Charles Ellicott Commentary John 10:8

"All that came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them." — John 10:8 (ASV)

All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers.—Compare to Note on John 10:1. The Sinaitic Manuscript and several of the early versions read this verse without the words translated “before Me,” but the balance of authority is strongly in their favor; and the fact of their being hard to understand, or having been misunderstood, is the probable reason for their omission. Retaining them, as we seem bound to do, we are also bound to give them their ordinary temporal meaning. There can be but one rendering that suggests itself to the unbiased mind, and that is the rendering of our version. The Greek words and the English words are equally plain, and other renderings are due to the exigencies of interpretation.

What, then, do the words mean? Their force seems to be all-inclusive; and yet they cannot contradict Christ’s own words, which have excluded Abraham, Moses, the prophets, John the Baptist, from any possibility of such thoughts (John 5:33; John 5:39; John 5:45; John 7:19). They cannot, on the other hand, be limited to false Christs, who did not come before but after our Lord (Compare to Note on John 5:43). Here, as often, the true meaning seems for the most part to have been overlooked because people have sought it elsewhere than in the words themselves, and in their place among other words.

The thought which precedes and which follows is that Jesus is Himself “the door.” “All that ever came before Me” is in immediate contrast to this thought, and the sense is, “all professing to be themselves the door, to be the means by which people enter the fold, to be the Mediator between humanity and God.” The Old Testament teachers cannot be meant, because they witnessed to the true door.

But since the return from the Captivity and the close of the Old Testament canon, a priestly caste had been growing up in place of the prophetic schools. These men had been, in practice if not in word, claiming for themselves the position of the door to the kingdom of God. There were Hillels and Shammais, heads of parties and factions, whose word was to their followers as the word of God. There were Pharisees then standing around Him who had solemnly decreed that anyone who confessed Him to be the Messiah would be shut out from the Temple and from the synagogue, and that they themselves would in God’s name pronounce a curse upon his head (John 9:22). As “thieves” were they, and as “robbers”—wolves in sheep’s clothing, stealing into the flock of Christ and rending those who were the true sheep (Compare to the analogous language of Luke 11:52). The lawyers closed the door and plundered and oppressed those whom they kept outside.

We should note the present tense of the verb “are” in this sentence, which itself seems to suggest that the words that follow apply to the people then actually living.

But the sheep did not hear them.—Read again John 10:3-5. What is true of the sheep and the voice of the stranger is also true of humanity and of every voice that is not of God. The heart of the child answers to the voice of the Father; it trembles at any voice that is unknown.

The conscience of humankind knows the voice of God, but it will not hear the voice of the devil, nor the unreal voice of humans claiming to speak in God’s name.

It will not call bitter, sweet; nor sweet, bitter; darkness, light; nor light, darkness. It will not accept the false, the impure, or the wrong, for it is the divine in humankind that always is, and always must be, true, holy, and right.

So it was that the teaching of scribes and Pharisees never truly influenced the masses, for it was concerned with the externals of matter and form, while they wanted the living truth.

So it has been that systems of error have had their day but have possessed no principle of life, because they were not the voice of God speaking to the human heart. Insofar as they have survived at all, it has been because the error was only in the form, or was only partly in the substance, which also contained some germ of truth.

So it has been in every age and in every school of thought: the men whom the sheep have heard have been men who had in them the ring of truth, and have been like prophets uttering the voice of God. Witness Paul of Tarsus and Francis of Assisi; Luther and Savonarola; John Knox and John Wesley; Charles Simeon and John Keble.