005_Tam_co_570-588 13/02/15 12:48 Pagina 585 WHEN PAPYRI AND CODICES SPEAK: REVISITING JOHN 2,23-25 585 because the same portrayal of people believing in Jesus will be re- peated in John 4, where the same polloi, in conjunction with pisteu,w is used (polloi. evpi,steusan eivj auvto.n, 4,39), being strikingly sim- ilar to 2,23 here (polloi. evpi,steusan eivj to. o;noma auvtou). Yet Jesus did not criticize their faith. Thus, contrary to many commen- tators, the author provides no clues in the narrative for us to identify the faith of these people as “shallow” or “inauthentic”. To use 2,23- 25 as a proof that any faith based on signs (“signs faith”) is rejected by the author seems to underestimate the real complexity encoded in this final form of the Gospel 50. Quite the opposite, the portrayal of their faith, though based on signs, falls into line with what the author has been persuading the reader about so far (1,12; 2,11). At the very least, the disciples are the ones who believe Jesus upon seeing signs, which suggests that the negative judgment made by Jesus in 2,24 should actually be explained differently. The author’s use of the knowing motif, as I will argue in the following section, provides a solution to it. b. The knowing motif The difference reflected in Jesus’ judgment, I assert, hinges not on the so-called “signs faith”, but on Jesus’ own authoritative dis- cernment. In an anticlimactic way, the author is trying to correct a naïve distinction of believing versus unbelieving, an impression one may have after reading 1,35 – 2,22, the conversion of the first disciples. The author tries to correct this naïve distinction by linking the seeing-signs-and-belief motif to the motif of Jesus’ knowing. He wants to show that the way people get to know and believe in Jesus, the disciples and the people alike, is neither totally their own autonomous free choice nor discerned only from their outward re- sponse. The discernment rests exclusively upon Jesus himself. In these few verses, the author stresses that one truly knows Jesus only 50 Contra BULTMANN, Das Evangelium des Johannes, 92; BROWN, John I-XII, 127; SCHNACKENBURG, John I, 358. For a view similar to mine, see M. DE JONGE, Jesus, Stranger from Heaven and Son of God. Jesus Christ and the Christians in Johannine Perspective (trans. J.E. STEELY) (SBLSBS 11; Missoula, MT 1977) 136; M.M. THOMPSON, The Humanity of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia 1988) 63-64; W.H. SALIER, The Rhetorical Impact of the Semeia in the Gospel of John (WUNT II/186; Tübingen 2004) 53; LINCOLN, John, 144-145.