Should we think that the author of the Gospel of John intended, in the narrative about Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, to tell a story which could be treated as an actual story about Jesus during the period of his public ministry? If so, it will shape the way we read it in interesting and unusual ways – as I explored with my Gospel of John class the last time it met.The first half of the chapter is usually treated as reflecting the standpoint of the author and a conversation between his Christian community and the Jewish synagogue of which they had once been a part. And this may, in the end, be the best way of dealing with certain elements of it.
But if we entertain for a moment the possibility that the Gospel’s author sought to offer not necessarily a true, factual, or historical account, but one that could be plausibly treated as an actual story about Jesus in his own time, then certain elements must be understood in some very interesting ways.
The “we” (contrasted with “you” in the plural) is one of the features that leads to the usual interpretation with the focus on the level of the author’s time and his community. But on the level of the story, Jesus has not clearly broken away from the movement of John the Baptist yet, and the Baptist’s public activity was still ongoing. In the perception of community leaders like Nicodemus, Jesus and John could have been thought of as part of a single movement or phenomenon, namely that of the baptizers.
In this context, Jesus’ language of being born of water and spirit could much more plausibly be viewed as referring to baptism in water as a means to spiritual experience – something that is elsewhere depicted as part of Jesus’ own experience of baptism.
Such spiritual experiences may well have included the idea of the descent of the/a heavenly spirit, and/or the ascent of the baptized. Jesus is depicted as claiming that he himself now speaks as one who has been taken over (in whole or in part) by a heavenly figure that descended upon him – the “Son of Man.”
Jesus is not only depicted as claiming that he had a unique experience of being taken over by a heavenly figure who descended, but also as a result being himself allowed to ascend to heaven in a unique way, and having already done so as of the time of his conversation with Nicodemus. (Cp. Paul’s claim to have had a similar sort of experience – ascent was a major component of Jewish and Christian mysticism in the ancient world). The “we” of which he is a part shares a knowledge of heavenly things, and so some sort of initiation into knowledge of heavenly things was presumably the experience of others who underwent baptism as well.
After considering this way of reading the story, some may find themselves all the more eager to treat the story as a retrojection of dialogue between later Jews and Christians onto the lips of Jesus and Nicodemus. But certainly it is at least appropriate to consider other ways the story might have been understood, since the “two levels” of the Johannine narrative are not always so blatantly anachronistic (although John 9, with its depiction of leaders ready to expel from the synagogue any who confess Jesus as Messiah, clearly is similarly anachronistic).
What do others think? Is it better to treat John 3 as a dialogue between the Johannine community and the synagogue, or as a purportedly genuine conversation between a Jewish leader and a baptizing mystic who would soon emerge from under the shadow of his mentor John and become a focal point of his own movement? Again, this is not to deny that the author of this Gospel presents everything in his own unique style, language, and viewpoint. The question is not about whether the story is historical but whether it is one that is supposed to seem plausible set in the time of Jesus’ public activity, or one that can only be understood if one reads it expecting Jesus to be the voice of later Christians.
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