Jesus’s simple response, “I am he,”
is more theologically loaded than the King James Version suggests. First, note
that “he” is italicized. In the King James Bible, words that were added by the
translators but that are not found in the original Greek manuscripts are placed
in italics. These added words were meant to make the translation more readable
when it was difficult to find a corollary word in English. To ensure that the
reader knows that these words were not in the original manuscripts, they are printed
in italics.
While in some instances this type
of clarification is helpful, in others it can obscure the intended nuances of
the Greek text. In the case of Jesus’s utterance in the garden, removing the
italicized word renders Jesus’s response as “I AM” (Greek: ego-eimi).
Therefore, Jesus’s response is not merely an indication that he is the one the
arresting party is looking for; rather it is a declaration of the divine name
of God from the Old Testament. For instance, the story of Moses’s encounter with
God at the burning bush reads: “Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto
the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath
sent me not you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say
unto them? And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt
thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you” (Exodus
3:13-14).
In uttering the name I AM,
therefore, Jesus seems to be referring to himself as the God who appeared to
Moses and who desires the full trust of his people. Jesus applied this same name
to himself earlier in John’s Gospel (see, for example, John 8:58), and in this
moment in the garden, he applies it to himself again. To heighten the impact o
this declaration during Jesus’s arrest, John notes that the large, armed party
of Roman soldiers and Jewish temple police all step backward and fall to the
ground in response (see John 18:6; cf. Psalms 27:2; 35:4). In doing so, John
describes Jesus’s adversaries as falling to the ground in the garden,
rather than Jesus falling to the ground as recorded in the Gethsemane
narratives of Mark and Matthew.
These details in John’s Gospel
suggest that Jesus, as God, has power over the forces of darkness that have
come out to arrest him in the middle of the night with torches. His statement
of “I AM” reinforces the idea that Jesus could not have been arrested unless he
permitted it. That belief is further substantiated by Jesus when he later
stands before Pilate and says: “Thou couldest have no power at all against me,
except it were given thee from above” (John 19:11). In these remarkable ways,
John’s account of Jesus’s final night replaces the synoptic emphasis on Jesus’s
suffering in Gethsemane with an emphasis on Jesus’s revelation of his divine
identity in the garden. (Matthew J. Grey and Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, A
Place Called Gethsemane: Seeing the New Testament Story and Site in Its First-Century
Context [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2025], 58-59)
