John 10:22-23

"At that time" (NASB) is a general reference to the proximity of the feast of Dedication and the events narrated in the previous pericope. It does not mean that the events in the preceding section occurred exactly before that feast. The NIV "Then came" gives the sense better.

". . . His Peraean Ministry, which extended from after the Feast of Tabernacles to the week preceding the last Passover, was, so to speak, cut in half by the brief visit of Jesus to Jerusalem at the Feast of the Dedication. Thus, each part of the Peraean Ministry would last about three months; the first, from about the end of September to the month of December; the second, from that period to the beginning of April. Of these six months we have (with the solitary exception of St. Matthew xii. 22-45), no other account than that furnished by St. Luke, although, as usually, the Jerusalem and Judaean incidents of it are described by St. John. After that we have the account of His journey to the last Passover, recorded, with more or less detail, in the three Synoptic Gospels." [Note: Edersheim, 2:195.]

The eight-day feast of Dedication, now called Chanukah (or Hanukkah), the feast of Lights, was not one of the feasts prescribed in the Mosaic Law. The Jews instituted it during the inter-testamental period (cf. 1 Maccabees 4:36-59; 2 Maccabees 1:9; 2 Maccabees 1:18; 2 Maccabees 10:1-8).

"Christ’s testimony at Hanukkah, and its place in the Gospel of John, which stresses the theme of light, is a testimony to Christians that Hanukkah emphasizes His great work of providing salvation to a spiritually blind world." [Note: Jerry R. Lancaster and R. Larry Overstreet, "Jesus’ Celebration of Hanukkah in John 10," Bibliotheca Sacra 152:607 (July-September 1995):332-33.]

It commemorated the purification and rededication of the temple by Judas Maccabeus ("Judas the Hammer") on the twenty-fifth of Chislev (modern late December and early January), 164 B.C. The Syrian invader Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) had profaned the temple three years earlier by replacing the brazen altar with a pagan one on which he offered a pig as a sacrifice to Jupiter. Antiochus attempted to Hellenize Judea, but the Jewish patriot Judas Maccabeus was able to lead a guerilla revolt that has borne his name ever since. After three years he defeated the Syrians and liberated the Jews.

"It was the last great deliverance that the Jews had known, and therefore it must have been in people’s minds a symbol of their hope that God would again deliver his people." [Note: Morris, p. 459.]

In warmer weather Jesus would have taught in one of the open-air courtyards of the temple. Because it was winter He taught what follows in Solomon’s colonnade on the temple courtyard’s eastern side. Perhaps John mentioned this detail because it was in Solomon’s colonnade that the first Christians gathered regularly (Acts 3:11; Acts 5:12). One writer opined that John may have included reference to winter because of the spiritual climate, namely, the generally frigid spirits of the Jews. [Note: Beasley-Murray, p. 173.] John may have made other references to times and seasons with such allusions in mind (e.g., John 13:30).