John 5:44

How can ye believe, who receive glory one of another, and the glory that cometh from the only God ye seek not?

This says that the Sanhedrinists could not believe in Jesus because it would have made them unpopular with their peer group. They were primarily in love with themselves; and their society was founded upon mutual flattery, mutual deceit, and mutual glory reflected among themselves. The Saviour of all men was "persona non grata" in such a society.

Exactly the same blight rests upon Christianity today in the destructive and sinful theology which has been received and promulgated in some high intellectual circles. Think of the unpopularity that would descend upon any of the radical critics who might openly confess that the Bible is nothing less than the word of God. Of this very Gospel, throughout the first third of the present century, there were few notable exceptions among the so-called higher critics who dared to support the opinion that John was written in the first century. Why? It was popular to ascribe it to a falsarius in the second or third century; and what scholar was there who desired to be unpopular among the "leading lights" of his age? Many of such cowards, who probably knew better, are now in their graves; and it turns out from the discovery of the Rylands fragment and from other discoveries of archaeology that the book of John was, after all, certainly written before the end of the first century. But what of those whose voices so stridently opposed such a view only a few years ago? This is another warning against subscribing to any view of sacred things purely upon the basis of the reputation of its advocates. As Hengstenberg said:

Receiving honor from man has a deep place in our theology. This theology is extremely anxious not to break with the spirit of the age, but to be in accord with it. This is the worm which is gnawing it, the curse which is resting upon it.[15]