John 19:2

19:2 The soldiers ¹  braided ²  a crown of thorns ³  and put it on his head, and they clothed him in a purple robe. ⁴ 

John 9:6

9:6 Having said this, ⁵  he spat on the ground and made some mud ⁶  with the saliva. He ⁷  smeared the mud on the blind man’s ⁸  eyes

John 9:15

9:15 So the Pharisees asked him again how he had gained his sight. ⁹  He replied, ¹⁰  “He put mud ¹¹  on my eyes and I washed, and now ¹²  I am able to see.”

[19:2]  ¹ tn Grk “And the soldiers.” The conjunction καί (kai, “and”) has not been translated here in keeping with the tendency of contemporary English style to use shorter sentences.

[19:2]  ² tn Or “wove.”

[19:2]  ³ sn The crown of thorns was a crown plaited of some thorny material, intended as a mockery of Jesus’ “kingship.” Traditionally it has been regarded as an additional instrument of torture, but it seems more probable the purpose of the thorns was not necessarily to inflict more physical suffering but to imitate the spikes of the “radiant corona,” a type of crown portrayed on ruler’s heads on many coins of the period; the spikes on this type of crown represented rays of light pointing outward (the best contemporary illustration is the crown on the head of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor).

[19:2]  ⁴ sn The purple color of the robe indicated royal status. This was further mockery of Jesus, along with the crown of thorns.

[9:6]  ⁵ tn Grk “said these things.”

[9:6]  ⁶ tn Or “clay” (moistened earth of a clay-like consistency). The textual variant preserved in the Syriac text of Ephraem’s commentary on the Diatessaron (“he made eyes from his clay”) probably arose from the interpretation given by Irenaeus in Against Heresies: “that which the Artificer, the Word, had omitted to form in the womb, he then supplied in public.” This involves taking the clay as an allusion to Gen 2:7, which is very unlikely.

[9:6]  ⁷ tn Because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, the conjunction καί (kai) was replaced by a third person pronoun and a new sentence started here in the translation.

[9:6]  ⁸ tn Grk “on his.”

[9:15]  ⁹ tn Or “how he had become able to see.”

[9:15]  ¹⁰ tn Grk “And he said to them.”

[9:15]  ¹¹ tn Or “clay” (moistened earth of a clay-like consistency).

[9:15]  ¹² tn The word “now” is not in the Greek text, but is supplied to indicate the contrast between the man’s former state (blind) and his present state (able to see).