ABSTRACT
After telling of the raising of Lazarus, John recounts a meeting where the chief priests and the Pharisees reach a decision to put Jesus to death (John 11:47-53). In this meeting, the high priest Caiaphas takes the leading role by counselling his hesitant colleagues that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (v. 50). In the following narrative aside, the Johannine narrator explains that Caiaphas “did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God” (vv. 51-52). The narrator thus shows that the earthly plot of the Jewish leaders should be seen in the framework of the divine plot disclosed in the Gospel narrative.
