Finding What’s Not There
“John 19:30 When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”
Compare this verse with its counterpart in the synoptics (BW: enter “John 19:30” in the command line, then select “Tools/Synopsis Window” to bring up a harmony of the gospels). All four gospels report that the Lord says something, and then dies, but only John notes that “he bowed his head.” Is John simply adding a detail from his personal observation of the event (Alford, Carson), or does he attach some meaning to it? Gill suggests the gesture shows his submission to the Father’s will. Morris draws a tentative link with Matt 8:20 and Luke 9:58, where the phrase refers to taking rest in sleep (“the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head”).
Morris’ suggestion is attractive. John alone among the evangelists records the Lord’s words, “It is finished.” It would be very fitting if, having finally completed his labors, he now makes a gesture of rest. But perhaps this observation is making too much of a simple expression. After all, bowing the head is a very common gesture, isn’t it? Morris himself simply understands it as a common expression meaning “to go to bed.”
To evaluate Morris’ suggestion, we need to see just how common this gesture is. The rarer it is, the more likely John is to be alluding to the expression in the synoptics. The general principle here is that the rarer a repeated expression is, the more likely the repetitions are to be connected to one another. If an expression is common, any two instances may just reflect its frequent occurrence. But if it is rare, it becomes harder to argue that two instances originated independently, and more likely either that they are separate witnesses to a common event (here, the repetition between Matthew and Luke), or an allusion by one of them to the other (John to Matthew and Luke).
In BibleWorks, we could search for the exact phrase by adding a Greek version to the browse window, highlighting the phrase, right clicking, and selecting “Search for Phrase.” But we would miss instances with a different inflection of the verb, or lacking the article, or with inverted word order. When we’re testing for rarity, it’s better to make the search overly general than overly strict. So let’s search for the lemmatized form of the words. BW: Select BNM as the search version, and enter
κλινω κεφαλη
Others: search for Strong’s numbers 2827 and 2776. (This is as far as users of English language search programs can go, since Strong’s numbers aren’t available in any of the other texts we will use.)
This search shows not only that the phrase appears in the two synoptic passages noted by Morris, but that it appears only there in the NT, a much stronger statement. But perhaps it’s used in the much larger LXX (623,680 words rather than 138,020). Repeat the search with BGM to show that it doesn’t occur there, either.
Our intuition that the expression ought to be common is growing weaker. Let’s search some other first-century Jewish-oriented Greek. The addition of morphologically analyzed texts of Josephus (JOM, 473,671 words) and Philo (PHM, 437,475 words) more than doubles our corpus, and still doesn’t show any other instances of the phrase “to bow the head.”
With this evidence, we can take a stronger stand than did Morris. John isn’t just speaking casually. He is echoing words of the Lord preserved in Matthew and Luke, to describe the Lord’s sense of relief that “it is finished.” “That resting place for his head that he did not have on earth, he found on the cross.”
