[297] Ps. 132:11; Jer. 23:5. [298] Micah 5:2; Luke 2:4. [299] 1 Sam. 16:1-4. 43 So there was a division among the people because of him. 44 And some of them would have taken him; but no man laid hands on him. =40-44.= These verses give the impressions produced on different auditors by Christ’s discourses at the feast. The word _many_ is wanting in the best manuscripts, and is omitted by Lachmann, Tischendorf, Meyer, Alford, Schaff; for it read _some_. Some regarded Jesus as the prophet foretold in Deut. 18:15 (comp. ch. 1:21; Matt. 16:14); others thought that he might even be the Messiah. See ver. 31. The opponents of Christ based their opposition not upon his character or that of his teaching, but upon their Jewish prejudice to his supposed Galilean origin. There is no good ground for the conclusion, arrived at by some rationalistic critics from John’s language here, that he did not know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Writing his Gospel many years after the main facts of Christ’s birth, life, and death were known throughout the church, he here simply narrates as an historian the objections which the Judeans made to the claim that Jesus was the Messiah; to have pointed out their mistake would have been a work of supererogation. Alford’s note on this point is quite conclusive: “De Wette’s ‘probability that John knew nothing of the birth at Bethlehem’ reaches much further than may appear at first. If John knew nothing of it, and yet the mother of the Lord lived with him, the inference must be that _she_ knew nothing of it--in other words, that it never happened.” [Illustration: OFFICERS OF THE CHIEF PRIESTS.] 45 Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, Why have ye not brought him? 46 The officers answered, Never[300] man spake like this man. [300] Luke 4:22.