After all this research into John 3:16, I wanted to compare different translations against what I’ve been able to establish about the documentary artifact, the provenance, the historical and literary contexts, the pericope setting, and the word study of the original passage in Greek.

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI (the publisher of the excellent journal Religion and American Culture) conducted a national study in 2014 of Americans’ uses of the Bible. Researchers found that the King James Version (1611) remained the most-used at 55%. The New International Version (1978) came in second place at 19% but dominated as the preferred Bible among evangelicals after 1986. Other versions that registered high on surveys included the New Revised Standard Version, the New American Bible, and the Living Bible. Other versions together made up 8%. Scholars often draw from the New Revised Standard Version or the English Standard Version, and I’ve already mentioned the Society for Biblical Literature Greek New Testament, which does have an English translation under the title of Lexham English Bible. The New American Standard Bible used the Novum Testamentum Graece as the control text and attempted a grammatically correct, literal translation that many readers prefer. David Bentley Hart, a renowned Orthodox scholar and world-expert on Koine Greek recently published a New Testament translation with Yale University Press. Hart wanted to achieve an exegetical translation that was somewhat opposite to the New International Version and New American Standard Bible — preserve grammatical inconsistencies and rhetorical irregularities rather than smooth them out, as well as maintain colloquialisms and dialectical patterns when such are evident in the earliest manuscripts.

So let’s take inventory of John 3:16 in these English versions:

  • King James Version (KJV)
  • New International Version (NIV)
  • New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
  • New American Bible (NAB)
  • The Living Bible (TLB)
  • English Standard Version (ESV)
  • Lexham English Bible (LEB)
  • New American Standard Bible (NASB)
  • David Bentley Hart New Testament (DBHNT)

Published English Translations

(KJV)
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

(NIV)
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

(NRSV)
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

(NAB)
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.

(TLB)
For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

(ESV)
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
[alternate:] For this is how God loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

(LEB)
For in this way God loved the world, so that he gave his one and only Son, in order that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life.

(NASB)
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.

(DBHNT)
For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish, but have the life of the Age.

Departures

Every version above translates houtos gar as “For,” which strikes me as owed more to the tonality of the KJV and its legacy than a strict rendition of houtos gar in English. The Lexham at least preserves “in this way,” which is more strongly suggested in houtos gar than simply “For.” All versions also treat ho theos as the title for “God in the fullest and most unequivocal sense,” according to Hart. We made this observation more or less in an earlier post, but I still stand by the stronger historical context communicated by “the god,” especially since the earliest versions of the Gospel of John give evidence of responding to Pagan critiques of Jesus and in its prose style implies a philosophical audience. Yes, it is jarring to read the gospel’s references to ho theos as “the god” rather than “God,” but that’s precisely what we should be picking up on if that is, in fact, a truer rendition that approaches the earliest manuscripts more accurately.

Hart departs from the English norm with his translation of kosmon; the others all stick with the KJV “world.” All versions render egapesen as a conjugated relative of agape, a Greek word for “love”; but again, we took a close look at various contexts for egapesen to see whether this instance in John expressed a different sense of the word and noticed how there is more nuance to the word than what is contained in the English “love.” I’m curious why all the versions also stuck with “perish” and passed on more common associations of apoletai with being destroyed or being lost. Again, this strikes me as a cultural or theological interest in not departing too dramatically from the English aesthetic and King James tradition evident in even the modern translations.

In my case, I care for a precise and contextual reading of the earliest, most reliable documents for the scriptual text, and this perusal of alternative published translations demonstrates, I think, why it’s worth digging deeper than a surface reading of English versions of the scriptures. I feel almost like Joseph Smith who detected the problems of translation and hoped for better versions of ancient scripture — whereas he employed highly esoteric methods for contemplating new translations, my methods have been less subjective and more evidence-driven. What can we reliably discern from the artifacts, the languages, and the histories surrounding the production of the scriptures we read? This yields very different results than an emotionally charged, isolated, subjective reading we’re so used to seeing in our devotional settings.

Conclusions

This study has persuaded me (barring new discoveries of previously nonextant documents) that the pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus possibly draws from an exchange Yeshua may have had with one Naqdimon, but very likely constitutes a lector commentary by a second-century Alexandrian or Syrian Christian who already viewed Iesous as Christos, the anointed Son of Man who had ascended into heaven after having descended from heaven to liberate humankind. This lector used poignant and well-known images from the Hebrew Bible: the Elohim’s breath of life in the adam and Moses’s brazen serpent lifted in the wilderness to heal Israelites from a plague of poisonous snakes. These images could very well have been invoked by Yeshua in the historical episode of conversing with Naqdimon, but in the stylus of the scribes of Papyrus 66, they become metaphors for a second-century theology that I’m skeptical existed in the Galilean countryside or Jerusalem synagogues where Yeshua taught.

Is this Alexandrian/Syrian lector accurate in presenting Yeshua in terms of ascending into heaven and speaking of a birth by breath? Well now we pivot from this historical and textual study into the work of theologians. We cannot prove the passage as having a provenance that stretches all the way back to Yeshua himself — but this doesn’t mean we cannot now entertain theological possibilities relative to our present beliefs. We just have to be able to name our approaches and maintain awareness of our poetic license, and I’m generally OK with drawing new inferences from the scriptures. Put simply, let’s not attribute this birth by breath teaching to Jesus, and then proceed under the method of logical reasoning, and we’re more solidly explaining a personal belief without crediting it with the authority of scripture.

An Eisegetical Reading of John 3:16

This becomes eisegesis, the form of interpretation where we develop meanings outside of the text itself. My own subjective resonances take me to the metaphor of wind that appears in the pericope — I’ll admit that what strikes me as experience with the spiritual, or “promptings,” visit me like wind. I can’t always say where the prompting came from or where it is leading me. When I proceed with trust that there are Heavenly Parents speaking in superconscious or spiritual ways, I do feel more sustained, more alive in that trust and in my awareness. Perhaps this is the birth by breath and a lesson from this long study of John 3:16 — we as Christians have an invitation to see Jesus as an imitation of our Heavenly Parents dispatched or offered or sent to draw us away from destruction or death or loss and toward a better cosmos. Our witness will be heavenly, so we look for the sudden, unpredictable strokes of godliness that come our way and prompt us along.