I started a word study of John 3:16 yesterday based on the Novum Testamentum Graece (NTG; also known as the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament). Today I want to continue this word study and build a stronger interpretation of the passage.

The first word houtos (=in this way) right away signals a common error I notice in church settings. Readers like to isolate verses and ask interpretive questions without considering the surrounding text. The first word in this passage implies that it extends from something already stated: In what way? What “way” is being referred to? If we focused only on this verse, we wouldn’t consult what came before and quite likely assume things of houtos.

This is why I generally don’t study a verse or short passage at a time. This approach promotes taking shortcuts, and if my purpose in studying the scriptures is to learn truth, I wouldn’t want to set myself up for subjective projections of what I want the verse to say, not what the verse says independently of me and my desires or feelings.

Compositional Units

This brings us to the question of units: when this passage was first composed, what was it composed as? A poem? A narrative? A prophecy? A sermon? The genre and form will help to explain how the passage was constructed in the first place. From there, we can gauge the basic compositional unit surrounding our focus passage, and then we can read that larger text with greater awareness of context when we arrive at the passage we want to interpret.

Now we go beyond John 3:16 and into the larger unit of text, the Gospel of John. Again, the NTG can indicate what the gospel’s compositional units were. Looking over the listed source texts throughout the Gospel of John, I can see Papyrus 66 and Uncial 01 appearing repeatedly as control texts for the main body. We already established Papyrus 66 and Uncial 01 as earlier manuscript sources compared with the other papyri and uncials, so examining those originals ought to indicate basic textual format for the whole Gospel of John.

Papyrus 66, a manuscript within the Bodmer Papyri collection, resides at the Vatican Library. The Bodmer Foundation maintains a website of digitized images of the Bodmer Papyri, which employs a different numbering system than that of the NTG. A Google search is enough to find Papyrus 66 listed under PB2 at the Bodmer Lab site.

The document is a beauty. For something so old to have survived in such condition is miraculous. Right away we can see that the earliest text for the Gospel of John is composed without title, chapter units, verses, stanzas, or the like. It’s basically a single continuous block of text in Greek majuscules. This means the basic format of the text is the entire Gospel of John. We’ll have to read the whole thing if we want to understand what moderns set off as chapter 3 verse 16.

Historical Setting for the Gospel of John

Well now we have some additional preliminary work to do. The immediate setting for the Bodmer Papyri artifact becomes an essential component in knowing who wrote down the passage and what they were trying to say when they wrote it. To learn about the artifact, I turn to scholarship that ought to have done the heavy lifting on establishing the history of the artifact.

My first search is in a university library catalog (and since I have patron privileges with BYU’s library, I go there first, but almost any large university library or the Library of Congress will do). A simple search for the Bodmer Papyri in the catalog yields some promising books. I favor the most recently published titles from academic presses. Near the top, I see Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). This looks promising. I also notice an ebook, James R. Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri(Leiden: Brill, 2008). Nice. This title is part of Brill’s New Testament Tools, Studies, and Documents series edited by Bart Ehrman and Eldon Epp, two senior scholars in New Testament Studies. The credentials bode well. Royse has a whole chapter on “The Scribe of P66.” That’s exactly what I’m looking for: an expert, peer-reviewed introduction to the artifact and immediate compositional setting for the earliest manuscript of the Gospel of John.

Source-Critical Scholarship on Papyrus 66

Royse dives right into the scholarly debate of dating P66. Plenty of technical arguments about why P66 ought to be dated to the third century and not the second century. He also explains the artifact’s missing fragments and which modern verses are not extant in the P66 document. Soon, Royse discusses textual affinities between P66 and other ancient manuscripts, which argues in favor of a primarily Alexandrian setting with a secondary Byzantine context. This discussion warns against various transcriptions of P66 that because of hasty production introduced errors.

The meat of Royse’s study is in tracking variations of P66 against all other manuscripts and early textual authorities. He contends that whoever was the scribe for P66 was copying from other texts (“exemplars”) and was deliberately correcting words and syntax. Another hand was also involved in the production of P66. Several examples of two-stage correction surface, implying that by the time P66 was composed, scribes were already participating in transcription conventions that encouraged editing out or inserting changes to precirculated documents. In other words, the scribes giving us P66 understood their job as conforming the copied words to both an exemplar and adjusting the text to fit their present (third century CE) understanding of Christian teaching. Scholars mentioned in the chapter and footnotes debate the degrees of correction, but it appears from the literature Royse exhaustively cites that they don’t disagree on the editorial conventions at work in the production of P66.

Royse cites to Philip W. Comfort and David P. Barrett who argue the P66 manuscript was produced in three stages: (1) An original scribe copied the entire text of today’s Gospel of John making corrections as he wrote, primarily to repair transcriptional mistakes he noticed. (2) A paginator of the first part of the manuscript made corrections, both grammatical and substantive, bringing the manuscript in line with Alexandrian texts and most likely using a different exemplar than the original scribe. (3) Another corrector, possibly the same person as the paginator, made some changes in preparing the text for lectionary reading as evidenced by breathing marks and punctuation.

For our purposes of interpreting John 3:16, it’s worth noting what Royse says about the verse: the text in P66 displays evidence that the scribe or paginator or other corrector introduced ἠγάπά (=“loved” in the imperfect tense, something like “loving-ed” in a crude English approximation) instead of the final form we see elsewhere, but then erased the final letter and completed the word ἠγάπησεν (=“loved”)—probably an incidental transcription event, not an intentional editorial one.

In all, the text of P66 and other early manuscripts suggest a geographical divide between the Alexandrian (in North Africa) P66 version and a “Western” (or northern Mediterranean) exemplar tradition. The exemplar for P66 was almost certainly a text of some kind and not an oral tradition. This would mean the Gospel of John was composed much earlier, since the contents of the Johannine narrative refer to speech patterns and regionalisms from the second century more than third-century Alexandria. But the third-century Alexandrian school, both in its scribal corrections of the nonextant “Western” text and in other sources it produced at the time, makes a conspicuous effort to inject a theology about Jesus into the gospel narrative of Jesus’s life. Bishops in Alexandrian ekklesia sponsoring scribal activities and lectionary presentations of the Gospel of John are on record as insisting Jesus was fully God and Christianity was fully realized on the Cross — theological positions absent from the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Yay, politics and theological controversy, and we haven’t begun to really dig into the whole text.

Selecting Appropriate Contexts

We could go on and on in establishing the historical context for the Gospel of John. But at this point, I’m satisfied this exploration has helped me frame the text appropriately: we’re not reading an eyewitness account of the acts and sayings of Yeshua of Nashrath, the historical figure who lived and breathed in first-century Judaea; we’re reading a narration that underwent several scribal iterations before being committed to Papyrus 66, a manuscript that through historical accident has become our current contender for earliest surviving manuscript of the Gospel of John. And the immediate setting for the production of Papyrus 66 involved scribal and editorial behaviors that injected Alexandrian theological concerns into the narrative.

We should therefore read John 3:16 as an expression of third-century Alexandrian theology about Jesus and not a contemporaneous description of something Jesus said or taught. We’re not yet at liberty to conclude Jesus told his followers that God loved the world so much that God sent an only-begotten son to save the world. That’s an important distinction to remember in studying the Gospel of John, and ultimately, the life and teachings of Jesus.

That’s it for today. Wow, so much more to consider. Already I can sense some discoveries await us as we dig a little deeper into the contexts that matter for those pre-P66 exemplars and what they would tell us about compositional units and establishing the text surrounding John 3:16.