Impossible conversation: Jesus and Nicodemus: YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN

by Terry 24 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Terry

  I am a member on New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman's blog, and the professor is currently outlining a new book he is writing about FALSE MEMORY and the life of Jesus.

  An interesting post occurred today in which he gives an example of a very famous scripture,

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  ". . . example of a false memory of Jesus’ teaching I turn to a famous passage in the Gospel of John, Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus (John 3:1-15). Nicodemus is said to be a Jewish leader who comes up to Jesus and affirms that Jesus must come from God because of the great things that he said to have done. Jesus then tells him “Unless one if born ANOTHEN, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven” (John 3:3).

  I have left the Greek word ANOTHEN untranslated because it is the key to the conversation as it proceeds. It is a Greek word that actually has two different meanings, depending on the context within which it is used. On one hand it can mean “a second time.” If that’s what it means here, then Jesus is telling Nicodemus that he must be “born again.” But it can also mean “from above.” If that’s what it means then Jesus is telling Nicodemus that he must have a birth from God above if he is to see the kingdom of heaven.

  The reason this double-meaning matters is because Nicodemus takes Jesus to mean that he has to be born a second time, and he is incredulous. He responds by asking how a person can crawl back into his mother’s womb to be born again. But Jesus tells him that he does not mean a second, physical birth. He is talking about a birth from heaven, a birth made possible by the Spirit of God who comes from above. Anyone who has had such a heavenly birth, to accompany his earthly birth, can then ascend to heaven and have eternal life.

  This is arguably the most famous passage of the New Testament Gospels that just about no one “gets” because they don’t read it in Greek, and it is only in Greek that it actually makes sense, since the double meaning of the word ANOTHEN cannot be replicated in English. And so English translators of John 3:3 and 3:5 have to decide whether they translate the word as “again” or “from above.” Either way creates problems for the translation, since the word has to mean both things for the conversation to make sense, with Nicodemus understanding the word in one way and Jesus meaning it in another.

  But it is precisely this key point – that the pivotal word means both things – that shows the conversation almost certainly didn’t happen, at least as described in the third chapter of John. The double meaning that cannot be replicated in English also cannot be replicated in Aramaic. Recall: Jesus, an Aramaic-speaking Jew, is allegedly talking with a Jewish teacher in Jerusalem, where, again, Aramaic was the native tongue. They would have been speaking Aramaic. But the double meaning of the key Greek word in the passage doesn’t work in Aramaic. In other words, the word for “from above” does not mean “a second time” in Aramaic (and vice versa). And so, since the entire conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is predicated precisely on a double meaning of a word that in Aramaic doesn’t have a double meaning, it could not have taken place as described.

  The conversation is not described in any other ancient Christian source. It appears not to have been a conversation that Jesus really had, with Nicodemus or anyone else. It is a conversation that was either created by the author of the Gospel of John or by a Greek-speaking story-teller before him who passed it along until it came to be written in the Gospel. Those who recall that Jesus had this discussion with Nicodemus, telling him he must be “born again,” are misremembering what actually could have happened."

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  "Some of my readers have not understood the point that I have been trying to make about this, mainly because I have not explained it very well. When I say that a Gospel passage represents a “false memory,” I am not necessarily saying that the author of the account is misremembering something. That may indeed to be the case, but it is impossible to know. It may also be the case that he’s just makin’ something up. My point, though, is that the way Jesus came to be remembered by those who *read* these Gospel accounts, and formed their impressions of Jesus from them, was based on these narratives that are not true to history. They may be religiously true or theologically true, but they aren’t historically true. It is in that sense, and only in that sense, that I am referring to them as false memories.

  People still today have false memories of Jesus based on what they have read in the Bible. In this chapter 5, I deal with false memories involving the life (as opposed to the death) of Jesus – including his teachings."
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  the comet

  Very interesting, I really enjoy these Bart Ehrman posts. I have to thank you terry for introducing his work to me. My wife and I bought several of his books recently and have really been loving reading and discussing them. his book, misquoting Jesus, is an amazing read that I'd recommend to anyone questioning the bible
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  Witness My Fury

  Thanks, please keep posting these titbits, they are useful.
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  sir82

  huh - I never would have thought of that, but of course it makes perfect sense.
  
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  fulltimestudent

  Thnx for posting that viewpoint.

  Another perspective, that I use form time to time, is that we all live our lives in a storied framework of our own writing. The gospel writers published their stories of Jesus (whether it was an historical Jesus or mythical Jesus does not really matter).

  Does anyone here, really remember, word for word, the Public Talk at your first ever big convention? So how could anyone recall exactly what Jesus said, some 30 years + later?
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  DATA-DOG

  So...I'm confused. Are you saying the conversation is "impossible" in the same sense that "Jehovah" being God's name is "impossible"???

  DD
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  sir82

  So how could anyone recall exactly what Jesus said, some 30 years + later?

  Standard fundy / JW answer is "holy spirit helped them remember", of course, but yeah, point taken.

  Another troubling point is that for centuries, manuscripts of what would become the "New Testament" were copied by hand, by amateurs, and with quite likely very little in the way of quality control. Dozens or hundreds of texts copied by hand by amateurs with almost certainly copious errors compounding over 400+ years (until there were enough skilled Christian copyists to take over).
  

  Ehrman, in his works, shows dozens of places where the accepted text is almost certainly different than what was originally written.
  
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  _Morpheus

  Misremembering? Did jon even claim to be present at that discussion....? Its third hand at best
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  JamesThomas

  Perhaps the core problem with religious beliefs is that all they amount to are memories. Memories being mere mental concepts that are results of some mental activity weaving a story that we then unquestionably accept as 'reality' or 'truth'. In other words, they are make-believe imagery, light-years removed from Reality. But we insanely keep embracing and supporting them as if they are genuine.

  It's so simple, no one sees it. We live, blind to existence.
  
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  Terry

  In 1956, the book THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY published and became a runaway bestseller.
  The book dealt with the memory of a woman named Virginia Tighe, an ordinary American housewife who’d been regressed hypnotically, seemingly into a previous life by the book’s author, Morey Bernstein.
  After sensational reaction from the reading public, newspaper investigative reporting commenced ferreting out details and discrepancies in Tighe’s account of her life as an Irish girl growing up in Cork, under the name, Bridey Murphy.
  Long story short: Cryptomnesia was the root cause.
  __Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.__
  (The experts who examined the case of Virginia Tighe came to the conclusion that the best way to arrive at the truth was to check back not to Ireland but to Tighe’s own childhood and her relationship with her parents. Morey Bernstein stated that Virginia Tighe (whom he called Ruth Simmons in the book) was brought up by a Norwegian uncle and his German-Scottish-Irish wife. However, it did not state that her actual parents were both part Irish and that she had lived with them until the age of three. It also did not mention that an Irish immigrant named Bridie Murphy Corkell (1892–1957)[2] lived across the street from Tighe’s childhood home in Chicago, Illinois. Scientists are satisfied that everything Virginia Tighe said can be explained as a memory of her long-forgotten childhood. The psychologist Andrew Neher wrote that as a child Tighe was a close friend to a neighbor whose life was very similar to Bridey Murphy’s.) Wiki article

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  The reason I cite this particular case is to highlight the fact no fraud was purposefully perpetrated, but Virginia Tighe had absorbed many details about her neighbor from listening in childhood. These details emerged as a ‘first person narrative’ when Tighe was in a hypnotic state.

  Isn’t it reasonable to conclude the transmission of details of eye-witness accounts of Jesus could likewise have been absorbed as hearsay and repeated as autonomous first person memories–then transmitted with corruptions by later stories, legends, imagination? No culpable plagiarism or malicious intent need be attributed along the way.