Rediscover the Verse: 1) John 3:16

This site is called “Rediscovering Jesus’s Words,” but, until now, I have been writing about specific words and phrases. In this article, I attempt to bring those ideas together to show how understanding them can open up our thinking about what Jesus taught. In this article, I take a look at one of the most widely quoted of Jesus’s verses. It goal is to explain how what his listeners heard differs from what is in our English translations. I hope to stimulate your thinking about what Jesus was teaching.

Most of us are familiar with John 3:16. Here is how it is translated in our Bibles:

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.

To give us a different perspective on what Jesus said, I could focus on the problems in these translations, but they are beautifully poetic, otherwise this verse - wouldn’t be so popular.

The Context

Jesus is being talking in this scene to the Pharisee, Nicodemus, who is described as a “high one.” Nicodemus is asking Jesus questions, one of the most famous asks about how a man can be born again. His last recorded question is, “How can these things happen?”

Jesus then says many verses that seem disconnected. However, I believe that Nicodemus kept asking more questions about each answer, which changed Jesus’s focus. The previous answer is about the Son of the Man being raised up like Moses holding up a serpent in the desert. This leads to the promise of “eternal life.” Then we come to the verse that is the topic here.

Here is my more literal translations of this verse. We can use this as a basis for discussing the differences between my version and the common ones and why those differences are important. I will discuss the bold words because they differ from the common translations.

Listeners Heard:

Because the Divine cared so much for this society.

So, he gave this son, this unique one, so that everyone trusting as much as him should not destroy himself.

Instead, he should have an on-going life.

How It Begins

Notice that the first sentence seems like another answer to an unrecorded question. Many of Jesus’s verses start with the Greek word that primarily means “because.” That word is often translated as the more neutral “for,” which makes it sound like he is explaining the offer of eternal life, but

The word “love” is converted to “cared” because two very different Greek verbs are translated as “love” in the Bible. We cannot understand Jesus’s meaning without differentiating between them. This verb means having a sense of responsibility for someone or something, not just feeling affection for them. This is explained in this article on both “love” words and how Jesus uses them. This “caring” is specifically the love between parents and their children and dependent family members.

The word translated as “the world” means a “world order.” I have written an article about this word as well. The focus of this word is on the “order” part. It refers to the organization of a society. The verb form of this word means “to order” or “to organize.”

There are many definite articles, the “the” in English, in this verse. I translate them as “this.” I do this because the Greek definite article is closer in meaning to the Greek pronoun “this,” sharing many of the pronoun’s forms” (see this article).

Jesus says “this society’, that what the Divine cares for is not “the world” but a particular society. This is not to say the God doesn’t care about the world, but that Jesus was sent into a specific society. He could have been referring to the social order in the province of Galilee and Judea or the Roman society, more generally, which was the “known world” in a sense. Jesus was not sent to China, or the Americas or Sub-Saharan Africa for a reason. That culture was ready to hear him.

The Connecting Idea

The next sentence begins with an adjective that marks a conclusion. I translate it as “so,” but the Greek word is stronger. I could have used a “therefore” but English Bibles translate other words as “therefore” and do it so frequently that it has weakened the word’s impact. “Accordingly,” works, as does “consequently,” but the Greek word is short, pithy, not pretentious like these English words.

The Greek word translated as “only-begotten” (KJV) and “one and only” (NIV) is only used by Jesus twice. It is an adjective that literally means a “unique type” or “only kin.” However, it doesn’t modify “son.” The adjective has its own separate definite article, which, when used with an adjective like this makes it act like a separate noun, “the unique one.”

The word “everyone” translated in English Bibles as “whosoever” and “whoever” is the common Greek word meaning “all.” This “all” is singular, so the sense is “everyone.” Jesus chose to refer to “everyone,” not the more limited idea of “whoever,” which is also a common Greek word but a different one.

The next words in my version are “trusting as much as him.” English Bibles translate this is “believing in him.” The problem is that the verb means “trust” more than our more religiously tinged “belief” (see this article here). And there is a historical problem with the idea of “believing in” as we use it today. I discuss that problem in this article. The preposition used can mean “in” but only when the object “him” is in a different form. The form in the “believe in verses works best with “as much as.”

The “destroy himself” is from the literal meaning of the word. The verb is in the middle voice, which means the person is acting on themselves. The English Bibles translated this as “perish” which communicates a passive idea of being destroyed, but the verb is not passive. “Destroying” is what people do to themselves, according to Jesus.

The Verse’s Ending

The final sentense begins with an “instead.” It is from another Greek word usually translated in English Bibles confusingly as “but.” However, there is another Greek word that is more commonly and better translated as “but.” Jesus use of this word is very specific. He uses it to contrast a negative statement with a positive one. This is exactly how “instead” works in English. Here, the negative is the previous line about “not destroying himself,” and the positive on is “should have an on-going life.”

This brings us to the verse’s “punchline” as I like to describe it. I translated it as “an on-going life,” but Jesus says “a life "on-going.” “On-going” is the punchline, the final word. The problems with translating these words as “eternal life” are discussed in this article. Our idea of “eternal life” arose as a result of Christian teaching., it was not part of the culture of the time, Judean, Greek, or Roman. People of the time did not think of anything as eternal and had no real word for it. Most gods were not even undying, and the Judean Divine is described only as “the ancient of days.”

Thanks for Reading!

If you liked this article, please let me know. I will start doing articles like this regularly. As you can see here, all the earlier discussion of Greek words, phrases, and Jesus’s speaking style were just providing the background for understanding specific, interesting verses that we take for granted in normal translations. I am not trying to teach any or my own thinking based upon this information. I simply want to give everyone a more exciting way to read verses that are much more interesting than they seem.