John 12

John 12 is the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It narrates an anointing of Jesus' feet, attributed to Mary of Bethany, as well as an account of the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem.Halley, Henry H. ''Halley's Bible Handbook'': an Abbreviated Bible Commentary. 23rd edition. Zondervan Publishing House. 1962. The author of the book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that John composed this Gospel.Holman Illustrated Bible Handbook. Holman Bible Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee. 2012.

Text

The original text was written in Koine Greek. This chapter is divided into 50 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Koine Greek are:
* Papyrus 75 (AD 175–225)
*Papyrus 66 (~200)
*Codex Vaticanus (325-350)
*Codex Sinaiticus (330-360)
*Codex Bezae (~400)
*Codex Alexandrinus (400-440)
* Papyrus 2 (~550; extant verses 12–15)
*Papyrus 128 (6th/7th century; extant verses 16–18)
*Papyrus 59 (7th century; extant verses 25, 29, 31, 35)

Places

Events recorded in this chapter refer to the following locations:
* Bethany ( John 11:1), about 15 stadia (15 furlongs or 2 miles) away from Jerusalem ( John 11:18)
* Jerusalem

Old Testament references

* :
* :
* : a;
* :
* :

New Testament references

* :

The anointing at Bethany (12:1–8)

Verse 1–3

:''Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was who had been dead, whom He had raised from the dead.''
The narrative suggests that Jesus and His disciples travelled to Bethany from Ephraim, where Jesus had been staying to avoid the Jewish leaders who were plotting to kill him (). He dined with Lazarus, Martha and Mary, a family well known to Jesus (). This family group had been introduced to the readers of John's Gospel in chapter 11, with Mary being described in as "that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair", the event recounted in .

:''Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.''

Verse 12:3 is curiously foretold in verse 11:2, and shows many striking similarities with, but also differences from, various traditions narrated in the other canonical gospels, which has created much scholarly controversy. New Testament scholars try to establish how John's narrative of the raising of Lazarus and the subsequent feet-anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany (John 11:1–12:11,17) was composed by seeking to explain its apparent relationships with the older textual traditions of the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke). The author of John seems to have combined elements from several – apparently originally unrelated – stories into a single narrative. These include the unnamed woman's head-anointing of Jesus in Bethany (Mark 14, Matthew 26), the sinful woman's feet-anointing (and hair-wiping) of Jesus in Galilee (Luke 7; these first two may have a common origin, the Lukan account likely being derived from Mark), Jesus' visit to Martha and Mary in the unnamed Galilean village (Luke 10), Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16), and possibly others involving Jesus' miraculous raising of the dead (the raising of Jairus' daughter and the raising of the son of the widow of Nain). Meanwhile, other elements were removed or replaced; for example, Simon the Leper/Simon the Pharisee was replaced by Lazarus as the host of the feast in Jesus' honour, and Bethany in Judea was chosen as the setting, while most elements of John's narrative correspond to traditions that the Synoptics set in Galilee. Scholars pay particular attention to verse (and ), which may represent an effort by the author or a later redactor to stress a connection between these stories that is, however, not found in the older canonical gospels. They further argue that the actual anointing will not be narrated until verse 12:3, and that neither Mary, nor Martha, nor the village of these sisters, nor any anointing is mentioned in the Gospel of John before this point, suggesting that the author (or redactor) assumes the readers already have knowledge of these characters, this location and this event, and wants to tell them that these were connected (which he apparently knew the readers did not commonly know/believe yet) long before giving the readers more details. Esler and Piper (2006) posited that verse 11:2 is evidence that the author of the Gospel of John deliberately mixed up several traditions in an 'audacious attempt (...) to rework the collective memory of the Christ-movement'. According to Esler, the author did not strive to give a historically accurate account of what had happened, but instead, for theological purposes, combined various existing narratives in order to construct Lazarus, Mary and Martha of Bethany as a prototypical Christian family, whose example is to be followed by Christians.

Verses 4–6

Judas Iscariot, described as "one of esus'disciples" and "Simon’s son, who would betray Him", asks “Why was this fragrant oil not sold for three hundred denarii ( gr, δηναρίων τριακοσίων ) and the money given to poor people (or ''the poor'')?” The New International Version, New King James Version and New Living Translation all equate this amount to a year's wages. In the oil is also valued at three hundred denarii; in it could have been sold for "a high (but unspecified) price". H W Watkins computes that, since in , two hundred denarii would purchase food for 5,000, three hundred denarii would have fed 7,500 people.Ellicott's Commentary for Modern Readers
on Matthew 26, accessed 1 June 2016

John's Gospel is the only one which observes that Judas was responsible for the disciples' "common fund" or "money box", both here in verse 6 and again in . The word το γλωσσοκομον (''glōssokomon'') "means literally "a case for mouthpieces" of musical instruments, and hence any portable chest. It occurs in the Septuagint texts of .Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
on John 12, accessed 2 June 2016

Verse 7

:''But Jesus said, “Let her alone; she has kept this for the day of My burial.''
The New Revised Standard Version