005_Tam_co_570-588 13/02/15 12:48 Pagina 586 586 JOSAPHAT C. TAM when Jesus recognizes that. True faith, like that of the disciples, goes hand in hand with Jesus’ omniscience. This is shown charac- teristically in the reversal of the knowing motif here. In the previous pericopae, different people came to know Jesus in various ways, but it is only Jesus who “knows” (ginw,skw) “all” people (pa,ntaj v. 24b) and what is really in them (ti, h=n evn tw/| avnqrw,pw|, v. 25b). The fact that pa/j and a;nqrwpoj are used in 2,24 shows that the au- thor is no longer talking about a specific group of people but, in a generic sense, everyone including the people and the disciples alike. By this, the faith of the crowd (polloi,) and the faith of the disciples are both included and yet distinguished as Jesus knows them all 51. c. The pisteu,w wordplay Along this line of thought, the wordplay involving pisteu,w in 2,23-24 is similarly subtle. Dodd considers the transitive use of pisteu,w in 2,24 to be “without any special significance” 52. Yet this is the only instance in John in which Jesus is the subject of the verb pisteu,w. Borchert rightly pointed out the sense here: that “Jesus did not believe their believing” 53. Thus, Jesus’ refusal to “believe” is actually contradicting the people’s “believing”. This is significant and strategic in John. With the reversal of the believing motif put in such a remarkable way, 2,23-24 becomes incisively an anticli- max to all the faith passages one has seen so far (1,35 – 2,22). The main ground for Jesus’ distrust, ouvk evpi,steuen, is his omniscience noted above, a divine characteristic echoing 1,1-5, where Jesus was explicitly called God. d. The witnessing motif In addition to the contrast with the use of pisteu,w mentioned above, another set of contrasts involving “bearing witness” (marture,w) 51 Here the author paves the way for an utterly false faith in 8,31-47. In Brown’s analysis of the vocabulary and various stages of faith in John, the significance of Jesus’ omniscience and its relation to his pisteu,w are unfortunately missing. BROWN, John I–XII, 512-14, 530-31. Similarly, MCHUGH, John 1–4, 219. Michaels, in this regard, shares a similar view with me although he does not see 2:23-25 as primarily connected to chap- ter 2. MICHAELS, John, 173-175. 52 DODD, Historical Tradition, 179. 53 BORCHERT, John 1–11, 168.