John 3:1-21

Having studied John 3 earlier this year I discovered a great deal of mistranslation and misunderstanding of this instance in the ministry of Christ. Remember that John is not a synoptic gospel. Instead of starting at the birth of Christ John begins before the creation of the universe. John also uses a more Socratic approach to the retelling of the life of Christ. This just means that the Greek philosopher Socrates asked questions to teach and to learn. If you read through the book of John you find Jesus asking a lot of questions, teaching His audience through this type of discourse. Chapter three is one of these conversations. In verse one we are told a great deal about one of the characters in this chapter. John uses en, the imperfect tense and indicative form of eimi (2258) "be". This is the usual way John introduces someone. I say this because there are instances John uses ginomai (1096) "become" to introduce characters. Because of this if you come across ginomai in an introduction use the literal meaning such as in 1:6, "There became a man". In 2:23-25 we learn when this conversation takes place at the Feast of the Passover. This is important to understand why Nicodemus by night. We will look at that a little later but now we see that Nicodemus was a man out of the Pharisees. The method by which a young man could become a Pharisee depended on his father's position. If a young man's father was a Pharisee then he would be expected to follow in his father's path and be educated to get him past the academic cuts. If a young man didn't have a father who worked in the temple or was a Pharisee then he had to be an exceptional student to make the cuts along the way. This would lead them to the temple to be educated and then they would be initiated into the Pharisees. We see in verse 10 that Nicodemus wasn't just a Pharisee but also a teacher. Some Pharisees held government positions and taught. This is why John points out that Nicodemus was an archon (758), a ruler of the Jews. The Roman government realized that if they appointed the Pharisees over districts to interpret and judge according to Jewish law, they could keep the peace better. So in addition to being a government official he was a teacher. The name Nicodemus means victor among the people. It is interesting that he has a Greek name that isn't a Greek translation of a Hebrew name. He may have been from outside of Judea like Paul or his parents decided to name him with a Greek name. Next we see that Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. Unfortunately commentators have surmised that it was out of fear of the Pharisees. We saw that the Passover Feast was going on when Jesus was in Jerusalem. Passover was a big part of Jewish culture and a busy time for Pharisees. Being both religious and governmental officials they were required to procide over what the priests did not. So it was necessary for Nicodemus to meet Jesus at night after a long Feast period. Also there is another aspect that cancels out fear as a reason. Later in verse 11-12 we find out Nicodemus is not alone because John uses a plural pronoun "you". From the way Jesus addresses them they came with Nicodemus and were more than likely Pharisees. They often would go to check out new Rabbis to see if they were keeping the Law correctly. Keep that in mind when looking at the rest of the chapter I'll continue this tomorrow.