Jesus answered and said to them, Even if I bear witness concerning myself—in case I bear testimony, I, being who and what I am, and surrounded by Divine attestations, charged with a consciousness of a whole army and legion of approving witnesses, and, above all, with the Father's own testimony to me—my witness is true—I satisfy in superlative fashion your own demand and also my own conceded test—because I know— οἶδα, with clear undisturbed self-consciousness I know, absolutely, invincibly, with perfect possession of the past and future—whence I came, and whither I am going.
The whole of our Christian verities turn upon the consciousness by Jesus of that which lay before and after that human life of his. He embraced the two eternities in his inward self-consciousness. That "whence" and that "whither," with all their infinite sublimity and solemnity, give adequate evidence and sufficient weight to his personal claim to be the Light of the world, because he is the temporary Embodiment of the eternal life which was with the Father, but is manifest to men (cf.
1 John 1:4). But ye know not whence I come—am ever coming forth to you with Divine judgment and calls of mercy—nor £ whither I am going. "Neither the one nor the other;" not that Christ had not repeatedly told them in various and most expressive form.
They could neither grasp the origin of his Personality, nor the method in which, as Messiah, through suffering, through an equation of his lot with man's (through the form of a slave and the death of a cross), he was doing the Father's will (cf.