120.  John’s record suggests that Jesus left Jerusalem shortly after the conversation with Nicodemus.  His work there was not without success, for Nicodemus seems to have been henceforth his loyal advocate (compare John vii. 50-52; xix. 39); and it may be that at the time of this sojourn he won the hearts of his friends in Bethany, for the first picture the gospels give of this household seems to presuppose a somewhat intimate relation of Jesus to the family (Luke x. 38-42).  It would be idle to speculate whether it was at this time or later that he became acquainted with Joseph of Arimathea, or the friends who during the last week of his life showed him hospitality (Mark xi. 2-6; xiv. 12-16).

121.  For a time after his withdrawal from Jerusalem he lingered in Judea, carrying on a simple ministry of preparation like that of John the Baptist.  In this way the summer and early autumn seem to have passed, Jesus growing more popular as a prophet than John himself had been.  The fact that Jesus’ disciples administered baptism in connection with his work roused the jealousy of some of John’s followers, and attracted again the attention of Jerusalem to the new activity of the bold disturber of the temple market.  John’s disciples complained to him of Jesus’ rivalry, and received his self-effacing confession, “He must increase, I must decrease.”  The Pharisees, on the other hand, made Jesus feel that further work in Judea was for the time unwise, and he withdrew into Galilee for retirement, since “a prophet has no honor in his own country” (John iv. 1-3, 44).  Baffled in his first effort to win his people, this journey back from the region of the holy city must have been one of no little sadness for Jesus.  Some urgency for haste led him by the direct road through despised Samaria.  A seemingly chance conversation with a woman at Jacob’s well, where he was resting at noonday, gave him an opportunity for ministry which was more ingenuously received than any which he had been able to render in Judea; and to this woman he declared himself even more plainly than to Nicodemus, and preached to her that spiritual idea of worship which he had sought to enforce by cleansing Jerusalem’s temple.  Samaria was so isolated from all Jewish interest that Jesus felt no need for reserve in this “strange” land.  The few days spent there must have been peculiarly welcome to his heart, fresh from rejection in Judea.

122.  One reason why he wished to hasten from Judea seems to have been his knowledge of the hostile movement which was making against John the Baptist.  Either before or soon after Jesus started for Galilee Herod had arrested John, ostensibly as a measure of public safety owing to John’s undue popularity (Jos.  Ant. xviii. 5. 2).  Herod may have been encouraged to take this step by the hostility of the Pharisees to the plain-spoken prophet of the desert (see John iv. 1-3).  The fourth gospel leaves its readers to infer that the imprisonment took place somewhere about this time (compare iii. 24 and v. 35), while the other gospels unite in giving this arrest as the occasion for Jesus’ withdrawal into Galilee.