At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, he who is to die shall be put to death. At the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death.
⛓ Read Deuteronomy 17 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Allusion6
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
The two-or-three-witnesses requirement also draws on the capital-case statute that no one be put to death on the testimony of a single witness. The double attestation needed before disciplining an elder mirrors this Deuteronomic protection against false accusation.
High confidence‘Dies without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses’ (v. 28) quotes the Deuteronomic evidentiary rule almost verbatim. High verbal volume; the a-fortiori (‘how much worse punishment’) turns the capital-witness statute into the structure of the warning.
High confidenceThe companion legal principle requiring multiple witnesses to establish a capital matter reinforces John's threefold testimony. The Spirit, water, and blood function as the plurality of witnesses that secures conviction in God's case for his Son. The forensic logic of confirmed testimony is Deuteronomic.
Medium confidenceThe same Deuteronomic two-or-three-witnesses principle appears here in a capital-case context, part of the legal tradition Paul invokes. The wording overlaps with Deut 19:15, the primary source, so this is a parallel attestation of the rule rather than the citation's lemma. Recurrence within the Torah strengthens the availability of the witness-tradition.
Medium confidenceThe parallel formulation that a matter is established on the evidence of two or three witnesses reinforces the law Jesus cites in v.17. Recurrence within Deuteronomy strengthens the witness-law backdrop; slightly lower Volume than 19:15.
Medium confidenceThe two-or-three-witnesses standard is doubled in Deuteronomy's capital-case law ('on the evidence of two or three witnesses he shall be put to death'), reinforcing the juridical weight of the procedure Jesus prescribes for the assembly.
Medium confidence