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 \u201ctwo levels\u201d of the Johannine narrative are\u00a0not 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).<\/div>\n
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What do others think? Is it better to\u00a0treat John 3 as a dialogue between the Johannine community and the\u00a0synagogue, or as a purportedly genuine\u00a0conversation between a Jewish leader and a\u00a0baptizing mystic who would soon emerge from under the shadow of his mentor John and become a focal point of his own movement?\u00a0Again, 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<\/em> but whether it is one that is supposed to seem plausible<\/em> set in the time of Jesus\u2019 public activity, or one that can only be understood if one reads it expecting Jesus to be the voice of later Christians.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Should we think that the author of the Gospel of John intended, in the narrative about Jesus\u2019 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 \u2013 as I explored with my Gospel of John class the last time it met.<\/div>\n