John 10:23

23. Jesus walked… in Solomon’s porch With an expressive abruptness the Evangelist presents Jesus walking in the great eastern piazza of the temple, and relates the scene which is counterpart and completion of the above discourse. Protected by the covert of the portico from the wet storm of a Jewish winter day, walking perhaps with the Evangelist, he is suddenly, εκυκλωσαν , encircled by a number of the very doubters of John 10:19-21, the sight of whom calls up to mind the image of shepherd and sheep, John 10:26-29.

To the pagan temples of Greece there was customarily fixed a portico for the convenience of walkers and talkers; and it is curious to remark that from two of the words used in this verse, περιπατει and στοα , two philosophical sects were named, respectively, Peripatetics and Stoics. This porch of Solomon was by some held to have been a work of that monarch, left undestroyed by the Assyrians.

We endorse the opinion of Lange, (against the protest of Stier,) that these Jews were not ironical, but most earnest in this movement, yet earnest after their own way. By the miracles of Jesus they were compelled to attribute to him some more than human power; but his teachings, so anti-Judaic, and, as they felt, anti-Mosaic, repelled them. They therefore, as in a body, encompassed him round, as if to make him prisoner, and if he will consent to be their sort of a Messiah, to make him their Messiah. It was an attempt, upon a much smaller scale, resembling the effort to make him king, in John 6:15.