We’re still in the pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus and last time discussed the heavenly witness part of Jesus’s and Nicodemus’s exchange. Here, I’m continuing with the next development in the pericope: Jesus’s discussion of ascending into heaven. An important item of review: leading to this, Jesus had responded to Nicodemus by juxtaposing an earthly witness and a heavenly witness. The metaphor of wind had sufficed for Jesus’s explanation of the birth by breath, but Nicodemus had resisted this metaphor; so Jesus countered with a distinction between the mundane and the heavenly. If Nicodemus couldn’t accept the wind metaphor, an earthly witness of something real, then he wouldn’t accept the witness of heavenly realities. So — premise number one in this dialogue (which feeds into this next point Jesus will make about ascending into heaven) is that there are indeed heavenly things that aren’t as apparent as earthly things, and Jesus’s use of a metaphor of an earthly thing to describe a heavenly thing is sufficient to explain that heavenly thing.
Now that Jesus has established that he offers a witness of heavenly things, he proceeds to describe ascending into heaven:
And no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven the son of the man
And just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness so must the son of the man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life
Jesus associates ascent into heaven with Moses’s snake, making another allusion to the Torah, particularly the episode documented there of the Israelites being attacked by poisonous serpents and Moses’s brazen serpent offering divine healing to those who looked upon it. Only one had ascended into heaven, the Son of Man, but after first descending from heaven. Because the dialogue is situated in the mortal ministry of Jesus — not after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension — the text appears to reflect the later theological expectations of the scribes giving us the Gospel of John, scribes who have it in their own present the fact that Jesus eventually ascended into heaven.
We see also another rhetorical device of antithesis: ascent versus descent being juxtaposed to deliver a punchline. Jesus describing no one ascending into heaven except the Son of Man who descended from heaven has the effect of making the heavenly witness all the more exclusive. Whereas the earthly witness is available to all, the heavenly witness is reserved for one who has been in heaven, who has seen heaven; and only the Son of Man has seen heaven, therefore, Nicodemus will have to accept Jesus’s description of being born by breath on the exclusive witness only Jesus has.
This brings me to two reasons why I’m suspicious we’re reading a historically accurate representation of something Jesus said. First, there’s such a manifest theology about Jesus ascending to heaven that appears anachronistic to me; looking outside the Gospel of John to other accounts of Jesus that predate John and are closer to the events they describe, we don’t see this ascent/descent theology, this metaphysical concern for transcending the earthly, for reaching up into the heavenly, and this dynamic of the Son of Man serving an esoteric mission of leading mortals into heaven. Maybe Jesus did emphasize his mission as descending from heaven to lead people to ascend into heaven — but this is attested really only in the Gospel of John. And, moreover, attested in documents we’ve already established went through a composition process that brought interpolations from later lectionary commentators. Put directly, these words sound much more like those second-century commentators than the Galilean Jews remembering Jesus’s teachings.
Second, we have to acknowledge a deeper textual problem: the so-called “Son of Man Problem.” Simply put, scholars are locked in a debate over whether the early sources have Jesus referencing “Son of Man” or using a colloquialism “son of a man” to mean something like “a regular guy” or “an everyday man” or “common person.” If Jesus invokes “Son of Man,” this would mean him alluding to the Apocalypse of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible that prophesies about a “Son of Man” who should be appointed by God to judge the world in some kind of cosmic event or judgment-day eschaton. If Jesus is using Galilean vernacular to say “the common person,” then it renders his teaching more universal, more applicable to the audience, not him the teacher. I’m persuaded there’s evidence suggesting that 2nd-century Christians in some areas made the connection between Jesus and Daniel’s “Son of Man”; and there’s evidence others remembered Jesus using a colloquialism to present himself as an everyday person. This means whenever we encounter the phrase “Son of Man/the son of a man,” we probably cannot conveniently assume one of these meanings. In the case of the Discourse with Nicodemus pericope, the use of Son of Man/son of a man to describe an exclusive witness of heaven descending out of heaven to lead others into heaven fits an anachronism more than a contemporaneous setting, so I suspect this is an interpolation by 2nd-century Christian commentators reading “Son of Man” into the pericope.
This has implications for our interpretation of John 3:16 — if the immediate literary context for the verse is an interpolated commentary on Jesus as the Son of Man descending out of heaven to lift others into heaven, then this is an altogether different setting for discussing “saving the world,” or God’s love, or other statements attached to verse 16.