"45 The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, who said to them, “Why did you not bring him?” 46 The officers answered, “No one ever spoke like this man!” 47 The Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived? 48 Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him?49 But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.” 50 Nicodemus, who had gone to him before, and who was one of them, said to them,51 “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?” 52 They replied, “Are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.”"
John 7:45-52
These verses return to the thought of 32, and to the command of the Pharisees to the temple police. The latter are influenced and affected by His ministry to such an extent that they are rendered powerless to arrest Him. 'Never man spake like this man' they exclaimed. The emphasis here in the Greek is on the word 'man'. It was as if they said, 'No mere man could ever speak like this'. In other words, they discerned His divinity, and this is what kept their hands off Him. They sensed that to handle or molest Him would be like committing an act of sacrilege, and they were not prepared to obey even the scribes and Pharisees to defile themselves in that way. But this left no impression on the hardened Pharisees, who contemptuously dismissed the police as being deceived and bemused. 'You will not find any responsible person believing in Him', they said - but in fact Nicodemus, one of their number, was in the process of coming to faith in Him, as we see in 50ff. And his point is a very shrewd one. The Pharisees were dismissing the crowd as ignorant rabble (49), but Nicodemus asks them, in effect, 'Do you yourselves know the law, when you are condemning a man unheard?’ This clearly nettled them, as the sharp and contemptuous retort about Galilee indicates. But more important than the Pharisees' reaction here is Nicodemus's. John seems to be drawing our attention to him (50), as if to say, 'Do you not see how this man is being drawn out to Christ?' At this time the shadow of the cross was coming down more and more upon Jesus and as it became more evident, people became more conscious, from the spiritual point of view, of its drawing power. 'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me' (12:32).