v22
It was only after Jesus had been raised that the disciples believed and started to understand the resurrection. At that time they remembered the words that Jesus had said, as here, and truly understood the Old Testament.
v23
The “now while He was in Jerusalem” implies that Jesus did many other things while He was in Jerusalem. We need always to remember that in the gospels we are reading condensed accounts of what Jesus did and said. This is part of the reason why there are so-called discrepancies between gospel accounts, often times they are merely reporting different aspects of a particular incident. Here we read that Jesus did various signs, presumably these were miraculous, probably healings or casting out of demons. Because of this many “believed in His name”. This brings us to one of the issues in John’s gospel. We will see in the next two verses that this faith was far from perfect, something that we see elsewhere in John’s gospel.
24,25
In the Greek there is a play on words here. To capture this it would be better to translate the key parts of v23 and 24 as “many trusted in Jesus, but Jesus would not entrust Himself to them”. Some see this as an indication that their faith was not really authentic. However, this is not necessarily the case. No matter how deep our faith is in Jesus He will never entrust Himself to us. There is still sin in us, there is still much in our personality and character that needs to be undone and put right.
Jesus is God and does not need to put His trust in anyone, nor does He need the testimony of anyone. If I want to be considered suitable for some job or ministry I will need the testimony of others as a vital part in proving my suitability. Jesus needed no such validation. We should also bear this in mind when the world gives its opinion on Christ and who He is. These opinions are usually wrong and usually worthless.
Of course, this does not mean that we should not testify to Jesus, but we are testifying to the truth, we are not proving the truth.
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