I concluded yesterday that John 3:16 appears in a block of text very likely composed as a lectionary statement from a 3rd-century Alexandrian Christian and does not represent a quotation from a dialogue between Yeshua and Naqdimon. This observation will influence how I continue with the word study that I began last week. Whereas I would normally match words in John 3:16 with their referents in the surrounding text, I should now keep in mind that this passage begins a departure, a discontinuity between a report of Yeshua and Naqdimon talking about a heavenly (re)birth and a theological teaching of an anonymous ekklesia lecturer some 150 to 200 years later. It would be like reading a Bible commentary: you see the main body text with footnotes providing an editor’s comments on the text. Except in this case, the commentators embedded their own excursuses within the main body of the text.
We see the commentator riff on Yeshua mentioning the brazen serpent of Moses. In the context of the original dialogue, Naqdimon did not have Yeshua’s execution by crucifixion as a reference whereas the later commentator did. So here’s a Jewish elder, Naqdimon — who, if he is the same as the Naqdimon ben Gurion mentioned in other early texts, is a member of the Sanhedrin and a prominent Pharisee — and he poses as an interlocutor with Rabbi Yeshua, or so the pericope presents the two men. In their exchange, Yeshua critiques Naqdimon for being a teacher of Yisra’el (Israel) and not accepting this ascent/descent dynamic. The Son of Man expected to judge the world, according to Jewish apocalyptic prophecy, must come down from heaven, which departs from Naqdimon’s interpretation of the prophecy (or so the pericope implies). Perhaps Naqdimon imagines the Son of Man appearing in glory in heaven at some kind of Book of Daniel apocalyptic world-ending event. And Yeshua corrects this assumption: No, look for the Son of Man to appear as a regular person because the Son of Man must be lifted up to judge the world, and to be lifted up, he must first have descended below.
In this dialogue, the metaphor of Moses’s brazen serpent works without explanation: both Yeshua and Naqdimon (and the immediate audience of the Gospel of John) all know the reference. When poisonous serpents had plagued the people of Israel, Moses lifted the brazen serpent for them to look upon for healing. Yeshua applies this event to the Son of Man prophecy, telling Naqdimon that the Son of Man must be lifted up before the world for God’s miracle of eternal life to be brought to the world. The rhetorical juxtapositions of these two events, the plague of serpents and the judgment of the world, function without commentary because both Yeshua and Naqdimon are teachers who are conversant if not fluent in the scriptural prophecies and Israelite history.
Fast-forward some two centuries, and within ekklesia organizations in Alexandria in North Africa we have Christians no longer identifying as Jews. Their context has shifted to include an overtly Greek cultural milieu, a Greek philosophical mentality, and a Greek linguistic aesthetic. Readers in this ekklesia can be reasonably expected to pick up on the symbolism of Moses’s brazen serpent, but the commentator draws the connections to support a philosophical argument about Jesus’s nature. All throughout the Gospel of John, we see a preoccupation with light and darkness — and not just light and darkness, but a metaphysical description of the nature of reality that hinges on there being light and dark, and the human condition being one of dwelling in darkness and needing to escape by acquiring greater light and knowledge. The Gospel of John consistently presents Jesus as being the bearer of light that overcomes all darkness. The commentator sees the lifting up of the brazen serpent metaphor as another instance of the escaping darkness motif. Jesus ascended into heaven so that we may ascend into heaven; Jesus fought off death so that we may live forever.
Notice how the commentator reconciles this Gnostic philosophy with the expected judgment mission of the Son of Man as prophesied in the Apocalypse of Daniel: the original pericope presented a dialogue between Naqdimon and Yeshua centered on a Son of Man argument, not an exchange about light/darkness and ascending to eternal life. So the commentator diminishes the judgment function of the Son of Man and argues that judgment is secondary to God’s love. It was the love of God that motivated him to dispatch Jesus to save the world from eternal death; judgment matters only for those who disbelieve Jesus, who reject the light and are therefore evil.
This doesn’t just make for a beautiful corrective of the earlier preoccupation with eternal judgment — this commentary presents an all-timer, a classic sermon on the love of God and the mission of Jesus.
Even so, the whole pericope waxes esoteric. Later Christians would (erroneously?) insist on water baptism based on this passage and would argue over this ritual. But was Yeshua presenting Naqdimon with a requirement for salvation or were they discussing esoteric themes (“the wind blows wherever it wishes … so everyone who is born of the pneumatos”)? I’ll consider these possibilities next time.