This is part 3 in a series on interpreting John 3:16 as an introduction to my approaches to scripture study. Yesterday I looked at the first word in the earliest text of John 3:16 and it sent me into learning what the basic compositional unit of the surrounding text was. The manuscripts offer evidence of editorial revisions and scribal conventions that make the whole Gospel of John a necessary compositional unit to have to understand if we are to situate John 3:16 in its proper context. Today, I want to continue the study and see where it leads.
Modern textual criticism of the New Testament had a strong boost if not beginning in the 19th-century discovery that the story of Jesus defending the adulteress against stoning (“Let he who is without sin first cast a stone at her”) did not appear in virtually all early manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Known as the “pericope adulterae,” this story made a conspicuous appearance outside and in late copies of the Gospel of John. Scholars came to the conclusion that the pericope adulterae could not have been original to the Gospel of John and represented an interpolation — a story inserted into the text long after the text’s original production.
The long debate over the placement of the pericope adulterae, whether it belongs in the Gospel of John or not, whether it represents a historical episode in the life of Jesus or not, has drawn upon the whole toolkit of textual and historical analysis. In a new book on the pericope adulterae, New Testament scholars Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman make this point quite directly: “To tell the history of the pericope adulterae is to tell the history of the Gospels, and vice versa.”[1] In other words, the provenance and production history of this one story and how it was added to the Gospel of John is a definitive example of how all four gospels were composed and assembled.
This is to say that the rest of the Gospel of John was created in the same way and by the same process as the pericope adulterae. Without laying out all the evidence for this (go check out Knust and Wasserman’s book if you are skeptical), I’ll say that the basic compositional unit of the Gospel of John, and by extension all four gospels, is the pericope, not letters, or chapters, or verses, or other formats. If we want to keep John 3:16 in context, we’ll need to identify the pericope in which it appears and then ask questions about the production and setting of this pericope unit.
The Pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus
The dense and technical analysis that has identified the pericopes (pronounced per-IH-co-pees) that were assembled into the four gospels is beyond my own current scripture study. Sorry. You’ll have to trust that everything you read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John corresponds to a story-unit known as the pericope and that the earliest scribes of the gospels both read and heard pericopes as they participated in ekklesia gatherings, listened to narrative retellings of Jesus’s life and teachings, and debated Jewish doctrine with other Greek-speaking rabbis and students. Each pericope is prone to interpolation, folklore, and manipulation. We have to take the gospels a pericope at a time and not assume the medieval compositing that gave us the canonized text presumed by King James clergy to be authoritative represents actual history or accurate quotations of Jesus.
My preferred tool for reading the gospels in their pericope forms is the handy Synopsis of the Four Gospels, English edition.[2] When you look up John 3:16, it appears within Pericope 27, “The Discourse with Nicodemus.” Scholars have identified our present-day John 3:1–21 as the distinct text, the pericope, set apart from other pericopes assembled as the Gospel of John.
Like the pericope adulterae, the Discourse with Nicodemus has its own production history. In our earlier exploration of the source history of John 3, we already covered the artifactual history (a.k.a. provenance) of Papyrus 66 with a minor overview of the papyri, uncial, miniscule, and lectionary manuscripts. To dig deeper, we must make sense of the oral and textual cultures of the first generation of Jesus’s followers.
Collective Memorializing
For now, I’m just going to mention the overall setting. In other scripture studies, I’m sure I’ll return with more detail to this history. But in general, it’s important that we know that each story-unit that we call a pericope began as a narration among generally illiterate people who had been Jesus’s principal audience and eyewitnesses. We notice some references to “scribes and Pharisees” in the gospels, suggesting that the main literate class of Galilean Jews opposed Jesus most of his ministry. The fishermen at Capernaum and the women of outer Jerusalem who were the largest group of initial followers were very unlikely literate, as evidenced by Jesus’s preaching styles among them and their behaviors described in the gospels. We know that Jesus and his followers gathered in homes and on hillsides to discuss Torah/scripture and to listen to Jesus’s teachings. They discussed teachings at meal times and in small numbers. The pericopes match a Galilean culture of collective memorializing through oral recitation and storytelling. It took decades for literate converts of a Greek-speaking background to begin the process of committing the shared stories of Jesus’s life and the collective wisdom of Jesus’s teachings to writing.
Legend, Not History or Journalism
The Discourse with Nicodemus pericope very likely emerged among Syrian or Alexandrian Jews recalling in an ekklesia meeting this episode from Jesus’s life. When reading this pericope, we might imagine Greek-speaking Jewish teachers pulling out a lectionary scroll or papyrus containing some episodes from Jesus’s life that they had collected as a kind of report for their assembly of fellow ekklesia members. They don’t yet have a concept of chapter-and-verse, a concept of scriptural canon, or a concept of journalistic standards of fact-based or evidence-based reporting. They certainly don’t have a modern concept of historiography, the methodology of how to interpret faithfully the events of the past through a strict analysis of documentary sources. A crude analogy might be how families like to tell their children the legend of Santa Claus. There’s no definitive text (except perhaps Clement Moore’s “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” better known as “‘Twas the Night before Christmas”); but everyone agrees on some key elements of the legend: Santa Claus resides at the North Pole and spends the whole year making toys for the children of the world and on Christmas Eve he rides a magical sleigh pulled by flying reindeer to leave presents in stockings. The word-for-word telling of this legend absolutely varies across time and culture. We cannot take sources reporting the Santa Claus story as historically precise despite there being a ubiquitous interest and awareness of the legend.
Back to the pericope. Scholars have identified the bookends to this story-unit: John 3:1–21. Here’s a trustworthy rendition from the SBL Greek New Testament but presented as a story block without punctuation and names transliterated from their original languages:
Now there was a man of the Perishayya [Pharisees] whose name was Naqdimon a ruler of the Judaeans
This man came to him [Yeshua] at night and said to him
Rabbi we know that you are a teacher who has come from God
for no one is able to confirm these signs that you are performing unless God were with him
Yeshua answered and said to him
Amen amen I say to you unless someone is born anothen [again/from above] he is not able to see the kingdom of God
Naqdimon said to him
How can a man be born when he is an old man
He is not able to enter into his mother’s womb for the second time and be born can he
Yeshua answered
Amen amen I say to you unless someone is born of water and pneumatos[wisdom/breath/spirit] he is not able to enter into the kingdom of God
What is born of the flesh is flesh and what is born of the pneumatos is pneuma
Do not be astonished that I said to you
It is necessary for you to be born anothen
The wind blows wherever it wishes and you hear the sound of it but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going
So is everyone who is born of the pneumatos
Naqdimon answered and said to him
How can these things be
Yeshua answered and said to him
Are you the teacher of Yisra’el and you do not understand these things
Amen amen I say to you we speak what we know and we testify about what we have seen and you do not accept our testimony
If I tell you earthly things and you do not believe how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things
And no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven the son of the man
And just as Moshe [Moses] lifted up the snake in the wilderness
Thus it is necessary that the son of the man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life
For in this way God loved the world so that he gave his one-of-a-kind son that everyone who believes in him will not perish but will have eternal life
For God did not send his son into the world that he should judge the world but that the world should be saved through him
The one who believes in him is not judged but the one who does not believe has already been judged because he has not believed in the name of the one-of-a-kind son of God
And this is the judgment
That the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil
For everyone who practices evil hates the light and does not come to the light lest his deeds be exposed
But the one who practices the truth comes to the light that his deeds may be revealed that they are done in God
Now we have the whole text that makes up the principal compositional unit for the text of John 3:16. The pericope doesn’t identify the relative timing of the event nor the location. All we get is that people recalled that a Pharisee named Naqdimon approached Yeshua and professed belief that Yeshua was a godly teacher. And then an exchange follows in which Yeshua teaches Naqdimon about a new birth.
When analyzing the pericope across manuscript sources, it’s apparent that some manuscripts present the dialogue with quotation blocks and others do not. Experts who parse these textual variations are generally agreed that a block of the pericope was produced later and represents an interpolation: the text of verses 16–21. Most modern editions reflect this, placing quotation marks after Jesus mentioning Moses and saying “the Son of Man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.”
This throws John 3:16 into question — Did Jesus say this or does this represent an interpretive excursus, a departure within a lectionary reading in which the reader began adding his own testimony or sermon to the reading of the Discourse with Nicodemus? The manuscripts themselves suggest the latter. Which means John 3:16 reflects the theology and ideas of 3rd-century Alexandrian Christians, not a teaching of Yeshua in first-century HaGalil.
- Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman, To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 9.
- Kurt Aland, ed., Synopsis of the Four Gospels, English ed. (New York: American Bible Society, 1982).