I started this series wanting to make a “quick exegesis” of John 3:16 to illustrate my approaches to scripture study. Part of me wants to chuckle at my own audaciousness — thinking this one verse could be interpreted exegetically without a ton of heavy lifting, and yet, seven posts later, here we are finally getting to the verse itself. But then I hasten to make the point of what I have experienced repeatedly when studying the scriptures in a contextual, exegetical fashion: it really does take this level of additional study to place the passage in its appropriate context(s). To think we can just crack open a nicely formatted English edition of the scriptures to a verse we want to muse about is to ignore what amounts to a significant level of detail we should be bringing to the passage. The larger volume of study here is my example of why the proof-texting approach to reading scriptures is flawed and fallacious and subjective — just compare what we have needed to do with what people get away with in devotional settings, and you’ll understand why I’m skeptical of riffing that passes for interpretation.

A couple more thoughts before looking at verse 16 directly: I proceeded through these posts genuinely searching for the context and provenance of the passage; I didn’t bring preconceived notions of the verse but suspended my own judgment and sought out accurate information about the Gospel of John, the pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus, and the passage before forming conclusive interpretations. So while we’re talking about approaches to scripture study, I wish to underscore this aspect of the approach, the mental move of suspending judgment and suspending my own subjective desires for what I may want the passage to mean, as a preliminary step in beginning the research and the study. This is a goal of my own personal exegetical approach, one that I intend to continue with whatever study topics or passages I’ll pursue.

Review of Facts

OK. Let’s take a look at just verse 16 and complete that word study I promised earlier. By way of review, here are some facts we established in the previous posts about the passage, its surrounding text, and its historical context:

Earliest papyri sources for the passage give evidence of copying from an exemplar text that is no longer extant.
The earliest copying practices interpolated words, teachings, and tangents that serve a lectionary objective; the scribes served also as ekklesia readers who combined their own sermonizing with the pericope tradition they had heard and read in other nonextant materials.
The pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus had its principal effect in delivering a teaching on the birth by breath, something second-century interpreters connected to a later theology about ascending into heaven.
Jesus likely did not teach the passage but may have had an exchange with Nicodemus that his associates remembered and passed down in an oral telling that was not circulated among the Markan, Matthean, and Lukan communities.
Verse 16 falls within a lectionary bracket produced by second-century (or potentially third-century) commentators; the verse reflects more about them and their theology than something the historical Jesus may have said.

With those textual and contextual pieces in place, let’s examine the original papyrus version of John 3:16 and consider each of the words using the scholarly concordance we used earlier.

Translating the Words

Here again is the Papyrus 66 and Uncial 01 composite we established in the first post in this series:

From the SBLGNT, I can examine each word from the Papyrus 66 and Uncial 01 composite:

(Whenever I draw a definition below, it will be using the concordance.)

Houtos [in this way]: this/so/in this way/accordingly/just as. This word refers to the preceding lines, which as a continuous textual referent, is the example Jesus gives Nicodemus of Moses lifting the brazen serpent in the wilderness and the Son of Man/son of a man being lifted up. We have a rhetorical construction of an enthymeme: given (this), therefore (that) or because (this) then (that). Enthymeme constructions serve to provide the reason or basis for something else, in this case, there’s the lifting up of Moses’s serpent that is the example for what follows houtos. The word here sets up the enthymeme; it’s the vital hinge word between the premise and the therefore element.

gar [for]: This word shows up as a conjunction used to express cause, inference, continuation, or to explain, and when following houtos really just extends the enthymeme expression; we should read this, then, as houtos gar[=since/as]. This has implications for the phrase that follows; there’s a statement about God’s love, and houtos gar is drawing from the two images (Moses’s serpent and the Son of Man/son of a man being lifted up) to evince that love. It was an act of love that Moses lifted a brazen serpent to bring healing to Israel; so too it was an act of love that the Son of Man/son of a man would be lifted up. That’s the premise of the enthymeme from which the rest of the statement proceeds.

egapesen [loved]: loved/prized/was contented with/be-loved. Other Koine Greek texts using this word tend toward various expressions of love. Romantic love is contained in ἀγαπάω; but also familial affection, valuing an animal, even the feeling of homesickness for a cherished homeland. I’m intrigued by the connotative space present in the Greek word — imagine rendering this verse with “in this way God yearned for the cosmos” or “so did God cherish the universe.” Even though the evidence is thin that Jesus was the one saying this, I still resonate with a sermon presenting the love of God in such poetry.

ho [who]: Enough Greek texts use ho immediately before theos that it’s unlikely the word ho appears here as the pronoun “who.” We see hofunction as the definite article elsewhere when it’s followed by theos, which happens in this passage; so we ought to render this as ho theos [=the God]. I’m inclined to treat this in our modern English style the way other translations present it, as simply “God” without the definite article. However, given the larger context we already noticed about the second-century setting for lectionary readings of the Gospel of John — specifically how the Johannine scribes were themselves responding to Pagan critiques of Apostolic Judaism and Jesus’s divinity — it makes sense that these lectionary speakers wouldn’t imply which god they meant, but state it explicitly: the god, as in, the god [not one of the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods]. If we were to keep this in mind, I would prefer to render this as the god instead of God without the article.

theos [god]: In the singular, theos is rather consistently only God; in the plural, it shows up in other Greek texts to describe idols, gods, divinities, or even “cedars,” like the “cedars of Lebanon” that shows up in Isaiah. We can confidently render this passage’s use of ho theos as “the god” or if we prefer to capitalize the proper noun, “the God.”

ton [the]: The definite article “the.” Not a complicated translation. All other instances of ton in the passage have the same function.

kosmon [world]: cosmos/world/universe/earth/humankind/ornament/decoration. There’s quite a lot embedded in this Greek word kosmon. It’s loaded with centuries of Greek philosophy and metaphysical meaning before showing up in Christian texts. Were we to give this the bandwidth we gave the pericope of the Discourse with Nicodemus, it could be its own series. (I remember a whole week of one of my graduate seminars reading and discussing Greco-Roman metaphysics about the kosmos and how this informed earliest Christianity; we could really go down a rabbit hole on this one if we wished.) Put simply, the kosmos is more than a word for the universe or the world. For regular Greek speakers, kosmos suggested the deep symmetry within all degrees of matter, from the micro to the macro, all points of existence displayed both the kosmos and the kaos, the cosmos and the chaos. An internal force of cosmos resisted an external force of chaos, and this balance held everything well enough for motion to exist. (I’ll spare us the Aristotelian philosophy of motion and how this contributed significantly to the idea of a Prime Mover Unmoved that would be responsible for first motion in the universe; but it’s enough to know how much is suggested by kosmon here.) What’s curious is how this passage could be saying “so the god valued order (universe-grade anti-entropy order) so he gave the one-of-a-kind son.”

hoste [so]: for this reason/therefore/so/so that/for the purpose of/in order that/very/exceedingly. It’s important to note that this word is attached to the previous clause — for loved the kosmon God [hoste] — and there’s a translation issue with whether this modifies the verb egapesen or whether this modifies the whole independent clause. If we’re supposed to see hostemodify the verb, then it functions as an adverb — loved exceedingly. But if it functions as a clause modifier, then it functions as therefore God loved the kosmon. But the passage already opens with houtos gar [=since/as], so it would seem a crude redundancy for hoste to mean therefore — but these early Greek texts present an abundance of crude redundancies for our stylistic norms today. I think we’re stuck in this instance having to make our own choice as readers whether to read hoste as an adverb or not.

huion [son]: male child/son/descendant/accepted or adopted son/pupil/member. The preponderance of huion in the rest of the Gospel of John to mean a direct male descendant of a father makes this a simple translation. In this case, the huion [=son] of theos is being referenced.

monogene [one-of-a-kind]: the only member of a kin/only-begotten/only (of children)/one and only/lone. We have to know some Greek syntax to translate monogene: this word is inflected as an adjective even though it is preceded by the definite article “the,” as in “the monogene.” In English when we attach the definite article to an adjective, we end up nominalizing the adjective, in other words, turning the adjective into a noun (e.g., “the great,” “the quiet”). But when we use this construction in a title, it has the effect of both adjective and noun: “Peter the Great” implies “Peter the Great [King],” an adjectival effect; “Peter the Great” without implication makes “Great” a noun, like saying “Peter the King” or “Peter the Man.” In Greek, however, nouns and adjectives are modified with declensions, so the word itself actually changes suffix depending on its function. Here, monogene is declined as an adjective relative to huion [=son], so the King James Version of “only-begotten Son” isn’t inaccurate. In some English translations, we see “the son, the only-begotten” as an alternative, no doubt to convey the Greek construction in ton huion ton monogene. But here’s a problem with “only-begotten”: the English “begotten” suggests begetting, which has a strong etymology as meaning a man, more so than a woman, siring a child, since earlier English “birth” more often was assigned to a woman delivering a child. In various contexts of monogene, ancient Greek texts steer closer to “only child” and not “begetting,” which allow for an adopted father/son relationship as much as a direct fathering of a son. The theological implications should be obvious here: monogene doesn’t demand that theosbegat ton huion, but when reading “only-begotten” in English, we absolutely perpetuate the theology that Jesus was God’s only Son. I’m positive this translation issue isn’t going away and that whole books have been written on this subject. I’m content with leaving monogene as a begotten-free translation; and considering gene in the Greek like genus, it’s not far-fetched to render monogene as “one-of-a-kind” or “lone-genus” or “lone-kind,” something to connote the singular quality of the huion compared to kosmon— this particular huion is alone in the cosmos.

edoken [he gave]: to give/to give into/to grant/to offer/to give to/to give (a daughter) for a wife/to make somebody as/to appoint/to establish/to place/to allow/to give as a sign/to put (to safety)/to answer/to send. My goodness. This word enjoys a massive degree of poetic possibility in ancient Greek literature. Just look at all those possibilities. Already this strikes me as itself the word with the most potential for extensive study — just about everything changes in this passage by selecting alternative connotations or definitions for didomi, the infinitive of the verb edoken. Consider how dramatically the passage changes by trying out other valid definitions. (For the sake of example, I’ll play with the King James Version we’re so familiar with.)

God so loved the world that he granted his only-begotten Son
God so loved the world that he appointed his only-begotten Son
God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son
God so loved the world that he gave as a sign his only-begotten Son
God so loved the world that he allowed his only-begotten Son
God so loved the world that he gave into his only-begotten Son

The last of these reminds me of Jacob 5 in the Book of Mormon when the servant pleads to the Lord of the Vineyard to spare the vineyard a little longer; imagining this kind of relationship and this passage saying in effect that God gave into the Son, as in, acquiesced or capitulated to the Son out of love for the world, renders something altogether different than imagining God sending or giving his Son. Now, this is obviously a poetic wordplay and not the historical text — to know which meanings or concepts are being presented by edoken in this instance, we have to consider (again, for the people in the back) the whole Gospel of John, or more specifically, all of Papyrus 66 and Uncial 01. Off the top of my head, my awareness of these texts makes me favor offer or send over give.

All right — I must take a break for the moment. I’ll be back to finish this word study in the next installment.

The God Exceedingly Prized the Cosmos, Part 1

Review of Facts

Translating the Words