PRELIMINARY NOTE.--There is nothing in John to indicate the time at which this miracle took place; and there is no general agreement among harmonists respecting it. Robinson places it immediately at the close of Christ’s Judean ministry and prior to his ministry in Perea; Andrews and Ellicott place it at the close of the Perean ministry and immediately preceding the Passion week. The reasons for so doing are: (1) It seems the immediate occasion both of the triumphal procession accorded to Jesus by the spontaneous action of the common people, and of the more deliberate determination on the part of the ecclesiastics of Jerusalem to put him to death. It does not seem reasonable, therefore, to suppose that a long period of active service in another part of the Holy Land intervened between this the greatest miracle wrought by Christ and the effects which it produced, both upon the church party and upon the common people. (2) Immediately after this miracle, and in consequence of the excitement produced by it, Christ retired into the wilderness, and is said by John to have continued there with his disciples; and the implication is that he remained in this retirement until after the Passover (vers. 54, 55). To suppose that the Perean ministry, which lasted something like three months, was interjected into this period of retirement, which is Robinson’s supposition, breaks into the continuity of John’s narrative, and does violence to its order and symmetry, without any adequate reason. (3) Jesus was at a considerable distance from Bethany at the time when Lazarus was taken sick. The sisters sent unto him at once; after receiving their message, he remained where he was two days; but when he reached Bethany, Lazarus had been four days dead (comp. vers. 6 and 39). Presumptively, therefore, he was at least one day’s journey from Bethany, even if we assume that Lazarus had died before the messengers had reached Jesus; more probably he was two days’ journey distant, for verse 11 indicates that the death of Lazarus took place after Jesus had received word of his sickness. Thus the narrative of this miracle tallies with the supposition that Christ was carrying on his ministry in the region beyond the Jordan, rather than with the supposition that he was anywhere in Judea; the more so that we have no intimation in the Gospels of any ministry in Judea except in and about Jerusalem, of which Bethany was practically a suburb. (4) In Luke 13:32, Christ uses the following language: “Behold I cast out devils and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected.” This occurs in the Perean ministry, and the “two days” here referred to, have been hypothetically identified with the “two days” during which, according to John’s narrative here, Jesus tarried where he was after receiving the message of Lazarus’s sickness. The coincidence between the two passages is at least curious, though it may be nothing more than a coincidence.