father except through Me. Read that on a placard and it is a challenge thrown at the world’s religions. Read it where it stands and it is something else entirely. The Greek of every printed edition begins with the words He says to him — singular. There is no crowd in the room. There is no controversy, no opponent, no question from the Pharisees. It is night, supper is over, eleven frightened men are in a borrowed upstairs room, and one of them has just put up his hand and said he does not understand. The most absolute sentence in the Gospels is an answer to a confused friend.
Going deeper
The range first, and this week it crosses a line the printed Bible draws.
The MSB puts a heading at verse 1 — In My Father’s House Are Many Rooms — and the next at verse 5: The Way, the Truth, and the Life. So the publisher’s units are verses 1–4 and verses 5–14, and this entry takes all of the first and the opening three verses of the second. It is not a printed unit and there is no pretending otherwise.
What justifies it is that the Church divided the text elsewhere. St John Chrysostom’s Homily 73 ends at John 14:7, the boundary verified by opening the homilies on either side. It ends where this entry ends — but it does not begin where this entry begins: Chrysostom starts at John 13:36, with Peter’s question, and reads the whole of it as an answer to Peter. So the entry has taken the Father’s ending without his beginning. St Augustine’s tractates cover verses 1–6, one verse short.
Verse 7 earns its place anyway, because verse 6 does not finish the thought. No one comes to the Father except through Me is a wall; verse 7 is what is on the other side of it, and the MSB closes its quotation there.
Now the apparatus, and the shape of it is the finding.
The MSB prints four footnotes on the first four verses — one on each — and then nothing at all on verses 5, 6 and 7. Every verse of the consolation is flagged as disputed in wording, punctuation or text. The sentence everybody quotes carries no flag whatever.
The first two are the ones that matter.
1 a Or Believe in God
2 b Or If it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.
Footnote a is a mood. The Greek form for you believe and believe! is identical, and not one of the nine printed editions disambiguates it. Eight of the eleven commentators consulted prefer two imperatives, and the Cambridge Bible states the honest position: “there is nothing to indicate that one is indicative and the other imperative.” The Greek line and the Latin line divide on it — Cyril, Theophylact and Euthymius Zigabenus take two imperatives; the Vulgate, Erasmus, Luther and Calvin take what the MSB prints. The book’s own Bible prints one reading and hands you the other in the margin.
Footnote b is a sentence, and this is where the MSB parts company with its own Greek. It prints a question, and the “that” in it translates a word the Byzantine text this book is based on does not have. Robinson-Pierpont prints a raised dot and a capital letter, an editor’s way of marking direct speech: if it were not so, I would have told you: “I am going to prepare a place for you.” The Greek text of the Orthodox Church puts a full stop and leaves two flat sentences side by side.
Nine printed editions produce five different sentences out of nine Greek words, and the difference is entirely where the punctuation falls. The MSB’s own footnote b is, word for word, the Orthodox text’s version — the Church’s reading, on the page, in the margin, underneath the question.
And it is the better sentence for a devotional. Not would I have told you? but If it were not so, I would have told you. He is saying: I would not have let you believe it.
Verses 3 and 4 run the other way, and this is where the MSB visibly is what it claims to be: its footnotes there flag the critical readings as the alternatives, because at both verses the printed English follows the Byzantine. At verse 4 the divergence is total. In the critical text Christ says only you know the way to the place where I am going. In the Byzantine, and in the MSB, He says two things.
And Thomas denies both, in the same order, in the same breath. We do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way? Verses 4 and 5 are a matched pair of assertion and denial — on the text this book prints, and not on the other one.
Augustine noticed it sixteen centuries ago, and his sentence only works on the Byzantine reading: “Our Lord had said that they knew both, Thomas says that they knew neither.” The Latin he read had what the MSB has.
Then verse 6, and after all that, nothing. I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me is identical, word for word and accent for accent, in all nine printed editions. Inside the saying nothing varies but a capital and, in two editions, a comma. The most contested sentence in the Gospels is one of the least contested in the manuscripts.
Now the room, and a lovely reading has to be handed back.
You will have heard that mansions is a mistranslation, that the Greek monē means a stopping-place on a road, and that the picture is of way-stations on a journey rather than fixed addresses. Concede first. That sense is real Greek — Vincent grants it outright, “a later meaning of both mansio and monē is a halting-place or station on a journey” — and it is genuinely attested in Pausanias, as Bernard shows in the ICC. And it is a beautiful reading, because it makes heaven a going-on rather than an arrival.
But it is not in the lexicon. Thayer’s whole entry for the word runs: a staying, abiding, dwelling, abode. There is not one word in it about journeys, stages, halting-places or stations. Anyone citing Thayer for the way-station has not read him. And the two commentators who raise the sense name its holders in order to kill it. Vincent names them — Trench and Westcott — and then, in three words: “This is quite untenable.” Bernard reaches the same verdict from the word’s other two occurrences in the Greek Bible, both of which require permanence.
What is worth having instead comes from the Expositor’s Greek Testament, which notes that the word became, “in later ecclesiastical Greek, a monastery.” The Greek for the room in the Father’s house is the Greek for the place a monk stays. Richer than a hostel on a road, and nobody has to invent it.
And the word occurs twice in the New Testament, and both are in this chapter. Verse 2 and verse 23. In verse 2 the monē is in the Father’s house and we go to it. In verse 23 it is in the disciple, and the Father and the Son come to it: We will come to him and make Our home with him. The same noun, nineteen verses apart, with the direction reversed. The going and the coming meet in one word — and that observation is this entry’s own; the commentators cite verse 23 only to fix the meaning of the noun.
Now the sentence itself, where there are four readings and no agreement.
Is the way the claim and the other two its explanation, or are the three coordinate? Bernard says the following nouns are “not directly involved in the context, but added to complete the great declaration” — and points out that the sentence’s own last clause resumes only the way. The Pulpit Commentary reaches the same place independently: “The two further terms used by himself are probably introduced to throw light upon the way.”
Meyer denies it flatly. The three are “co-ordinated,” and “this cannot justify an arbitrary fusion of the three predicates.” He is the same commentator who denied the parallel reading of “the resurrection and the life” last week, and Bengel, who was with the subordinating party there, is against it here. Neither is a consistent authority on this.
And the two Fathers do something neither party does. Chrysostom splits the verse and assigns each noun a job: the Way proves “no man comes to the Father but by Me,” and the Truth and the Life prove that the promise about the rooms will actually happen. “There is then no falsehood with Me, if I am ‘the Truth’; if I am ‘Life’ also, not even death shall be able to hinder you from coming to Me.” Augustine goes further still: the Truth and the Life are where the Way goes, and the Way is the same person. ”By Himself, therefore, He was going to Himself.”
In the modern world
Nobody consulted remarks on the setting, so this is the entry’s own: the exclusive claim is made in the gentlest circumstances in which it could possibly have been made.
It is not shouted at a rival. It is not the winning move in a debate. It is offered to a man who has just admitted, in front of ten other people, that he has lost the thread — and it is offered as comfort. The paragraph it sits in begins do not let your hearts be troubled.
That does not make the claim smaller. It changes what kind of thing it is. A sentence meant to settle an argument and a sentence meant to steady a frightened man are put to different uses, and this one has spent most of its life being put to the first.
Which matters, because the reader will have to say it in a room where it is not welcome. Someone at work asks what you actually think; a relative asks whether you really believe everyone else is wrong. Christ’s own delivery is the model available: privately, to a person who asked, with the reason attached — if you had known Me, you would know My Father as well. He gives the ground in the very next verse. The exclusivity is not a boundary fence. It is a claim about who the Father turns out to be.
And the honest thing to notice about Thomas is that nobody in the room told him off. The commentators are harder on him than Christ is. Gill says he “betrays his ignorance”; Chrysostom, in one place, says he asked “from cowardice.” But the Cambridge Bible sees it straight — “there is honesty of purpose in it” — Bengel credits him with “acute reasoning,” and the Pulpit Commentary allows that in the language of scepticism “there often seems much common sense.” Chrysostom, elsewhere in the same homily, says Thomas asked what every one of them wanted to ask. The question that gets the greatest answer in the discourse is the one that begins by admitting confusion.
The tidbit
Many rooms. Does that mean there are grades of glory in heaven — some brighter than others?
Here the Fathers and the Protestant commentators change places, and not in the direction anyone expects.
St Augustine says yes, plainly: “the many mansions point to the different grades of merit in that one eternal life,” and “the saints, like the stars in the sky, obtain in the kingdom different mansions of diverse degrees of brightness.” St Gregory the Great agrees, and links it to the parable this volume printed six weeks ago: “The many mansions agree with the one penny, because, though one may rejoice more than another, yet all rejoice with one and the same joy, arising from the vision of their Maker.” One wage; many dignities.
And the nineteenth-century commentators deny it, four of them in as many words. Meyer: “the conception of different degrees of blessedness lies entirely remote from the meaning here.” The Cambridge Bible: “nothing is said about mansions differing in dignity and beauty.” Gill and Alford say the same.
They are probably right about the verse and the Fathers probably right about the doctrine — Augustine and Gregory bring a conviction held on other grounds and find it consonant here. What is worth carrying is that both attach the same guard in the same breath. Augustine: “there will not, therefore, be any envying amid this diversity of brightness, since in all of them will be reigning the unity of love.” The men who taught the degrees took the trouble to say that nobody in heaven will mind.
This week
This week’s practice is Thomas’s, and it is harder than it sounds.
On the first day, write down one thing about the faith that you do not understand and have never said out loud. Not a doubt you enjoy having — the plain one: something in the Creed, or in a Gospel, that you repeat and have never followed. Write it as a question, in the form Thomas used, which admits the ignorance and asks anyway.
Then, once this week, say it to somebody. A priest is the obvious person. A godparent, a friend who has been at this longer, a spouse. Say it as a question and not as a position; that is the whole difference between Thomas and an argument, and it is why Thomas got an answer.
It might look like this. I say “and the life of the age to come” every Sunday and I have no clear idea what I am claiming. Written as a question, in Thomas’s form: We do not know what happens; how can we say we know what we are asking for? Then on Saturday you say it to your priest, as a question and not as a position — which is the whole difference between Thomas and an argument.
And each day, take the two rooms. In the morning, the room in the Father’s house — the one prepared, that you are going to, and did not build. At night, the other one: We will come to him and make Our home with him. The same word. Nineteen verses apart. The place you are going to, and the place He is asking to stay. One sentence for each, and nothing more elaborate than that.
And if somebody asks what you believe this week, answer as it is answered here. To the person, not to the room. With the reason attached. Beginning, if you can manage it, with the part about not being afraid.
The limit. Saying the thing you do not understand is not owed to anybody who has not earned it, and this week does not ask you to disclose doubt to a person who would use it — an employer, a hostile relative, anyone with power over you who has shown they will not handle it kindly. One trustworthy hearer is the whole of the exercise; nought is required in public. And if what you find when you write it down is not a question but a grief, that belongs with a priest rather than on a page. Where a week and the safety note in How to Use This Book seem to disagree, the safety note governs.
Scripture. John 14:1–7, Majority Standard Bible (Byzantine Majority Text). This range is not a printed unit and crosses a heading, and the entry says so on its face. The MSB prints In My Father’s House Are Many Rooms at verse 1 and The Way, the Truth, and the Life at verse 5, so the printed units are 1–4 and 5–14; neither heading carries a parenthetical cross-reference and none has been supplied. The justification offered is the Fathers’ own division, and it is stated at its true strength and no higher: Chrysostom’s Homily 73 ends at John 14:7, but it begins at John 13:36, so the entry has his ending and not his beginning. Augustine’s Tractates 67, 68 and 69 cover verses 1–6 — one verse short of this range, not its exact extent. One thing worth noticing on the page: the heading at verse 5 is printed with commas, and verse 6 has none — the MSB prints I am the way and the truth and the life. The commas belong to the editor. biblehub.com/msb/john/14.htm
Text. Nine printed Greek editions were collated across the range. The saying at verse 6 is identical word for word and accent for accent in all nine editions — the only differences inside it are Nestle’s capital on the word for Father and a comma before “except” in the Byzantine text and Scrivener’s. Outside the saying the article before the name Jesus divides the editions in the usual way, and reaches no English. Everything disputed happens before it. At verse 1 no edition disambiguates the mood of “believe,” the form being identical for indicative and imperative, so the MSB’s footnote there is grammatical and not textual. At verse 2 the critical editions carry a conjunction the Byzantine, Orthodox and both Received texts lack, and the punctuation of the clause differs in five distinct ways across the nine — a raised dot, a comma, a full stop, a capital marking direct speech, and in Scrivener’s Received Text a Greek question mark. The MSB’s printed question requires the critical construal, and its own footnote gives the Orthodox reading instead. At verses 3 and 4 the MSB follows its Byzantine base and footnotes the critical text, the mirror image of what the sister translation does at the same verses. All footnotes above were read off the MSB’s own chapter page. biblehub.com/text/john/14-2.htm biblehub.com/text/john/14-4.htm
Greek. Monē (3438): Thayer’s entire entry is “a staying, abiding, dwelling, abode,” with a second sense for verse 23, and no journey vocabulary in it of any kind. The way-station sense is real later Greek — Vincent grants it and Bernard cites Pausanias for it — but Vincent names Trench and Westcott as its holders here and calls the reading “quite untenable,” and Bernard reaches the same verdict from the word’s only other occurrences in the Greek Bible, at verse 23 and 1 Maccabees 7:38, both requiring permanence. The monastery sense is the Expositor’s Greek Testament’s, from the same sentence in which it reports the journey senses. Two occurrences in the New Testament, verses 2 and 23, corroborated independently by five commentators who each counted for himself. The theological link between the two is the entry’s own move and is made in the entry’s own voice; no consulted commentator draws it. Nothing above rests on a tense-form — Vincent reads the present of I am coming in verse 3 as a continual coming and Bernard reads the same form as the certainty of a future return, and the entry builds on neither. biblehub.com/thayers/3438.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/vws/john/14.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/icc/john/14.htm
Commentators. Meyer, Vincent, Ellicott, the Cambridge Bible, the Pulpit Commentary, the Expositor’s Greek Testament, Bengel, Barnes, Gill, Poole, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Alford and Bernard’s ICC were consulted, and those quoted are quoted as attributed. The “one governing two” reading of verse 6 is offered as a reading and not as the meaning, because Meyer denies it in the technical vocabulary and must be named doing so. Bengel changed sides between this saying and the one treated last week, so he is not cited as a consistent authority on the structure. Three transcription defects are respected rather than repaired: Alford’s note on verse 6 came through with the retrieval’s own ellipses in it and is quoted only up to them; his note on verse 2 came through with a bracketed placeholder standing in for a list of Fathers that was never transcribed, so that list is neither printed nor guessed; and the Latin tags several commentators attach to this verse came through in two hosts with two different word orders and at least two miscopied words, so no Latin is printed here at all. Vincent closes his note on verse 6 with a threefold formula whose author he does not name, and it is not used. biblehub.com/commentaries/john/14-2.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/john/14-6.htm
Fathers. St John Chrysostom, Homily 73 on the Gospel of St John. Public domain. The number was read off the printed heading and the extent verified by opening the homilies on either side — 72 ends at John 13:35, 74 opens at John 14:8, so Homily 73 runs John 13:36 to John 14:7 — and is independently corroborated by the Catena Aurea, which cites it as “Hom. lxxiii.” File numbering and printed number agree across four consecutive homilies on the edition used. His reading of the many rooms is recorded here because it is unique and there was no space for it above: the rooms answer the disciples’ fear that the promise had been made to Peter alone — “the same place which receives Peter shall receive you” — which depends entirely on the homily beginning at 13:36. Two of his judgements on Thomas are in tension, one calling the question cowardice and one placing it in “much love, and, at the same time, fear”; both are printed on their pages, they are different translations of different sentences, and the entry uses the second and reports the first. St Augustine, Tractates 67, 68 and 69, numbers corroborated by the same compiler. St Gregory the Great reaches this page only through the Catena Aurea and is attributed that way. St Cyril of Alexandria could not be reached: the passage falls in Book 9 by the volume’s own printed table of contents, and four attempts on that page truncated well short of John 14. Three retrievals reported that John 14 does not appear there; that is a limit of the search and not evidence that Cyril is silent. www.newadvent.org/fathers/240173.htm www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701067.htm www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701069.htm
Refusals. The entry does not print the claim that the imagery of verses 2 and 3 comes from a Jewish wedding custom — the bridegroom preparing a room in his father’s house during the betrothal. Sixteen sources were checked verse by verse and not one of them knows about it — eleven commentators, Chrysostom’s homily, two of Augustine’s tractates, and the whole of the Catena Aurea on these verses. The modern page that states the custom most explicitly cites no ancient source at all, no Mishnah, no Talmud, no Josephus, no papyrus, and the earliest attribution found for it is a book of 1990. That is unsupported, not refuted: rabbinic literature was not surveyed, and 1990 is the earliest source found rather than an origin. The image the commentators actually adduce is a different one: the Expositor’s calls it a figure taken from sending one of a party ahead to secure quarters, and Vincent sends the reader to Numbers 10:33 and to Hebrews 6:20, where Christ is the forerunner. A journey and a camp, not a wedding. The entry also declines to say that the ambiguity at verse 1 is deliberate — eleven commentators were canvassed and every one treats it as a problem to be solved. And it declines to attribute its own observation about the private setting of verse 6 to anybody, because not one consulted source remarks on it. biblehub.com/commentaries/john/14-1.htm www.ecatholic2000.com/catena/untitled-102.shtml
Fifty-one more like it
If one week changed how you read that passage, Abide in Me has fifty-one others, each given the same treatment.