John 5:3

In these lay a multitude of them that were sick, blind, halt, and withered.

In these ... that is, in the five porches of the pool. This pool was a popular health resort similar to such places all over the world, from Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Mineral Wells, Texas, to Bath in Somerset, England, where the father of King Lear was reputed to have been healed of leprosy.[4]

Waiting for the moving of the water: for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water entered in was made whole, with whatsoever disease he was holden.

Upon what would appear to be sufficient critical grounds, these words have been removed from the English Revised Version (1885); but it is well that they have been retained in the margin, because they explain the common conviction regarding the pool which resulted in its popularity. It would be no great thing to stumble at if indeed it was part of John's Gospel. Whatever healing ever occurred there would thus have been attributed to the power of an angel of the Lord, and what would be so unreasonable about that? The healing qualities of the waters at Hot Springs, for example; are they any less of God and his angels, merely because our chemists have analyzed them? Is there not here a tracing back to their true source phenomena which men are so ready to ascribe to secondary sources? Is not all healing of God; and do not the Scriptures teach that God's angels are servants sent forth to do service for them that shall be the heirs of salvation? (Hebrews 1:14).

The spurious nature of the words here cited, however, is not to be denied. They were probably added by some scribe at a very early date to explain what was meant by the cripple's having no one to help him get into the water at the propitious moment. If there had been any virtue in the waters of the pool, it seems highly incredible that they should have been efficacious only at indeterminate intervals, only for such a short while, and, even then, only for the person who got into them first. The cripple of this narrative had surely found them without any value to himself.