Last time, we considered the pericope of the Discource with Nicodemus and noticed how its principal context had to do with Jewish apocalypticism and the Son of Man prophecy. This holds significance for the passage we’ve been interpreting, John 3:16, for how this verse belongs to a commentary block, not a quotation of either Jesus or Nicodemus. And the commentary basically frames the judgment-mission of the Son of Man as not condemnatory but rather showing solidarity with humanity. The commentator who inserted these lines into the narration of the Gospel of John was likely a lector/reader in a Syrian or Alexandrian ekklesia of 2nd-century or 3rd-century self-identifying Christians. This group cared about defending Jesus’s mission against the criticisms of non-Christian, non-Jewish Roman philosophes trying to cast Jesus as a criminal and a pitiful candidate for godlike status. The Johannine community giving us this pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus accepts the terms of the Pagan critique: indeed, Jesus was executed as a criminal, but this is further proof of his divinity; the Son of Man had to descend before he could ascend.
I’d like to wrap up my present study of John 3:16 by considering two things within the context I just laid out: (1) the pericope’s esoteric teachings and (2) the words of the verse.
Esotericism in the Gospel of John
Esoteric is my own term I’m bringing to the Gospel of John. The narrators themselves did not operate with a concept of the esoteric; it’s a modern category that identifies a worldview by which people regard absolute reality as elusive or hidden. Examples of esoteric philosophy and practice include symbolic codes in the Book of Revelation, magical incantations, numbers bearing hidden meanings, astrological signs of the motions of the stars, pseudoscientific elixirs for healing, interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphs as containing deeper meanings, and so on. When the narrator of the pericope quotes Jesus as telling Nicodemus about the pneuma, we’re in prime esoteric territory, especially since the Greek word pneuma can describe such various things as wind, breath, whirlwind, blow, spirit, soul. On the surface, one could use pneuma to refer to the “Word of Wisdom,” and this could invite esoteric thinkers to assume there’s a deeper meaning beneath pneuma, something even more spiritual than the surface reading implies.
We’ve already established how the SBL Greek New Testament is an accurate starting point for English readers of the Bible; I’ll use this text to get some overall ideas down about the esoteric elements of the Discourse with Nicodemus. I see Jesus making three assertions in sequence: (1) new birth; (2) heavenly witness; (3) ascent into heaven.
New Birth
The pericope sets up Nicodemus approaching Jesus and complimenting him for the signs that witness how God is with Jesus. What initially follows seems to be a reply and possibly a counterpoint — Jesus implying Nicodemus doesn’t possess the heavenly testimony to understand those signs of which he speaks. “Unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” In other words, Nicodemus had seen some signs, but there are signs of the kingdom of God that he cannot yet see because Nicodemus has not ostensibly been born from above (yet).
Nicodemus recognizes this rabbinical style of point/counterpoint teaching (he called Jesus a rabbi, after all). Such a prompt invited synagogue peers and students to inquire philosophically into the deeper meanings — but the style was to ask with obvious counterpoints or rebuttals. Hence, Nicodemus replies with a clear absurdism: How does an old man get rebirthed? He can’t reenter the womb, of course. Jesus explains in language that exudes esoteric meanings: Unless someone is born of water and pneumatos, he cannot enter into the basileian of God; what is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the pneumatos is pneuma.
Before getting into what these Greek words suggest, already we have a conditional rhetoric (unless [this], there is no [that]) based on metaphors. Nicodemus just established Jesus cannot be speaking literally: one doesn’t reenter the womb, correct? But those metaphors are both obvious and non-obvious. Water and pneumatos, flesh and pneuma — an ancient Greek speaker would see pneuma first as “breath,” not as “spirit” since the concept of spirit hadn’t been articulated just yet, and water, breath, and flesh all belong to the most mundane of categories. Because these regular terms are applied to birth, they get inflected with a non-obvious function. People are by default born of water, breath, and flesh; by saying one is reborn by water, breath, and flesh, Jesus brings Nicodemus no closer to resolving the reply. So does one reenter the womb or not? It’s not clear right away. At least not clear at the literal, surface level. The suggestion here must be that there is something deeper to this conditional statement, and that something deeper is what I notice as esoteric reasoning.
Jesus continues with overt crypticism: The wind blows wherever it likes and you hear its sound but you do not know whence it comes nor where it goes — so is everyone who is born of the pneumatos. He appears to recognize the esoteric styling of saying rebirth by water, breath, and flesh is possible and now refers Nicodemus to the mystery of his sayings: you cannot predict the wind, it just happens. Of course this is cryptic to Nicodemus; he asks, “How can these things be?” Confusing. He’s clearly not taking Jesus literally and would like Jesus to expound.
Greek Words
I want to know better what words like pneuma and basileian meant in their ancient setting. The best-known concordance for tracking down Greek words of the New Testament is Strong’s Concordance, but this resource is laden with theological inflections and biases. No scholar uses it except to study how Christians have toyed with Greek language. Fortunately for me, I have access to the Oxford Bibliographies database containing up-to-date, peer-reviewed bibliographic introductions to thousands of subjects. The article on “Greek Lexicography” gave me a cheat-sheet to the scholarly literatures PhD students in classical studies must master. It appears four resources each represent the heights of current scholarship into Greek-English definitions of Koine Greek words appearing in the New Testament manuscripts:
- Cambridge Greek Lexicon Project (due late 2020 or early 2021; a 20-year project)
- J. Lust, E. Eynikel, and K. Hauspie, Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (2008)
- T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (2010)
- Frederick William Danker, ed., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (2000)
I have digital access to the Lust, et al., lexicon, so I’m working with this until the Cambridge project releases its volumes soon.
Sure enough, it looks like pneuma is a simple enough word in its original setting but has been complicated by later patristics and theologians imputing additional meanings to it. I’m not confident this word can be accurately translated into English as “spirit” without tons of historical qualification. And the words “breath” and “blown” as in “breath of life,” “breath of anger,” and “blown by” approximate the various texts I’m seeing cited in the lexicon. Just as it’s likely a mistranslation to say “the sails were spirited” or “the sails were inspired,” it’s more likely to take pneuma to mean “breath” or “breeze,” especially since Jesus starts talking directly of wind and how wind may blow about.
Basileian has several connotations — kingdom, domain, dominion, reign, position/rank, palace, royal dwelling, chamber, and even tiara. In all references in classical and biblical literature to βασιλεία (=basileia), the connotations of kingdom and domain seem interchangeable. In English and in Greek, there’s clear nuance between these alternatives. Not all domains are within a sovereignty like a kingdom; and the etymology of the English “kingdom” involves the contraction of two terms, “king-domain,” a narrowing and qualifying of the “domain” term to a specific kind of domain, the domain belonging to a king. Because this etymological development occurs in English and not in Greek, I favor a translation of “domain” or “dominion” unless in the Greek, we have a clear reference to a sovereign’s domain or a king’s domain.
God’s Breath of Life, God’s Rebirth Like the Wind
Working these word studies back into the pericope, we get the sense that Jesus is saying to Nicodemus: “Unless someone is born of water and breath, he cannot enter into God’s domain. What is born of flesh is flesh, what is born of breath is breath. Don’t be astonished that I said it is necessary to be born from above. The wind blows wherever it likes and you hear its sound and you do not know whence it comes or where it goes; so is everyone who is born of breath.” The juxtaposition is between the flesh-birth and the breath-birth, which Jesus uses to define being “born from above.” God’s domain is not one of flesh but one of breath — and now we’re seeing the pre-Greek language, which we know would have been the immediate setting for this dialogue between Naqdimon and Yeshua, two Aramaic speakers. In Greek, we have only pneuma to translate from what would have begun as an Aramaic word/concept. As we contemplate what in Aramaic Yeshua may have been saying to Naqdimon, we find a strong corollary in the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the early passages of the Torah when elohim breathe life into adam.
Robert Alter, who produced the definitive scholarly translation and commentary of the Hebrew Bible, has this to say about the language of “breath of life” in the Torah: “God, now called YHWH ‘Elohim instead of ‘Elohim as in the first version, does not summon things into being from a lofty distance through the mere agency of divine speech, but works as a craftsman, fashioning (yatsar instead of bara’, ‘create’), blowing life-breath into nostrils, building a woman from a rib.… [We get] a harmonious cosmic overview and then a plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins.” The “breath of life” or “life-breath” has its own word in Hebrew/Aramaic, which was very likely behind the Greek translation of pneuma. If we suspend all the (much) later theological development of the idea of spirit and remember this Hebrew context for God literally, according to Alter, breathing into the nostrils of the adam/human to activate the lungs, then we see Jesus playing on this same Torah moment: there’s the birth of the flesh (through the mother’s womb) and the birth of the breath — a reference to God’s breath, the breath of YHWH ‘Elohim. And just as wind comes and goes, so does God’s breath into those who are thus born.
What’s amazing to me is how we even have Jesus warning against overthinking this — and Christians just had to overthink this and turn this into a full-blown subdiscipline of Christian theology, what is known as pneumatology, the study of the Holy Spirit. In its simplicity, a simplicity Jesus directly affirms, there’s a birth that God will perform juxtaposed with the birth of the flesh that we humans perform. And those who are reborn by God see/enter God’s domain. So, Nicodemus, before you go claiming to know all those signs of God that prove Jesus’s divine teachings, you have to understand that it is God who does the breathing, God who does the signing, and God who does the teaching. This is the substance of the pericope, I think, when considered in all these important historical, linguistic, and literary contexts.