“where this man is from” = the Jews thought the birthplace of Jesus to be Nazareth of Galilee (verse #41) which did not line up with the prophecy which told of the Messiah coming from Bethlehem. (Micah 5:2) But, even more than the place of the origin of Messiah not lining up with that of Jesus (so it was thought) is the matter of the method of the origin of Messiah. They thought that Jesus was the son of Mary and Joseph, born of natural means in wedlock. However, the popular belief of the Jews was that the messiah would come suddenly, maybe even being dropped from the skies as Satan tempted Jesus with throwing Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple. For example, Rabbi Zera taught, “Three come unawares: Messiah, a found article, and a scorpion.” (Sanhedrin 97a) Also, Justin Martyr reports Trypho as saying, “But Christ — if He has indeed been born, and exists anywhere — is unknown, and does even know Himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint Him, and make Him manifest to all.” (qt’d in Morris 412) This theology was perhaps based on such passages as (Dan 7:13, Mal 3:1). And the Messiah was to be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14) which did not agree with their supposed knowledge of the lineage of Jesus. Messiah was called “the seed which comes from another place,” meaning not from the place where seed usually comes from, the loins, but from a different, unknown source. We know that Source to be the Holy Spirit, but these Jews were operating upon incomplete knowledge and did not think it possible that Jesus was Messiah because He didn’t fulfill the scriptures in the manner they thought Messiah would.

Mic 5:2  “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”

Da 7:13  “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.

Mal 3:1  “See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty.

Ge 4:25  Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, “God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.”

In his overview of this section Barrett says: “. . .the important question is whether or not Jesus comes from God; whether he comes from Nazareth or Bethlehem is comparatively irrelevant.”

There is a message here to us, also. We often think we know what God will do and how He will do it. We have read the scriptures, as had the people of Jesus’ time, and we have developed a certain pattern within our perception of the scriptures to determine exactly how God is going to react in certain circumstances. In other words, we “know” how He will answer our prayer, we “know” how He is going to instruct us, and we “know” how He is going to fulfill prophecy, and yet our knowledge of Him and His ways is incomplete (Isaiah 55:9), so our ideas of what He is going to do are probably incorrect. We must beware that we do not fall into the same trap these people had fallen into, or we may also miss God and what He is really doing.

Isa 55:9  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.