John 1:19 Commentary and Bible Study

We see here the desperate need of the times. The Israelites were in such a state of spiritual declension that before the coming of Christ a forerunner had to be sent to call them to repentance. When you read this term ‘the Jews’ in the Gospel of John, it almost always refers to those Jews who were hostile to Christ. John the apostle uses this term to describe the Sanhedrin council, the scribes and the Pharisees, the leaders of the Jewish community who were opposed to Christ. So we are alerted to the fact that this is a hostile delegation sent from the authorities in Jerusalem to interrogate John the Baptist. The Levites were probably temple police, and the priests were the ones who did the cross-examination. And they came from Jerusalem to ask: ‘Who art thou?’Now they were rather haughty people. It is evident from their questions that they had not done a lot of research. John the Baptist made it quite clear who he was and who he was not in his preaching and in his calling the people to repentance. They would have found it very easy to find exactly what he was saying, because as we read in the Gospel of Matthew many people from Jerusalem had already heard him. They had streamed out in their thousands to the place where he was baptising at Bethabara, and we are told in by Matthew that even many priests, both Pharisees and Sadducees, went to the baptism of John and were deeply impressed by him. But the Jewish leaders had heard what seemed like a challenge to their exclusive authority over the land, a preacher who was so popular that people were undergoing this rite of baptism at his hands, so they sent their delegation.