Charles Ellicott Commentary John 10:24

"The Jews therefore came round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou hold us in suspense? If thou art the Christ, tell us plainly." — John 10:24 (ASV)

Then came the Jews round about him.—The words literally mean, they encircled Him. It is again the impression of one who saw what he records. He remembers how they stood in a circle around our Lord, and watched Him with eager eyes as they asked their question.

How long dost thou make us to doubt?—Literally, How long do You lift up our souls? or, as the margin, “How long do You keep us in suspense?” The words exactly express what was probably the real state of fluctuation in which many of these Jews then were. They do not in the true sense “believe” (John 10:25–26), and they soon pass to the other extreme of seeking to stone Him (John 10:31); but in many of them the last miracle, and the words accompanying it, had left a conviction that He was more than human, and not possessed by a demon. (See Note on John 10:21.) Two months have passed away, not, we may believe, without many an earnest thought and much anxious weighing of evidence concerning Him.

And now the Feast of Dedication has come, and what thoughts have come with it? It is the Feast of Lights, and He had declared Himself the Light of the world.

It is the Feast of Freedom, telling how the Maccabees had freed their nation from the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes, and He has declared that If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed (John 8:36). It is the feast which commemorates the cleansing of the Temple, and His first public appearance in the Temple was to cleanse it and claim it as His Father’s house.

May there not be, then, a close connection between the statement that “it was the Feast of the Dedication,” and the question, “How long do you excite our souls?” Was He, the question would seem to ask, really the Messiah or not, though by the Messiah they meant only a temporal prince? Was He, like the Judas of whom they were thinking, raised up as a deliverer from the Roman power, to give them the freedom which had long been the national dream?

If thou be the Christ, tell us.—Compare Note on Luke 22:67.