This passage may be translated either as a simple statement, “Ye search the scriptures,” or as a command, “Search the scriptures!” The context seems to indicate that these words are best understood as a plain declaration of Christ to the Jews, “Ye search the scriptures because ye think to have eternal life in them, and they are the witnesses about me!” It was ancient Jewish thought that a knowledge of the law would itself assure a man of eternal life. Thus Hillel, a rabbi of the 1st century B.C., is reported to have declared: “One who has acquired unto himself words of Torah, has acquired for himself the life of the world to come” (Mishnah Aboth 2. 7, Soncino ed. of the Talmud, p. 17). Jesus here makes use of this belief to remind the Jews that the Scriptures in which they thought to find eternal life were the very writings that testified of Him (see PP 367). This passage has also been used effectively as an injunction to study the Scriptures (see 2 T 121). Had the Jews searched the Scriptures with eyes of faith, they would have been prepared to recognize the Messiah when He stood among them.

A passage almost identical with this verse appears in an apocryphal gospel discovered in Egypt on a papyrus written at the latest by A.D. 150. It reads, “Turning to the rulers of the people, he said this word, ‘Ye search the scriptures; [those scriptures] in which ye think to have life, they are those that witness concerning me’” (Egerton Papyrus 2, lines 5-10; Greek text in H. Idris Bell and T. C. Skeat, Fragments of an Unknown Gospel [London, 1935], pp. 8, 9). Such a passage appears to have been based upon the Gospel of John, and consequently is an important witness to the existence of that Gospel during the first half of the 2d century. The fact that apocryphal gospel papyrus was discovered in Egypt indicates that the Gospel of John apparently had circulated there—at a considerable distance from Ephesus, its probable place of origin—for some time before it was used in the construction of an apocryphal account of Christ. This, together with the contemporary Rylands Papyrus of John, is significant evidence for the validity of the traditional dating of the Fourth Gospel near the end of the 1st century A.D. (see pp. 179-181).