If you only know one verse from the Bible, there is a good chance that it’s John 3:16. That verse has become a stand-alone theology, a confessional icon, and an evangelical shorthand. More than any other verse in the Bible, you can put John 3:16—not even the actual verse, but just the word “John” and the numbers “3:16”—on a t-shirt or a sign in the end zone and expect that a lot of the people who see it will not only know what it refers to, but also be able to recite it. For many people, John 3:16 is a distillation of Jesus’ whole message, all anyone might need to grasp the entirety of the gospel.
As long as I have read the New Testament closely, this has baffled me. The roots of this bafflement come from my first encounters with John 3:16, which came in the context of 1990s evangelical culture. Then and there, John 3:16 was a gateway to the “born-again” movement, the notion that in order to be “saved,” one needed to acknowledge precisely what it says in John 3:16—that God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. But it didn’t take me long to notice that being born “again” was precisely the wrong interpretation of the words Jesus was saying in 3:1-9. Jesus, in his conversation with Nicodemus, had made a pun or a wordplay on the Greek word anothen, and Nicodemus incorrectly interpreted that word as “again.” But Jesus quickly clarifies that he intends the other meaning of anothen, which is “from above.” So the whole notion of being “born again” is premised on an interpretation of a word that Jesus, in the Gospel of John, explicitly says is wrong. (To read more of my thoughts on Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, check out my commentary on John 3:1-15 for the Visual Commentary on Scripture).
Before we go any farther, I want to point something out that you might not have noticed. In the paragraph above, I said that the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in the Gospel of John turned on the meaning of a single Greek word, anothen. But there’s a problem with this: Jesus and Nicodemus would not have been speaking Greek. Both Jesus and Nicodemus were Judeans, or Jews—they were native to the Aramaic-speaking areas along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, in what is now Israel and Palestine. They both likely would have been able to speak a little bit of Greek, simply because Greek culture and language had been influential in the area for several hundred years, and Greek was the language of commerce and government for many of the surrounding regions. But there are mountains of evidence that everyday people like Nicodemus and Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic in their day to day lives. So, why does the Gospel of John have Jesus making a wordplay in Greek? And how should we feel about that?
The fact that John and the other gospels were written in Greek when the characters in the story all spoke Aramaic is extremely consequential. Within a generation or two of Jesus, the stories about him had moved from one language to another, and they were passed down from there mostly (but by no means exclusively) in Greek. There are people who spend their whole academic careers working on this problem, so this is a very simplified explanation, but essentially what happened is that as Christianity developed and expanded geographically, it made sense to put the stories about Jesus into a language that was widely accessible. Aramaic was a local language, but Greek was spoken everywhere around the Mediterranean, so it made sense for the gospels to be in Greek.
So what? Well, this story of Jesus and Nicodemus is a good example of why this matters. Their story turns on a Greek misunderstanding, but neither of the speakers would have spoken Greek. And, as it turns out, the misunderstanding that drives their conversation only works in Greek—there is no equivalent word in Aramaic that can mean both “from above” and “again.” (There is no such word in English, either, which is why this story can be confusing, and why people call themselves “born-again” against the logic of the text). So, what this means for us is that the story of Jesus and Nicodemus, as it comes down to us today, could not have happened the way it was written. It only works in a secondary language, as a literary device to illustrate Jesus’ teaching of Nicodemus. When we read the conversation between them, we aren’t reading a transcript of their remarks, and we aren’t even reading a translated transcript. Instead, we are reading an imaginative reconstruction, translated from a language neither of them spoke, that was written decades later with the goal of conveying something important about Jesus. That doesn’t make this passage duplicitous or wrong; it just means that (like all literary works) gospels have perspectives and agendas, and they are constructed purposefully to advance those perspectives and agendas.
But, back to the lectionary. The gospel reading for the lectionary for this week doesn’t include the whole conversation with Nicodemus, with the business about being born again or from above. Instead, it begins at 3:14 and continues through 3:21—from an intriguing comment about Moses and the serpent in the desert, through what seems like the end of the section. Here, I want to point out something else that might have escaped your notice about this passage, which is something worth knowing about all biblical texts. If you read this passage (3:14-21) in the NRSV version and many other modern translations, you’ll see that verses 16 and 17 both begin with quotation marks, and verse 21 concludes with an end-quote mark, which together suggest that the material in verses 16-21 is all quoted material. I can’t quite tell whether verse 16 is supposed to be one quote, and 17-21 another, or whether the whole thing is supposed to be one quote. Furthermore, I can’t quite tell from the punctuation who is supposed to the speaker of the quote. Is it Jesus? Is it Nicodemus? Is it the narrator? I don’t see anything in the text that helps me know.
I suspect that this ambiguity is intentional on the part of the translators, because the translators of the NRSV and other translations are trying to leave all the possibilities open. They are doing that, I suspect, because the Greek text does not say who these words belong to—it doesn’t say anything like “and then Jesus said.” So they are rendering the text in a way that leaves open the possibility that the words belong to any of the speakers. But the problem goes a lot deeper than that.
The problem is that Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are not punctuated. The Greek of the New Testament era was typically written in what is called scripta continua, with all the words running together in one big mega-word. There are no sentence markers (capital letters at the beginning, period at the end, etc.), and nothing like commas, question marks, paragraph breaks, or quotation marks. The words aren’t even separated from each other; you have to figure out where one word ends and the next one begins.
(Thisisnotactuallythatdifficulttodoifyouknowalanguagewellyoucanusuallydividethemeasily).
So, every punctuation mark you see in a modern translation—every period, exclamation point, question mark, quotation mark, comma, semicolon, and dash—is a modern editorial choice. There are clues in the Greek text sometimes, and a logic to how it is written that can help; characteristic words might introduce a quote, for example, or specific words might signal that a question is coming. But one of the first tasks of the interpreter and translator is to decide how to divide things up into words, sentences, and paragraphs, and assign those to certain voices among the text’s characters. The text you see in your Bible is already being interpreted for you as it meets your eyes or your ears; it has already been parsed into units of meaning that might or might not be what you would have come up with on your own. In that run-on sentence above, for example, you could parse it as “This is not actually that difficult to do if you know a language well. You can usually divide them easily.” Or, you could put the period in a different place, and end up with “This is not actually that difficult to do. If you know a language well you can usually divide them easily.” You could add commas with abandon, shifting emphasis as you go, ending up with something like “This is not, actually, that difficult to do. If you know a language well, you can usually divide them, easily.” Or make it dashes and exclamation points: “This is not actually that difficult to do—if you know a language well! You can usually divide them easily!” There are lots of choices.
In the case of John 3:16-21, there really aren’t good textual clues to tell us who is saying these words. The last time we get a clear marker in this passage is in 3:10, where it says “Jesus answered him,” but after that we simply get statement after statement without any attribution. Are we supposed to imagine that Jesus is simply monologuing for the rest of the passage, while Nicodemus listens? It’s possible. Or maybe they are taking turns, so that Jesus says 3:10 and then Nicodemus responds at some point, and they go back and forth, so that some of the big theological language in that section belongs not to Jesus but to Nicodemus? It’s also possible that Jesus simply responds in 3:10 and then the narrator takes over, with everything that follows (including the famous 3:16) belonging to the narrator’s commentary, and not the direct words of Jesus.
What would happen if we tried to emphasis this ambiguity in the text, rather than hide it? What would happen, for example, if the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus were treated like a page from a play, and we assigned different actors or speakers the different roles? What if you gave people parts—Jesus, Nicodemus, the narrator—and then tried different ways of assigning the words?
So you could it this way:
3:10 – Jesus
3:11-15 15 – Nicodemus
3:16 – Jesus
3:17-21 – Nicodemus
Or this way:
3:10 – Jesus
3:11-15 15 – Nicodemus
3:16 – Jesus
3:17-21 – Narrator
Or you could do it this way:
3:10-21 – Jesus
Or try it like this:
3:10-12 – Jesus
3:13-15 – Narrator
3:16 – Nicodemus
3:17-21 – Narrator
Or this way:
3:10-15 – Jesus
3:16 – Nicodemus
3:17-21 – Jesus
It might be interesting to actually try that in a service or a class—have three readers in three voices, or try it out in all those different ways to see how the meaning changes with each different configuration. The point would not be to figure out which version is correct, but rather to get a sense of the multiplicity and wild potentiality of the text—to see how many different ways it can mean, all at the same time. If you try that out and find anything interesting, drop a comment here to tell us all how it went! But I think, no matter which set of voices you choose for which parts, that very famous verse—John 3:16—will end up having a more textured and complex meaning within the conversation than it usually has on a t-shirt or a sign in the end zone of the football game.
What fun this will be with a youth group that I may work with someday… for them to listen for voice and tone:) thanks so much! I’m on the search for this coming week’s John scripture in the lectionary:) I need a quick video summary of the book of John to prepare me for this Sunday…
Eric, love the idea of introducing the ambiguity of whose line is it...next time I preach on this scripture, I plan on using this as a resource! Thank you!