<p>7:4 <i>For no one does anything in secret while he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, manifest yourself to the world</i>- This was another form of the temptation to &quot;come down from the cross&quot; and the wilderness temptations, to persuade the Jewish world by visible miracle. But the Lord's experience in chapter 6 had prepared Him for this; the miracle of the feeding had only led to men turning away from Him once it was explained to them. As explained on :3, the Lord's family didn't want all the public attention now given to them because of His claims to be God's Son and Messiah. They taunted Him that doing miracles in backwater Galilee was effectively being secretive; if He were indeed Messiah then He surely would want to be &quot;known openly&quot;, and so they urged Him to leave them and go to Jerusalem and manifest Himself openly to the Jewish world there. Just as the Lord's synagogue-influenced brothers wanted Him to show Himself openly to the world (Jn. 7:4), so did the disciples (Jn. 14:22). There was that hankering for Him to openly display Himself as the Messiah which Judaism had created within its own mind. This was all a repeat of the wilderness temptation.</p><p>Perhaps they were alluding to the Rabbinic idea that as Moses hid himself and then re-emerged from obscurity, so Messiah would. Rabbi Berekiah said: &ldquo;As the first deliverer Moses was revealed, then hidden and afterwards appeared again, so will it also be with the last deliverer Messiah&rdquo;. John&rsquo;s record is clearly presenting the Lord as Moses in this sense.</p><p>In collective societies, where life was totally lived in the public realm and anything done 'in private' is seen as deviant (cp. Jn. 7:4; 18:20), shame was related to how <i>others</i> saw you, not your internal reflections and assessment of your guilt or innocence for things like private thoughts and unknown deeds. And there's every reason to think that the global village of the 21st century is an equally conscience-less place, where so long as you talk in nice speak and don't get caught actually <i>doing</i> anything society thinks is wrong, you can exist with no internal, personal conscience at all. Indeed, the word &quot;conscience&quot; originated from words which literally mean 'common / with others / knowledge'- conscience was collective, whereas the Biblical understanding of it is more on a personal level.</p>