I agree! He would have! My point is that He didn't mean to say "from above"!!! He meant to say exactly what He did say - "born again". The response of Nicodemus makes sense, and what Jesus said makes sense, as I pointed out earlier.
If this was a real conversation that had taken place in Aramaic, of course he would have said "from above", that's what his entire speech was about. One must be born from above to enter heaven. He never said "born again" in Aramaic. "Born again" and "from above" are two different words in Aramaic.
Yes....they substituted the only available Greek word.
Precisely! Now do you get where I'm coming from? Only now that they substituted the Greek word in, the conversation makes sense. That's been my entire point. It's more likely that it was originally written in Greek.
Because it has a dual meaning, we are left to try and determine which meaning makes the most sense, contextually. I contend that "born again" makes the most sense based on the reaction of Nicodemus.
But Jesus never said "born again" in Aramaic, "born again" is only attributed to him when his words were translated into Greek. In Greek, he could be taken to mean that because of the Greek double meaning. But this is all assuming this dialogue was actually written down in Aramaic. There's no proof of that.
Nicodemus could realistically react as he did even if Jesus said in Aramaic "you must be born from above". In my opinion. But it makes more sense that Jesus said "Born again"
How? In both English and Aramaic there is no double entendre. If I said "You must be born
from above" your response would never be "What do you mean born
from my mother's womb again?" Yet this is what we see in the Gospel. It only makes sense recorded in Greek.
My point is that John's gospel was recorded faithfully - John recounted the Aramaic words Jesus spoke to Nicodemus.
How was it recorded faithfully? What makes you think that? Was the author(s) of John there to witness the conversation? No. It was written years after Jesus' death. It's also written in the third person narrative and we don't even know who originally recorded it. We have no idea how many scribes could have possibly tampered with it over hundreds of years, and the fact we have so many variances should worry anyone taking the Gospels seriously. Are you really that comfortable saying it was faithfully recorded?
It's a lot like that whisper game kids play. You know the one where everyone lines up and the first person whispers something to the next, and it's whispered down the line? It's rare for the words to come out exactly the way they were originally. And that's just with a group of 20 people, not thousands over hundreds of years! Sometimes it's a simple word that's accidentally lost- no big deal, but sometimes phrases lose entire meanings, and sometimes people outright lie to suit their own agenda.
mm, as an ex-Christian, I understand there are circumstances that are comparatively safe to place your faith in, but the inerrancy and credibility of the New Testament manuscripts isn't one of those circumstances.
