John 1:13 in its Historical-Grammatical Context
In the centuries-old, swirling debate between Reformed and non-Reformed theology, a discussion of John 1:13 is never far from the center of the maelstrom. Perhaps this is because Calvinists regard John 1:13 as a key text proving that man is too depraved in his will to receive Christ. The verse reads:
“Who were born, not by blood nor by the will of the flesh nor by the will of man, but of God.” (NAS)
Calvinists lay emphasis especially on these last two phrases, i.e., “the will of the flesh” and “the will of man,” in an attempt to prove their argument. But, of course, to teach that verse 13 means that a man exercises no will of his own in receiving Christ is to eliminate the near context of verse 12 (”But as many as received Him”), which would seem to refute the Calvinistic claim that man is unable to respond. Nevertheless, Calvinists argue that God must change the very will itself if a man is to respond and receive Christ. As explained in principle previously and extensively in this book, the Calvinistic position (because it embraces the dialectical method) thus retains the term ‘man’ in the phrase “the will of man” in name only.[206]
Now, as we dig deeper into the meaning of John 1:13, we concede that this verse is not easy to interpret. Part of the problem is that wrong interpretations have been ‘free ranged’ for many years apart from significant historical-grammatical considerations. The difficulty is in understanding John’s tri-part statement, which is comprised of three things by which people are not born of God; these are: “blood,” (lit. bloods), “the will of the flesh,” and “the will of man.”
Before interpreting this list of three things we must first establish the identity of the word “who” which begins John 1:13 (in the NAS), i.e., “who were born…” A few early church fathers (Iraneaus and Tertullian) take the phrase “who were born” to be “who was born,” thus asserting that John 1:13 refers to Christ rather than to those who have received Christ. In fact, this view would clear up much confusion if it were true. But as A.T. Robertson points out, the phrase “who were born” is found in all the earliest Greek Uncials[207] “and…must be insisted upon.” The following study will take Robertson’s conclusion as our starting point, i.e., that the beginning phrase is correctly rendered, “who were born” (or, “who are born.” See next paragraph.)
Not of Blood
Again, the tri-part statement that follows the phrase “who were born” describes what must be understood about those born of God. John tells us that they were born, “not of blood (lit. bloods) nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” [In the phrase “were born,” the ‘tense’ is aorist, that is, without particular regard to past, present, or future time, thus “are born,” as stating the matter generally without addressing the temporal issue per se. In other words, those who receive (v. 12) are born (v. 13).]
Now in examining the first phrase, “not of bloods” (again, blood is in the plural), it is best to begin by asking two questions: 1) the identity of John’s intended audience, and 2) what erroneous assumptions John was trying to anticipate in his readers’ minds with the tri-part statement “not…nor…nor…”
First, then, it is reasonable to conclude that John’s intended audience was both Gentile (particularly Greek[208] and Greco-Roman) and Jewish. (Even many of these latter in John’s time would have had a Hellenized education-for Palestine was certainly a Hellenized culture in the first century.) John’s gospel itself makes some concession to this fact of Jewish and Greek readership, explaining, for example, that the Passover was a Feast of the Jews, i.e., as opposed to simply stating the words, “the Passover,” which is all the explanation a sole Jewish readership would have needed (Jn. 6:4). Then, of course, there is John’s unfolding definition of the Logos, a Greek term meaning the source and foundation of the Cosmos[209] which went back to the time of Heraclitus (about 500 B.C.).[210] To deliberately invoke such a Greek term shows that John was using the term Logos as a contact point with his readers. As for the purpose of John’s gospel, he tells us in 20:31 that his recording of Jesus’ miracles (and therefore, by implication in one sense, all his gospel) is that the reader might believe in Jesus Christ and be saved.
It bears on the issue of interpreting John 1:13 to know that John’s gospel was among the last books of the New Testament written, being composed around 90 A.D. By this time in early church history Paul had died, perhaps over two decades earlier, and the gospel had made considerable inroads among both Jews and Gentiles. Also, John is now very old and appears to have mellowed greatly from the much earlier time when the Lord dubbed him and his brother “the Sons of Thunder.” As we look at John’s epistles and gospel written toward the end of his life, the apostle’s demeanor has softened considerably and comes through beautifully. In short, it is not a demeanor that quickly divides people into taking sides in a controversy; that is, John does not write the kind of challenging, confrontational statements Paul made in the early part of Romans, or communicated at Athens.[211] John’s tendency is to use emerging definitions that nudge readers to keep looking and thinking. Despite John’s forthright statements in his epistles identifying the antichrists of this world, etc., one always observes in John a relatively winsome approach toward “his little children.” This fact of John being identified as the Apostle of Love needs special attention. For certainly John’s love informs his attitude and approach throughout his gospel, though to bring the matter to a present day consideration, it appears that John’s demeanor has had little impact on how certain Christian interpreters think about his books. This seems especially true of those in Evangelical cyberspace. For one sees the hard line taken by certain online Reformed bloggers anxious to state their interpretations of John 1:13-i.e., Calvinists pouncing upon the verse as though John was laying it all out there right at the beginning, caring little if he sounded contradictory to the average reader between verses 12 and 13, so long as the reader saw the truth about God beheading the dragon of free will with the coup de group phrase, “nor of the will of man!“But imagine the average Roman reader coming to the gospel of John for the first time. Probably he knows little or nothing in particular about the life of Jesus Christ. So here is the question: Would not such a reader perceive, through the beginning portion of John, that the apostle’s “not…nor…nor…” statement in verse 13 was more of a diplomatic clarification rather than a forthright come-what-may statement? For certainly, John seems more gentle in his corrections than he might have been, as though he simply wishes to guard his readers against erroneous assumptions he knows his readers will likely make in the course of emerging definitions that are unfamiliar to them.
This realization of John’s approach segues us into the beginning of the apostle’s gospel itself, in which John uses the term Logos (”In the beginning was the Logos“). Jews and Greeks would have understood this term somewhat differently. While for the non-Hellenized Jew the Logos would have meant God’s Communication, the Greek would have understood the Logos as the source of reason (not attached to a person or personality) which overarched the universe and preceded the gods and persons that had come afterward as actors in the universe. Thus John is trying to help this latter group, the Greeks, understand (in the course of the first 14 verses) that this overarching reason and principle of the universe is, in fact, a Person by whom the world was created-and who, moreover, became a Man.
In the course of this description of the Logos, John speaks of two groups of people: those who rejected the Logos, and those who received Him and became children of God. Let us consider some of the surrounding context of John 1:13, beginning with verse 9 (in the NAS):
9There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. 10He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. 12But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, 13who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. 14And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
Notice once more that reading John 1:13 in context with verse 12, the phrase “nor by the will of man,” does not seem to be arguing forthrightly that man is incapable of volitionally receiving Christ. For again, verse 12 actually states that there are some who do receive Christ (though it is implied they are a minority), and here the verb means to receive by taking. The same Greek word is used in Matthew 26:26, when Christ says, “Take, eat; this is my body.” This reading of John 1:12 (about man receiving Christ), when combined with the phrase “[not] by the will of man” in verse 13, has led certain interpreters to use a dialectical explanation in order to reconcile the supposed antinomy. Thus they claim that a man comes to God in this fashion: he passes under a doorway with a sign above it reading, “Whosoever will may come;” yet once he has passed through the doorway and looks back, he sees that the sign reads, “Foreordained before the foundation of the world.” Such a dialectical explanation appears to rely on, at least in part, a misunderstanding of Ephesians 1:4-5, in which it is thought that salvation is what is predetermined upon certain unbelievers. But, in fact, Ephesians 1:4-5 is speaking of a future glorification which God has pre-planned for believers whose decisions of belief He knows in advance (see chpt. 16, discussion on adoption). Hence, part of the dialectical ’solution’ of the hybrid view is based on an erroneous view of adoption, a term quite abused by many theologians (again, see chpt. 16).
But moving on, although John reveals in verse 12 that some persons have become [essen., are ongoingly being (2nd aorist Middle ‘Deponent’)] the children of God, in the Roman mind this idea of being a child of God would certainly bring to mind the idea of demigods. Thus John presumably would have acted to correct any such notion on the part of the Greco-Roman pagan that the “children of God” of whom he speaks in verse 12 were anything of the kind which they as pagans were likely to assume from their Greco-Roman mythology. For in Greco-Roman religious culture, a demigod was held to be the offspring that resulted from the pairing of a human and a god, such as those sired by the god Zeus in his philandering, conjugal activity with human women. Many such liaisons (most of them involving male gods and human women rather than female gods with human men) were recognized in Greek mythology. Interestingly enough, Alexander the Great was held by some to be a demigod, for he frequently used the title “Son of Ammon-Zeus” which derived from his mother Olympias, who reportedly claimed that Zeus had impregnated her while she slept under an oak tree sacred to the god.[212] Caesar Augustus, somewhat similarly, claimed for himself a kind of demigod status centuries later. The cause of change happened early in his reign, when Augustus and the citizens of Rome saw Haley’s Comet pass overhead. The emperor declared it was the spirit of Julius Caesar entering heaven upon his deification. As Augustus was the heir apparent of Caesar, Augustus declared himself the “son of the deified” (Latin “divi fillius”). In the polytheistic religion of Rome this title did not mean “the son of God” (Lat. “Deo fillius”) but rather “a son of a god.” Nevertheless, the title did assign a deification to the emperor, and the change in status helped to encourage allegiance and stabilize Augustus’ reign early in the Roman ruler’s career.
Considering, then, that John knew that some of his readers (Greek or Hellenized) would likely here think he was referring to demigods when he spoke of “children of God,” the apostle seems anxious to clarify the point, thus stating that these he refers to are not begotten of bloods, i.e. not a product of human intercourse[213] nor that intercourse supposed between gods and humans. It is interesting to note in this regard that the first century Jewish historian, Josephus, speaks of the Greek belief in the gigantes-[mighty beings who, according to Greek religion, were the offspring of the two gods, Gaia (Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Sky)]. The Greeks held that many offspring had come from various gods, some involving human parentage and some not; but presumably for the Greek, any of these offspring might be thought to be “children of divinity.”[214] Josephus probably based his own view of supernatural males cohabiting with women on Genesis 6:1-4. Describing the pre-Flood culture of Noah, Josephus states: “For many angels of God accompanied with women, and begat sons that proved unjust, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the confidence they had in their own strength; for the tradition is, that these men did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants” (Antiquities Book I, Chapter iii).[215] Josephus is not stating here that Greeks believed in an offspring of angelic cohabitation as he (as a Jew) would have defined angelic, but he recognizes that the Greek tradition held to something similar (the gigantes). In fact, the demigods were even more similar in nature to the offspring alluded to in Genesis than the race of gigantes that Josephus mentions, since demigods were held by the Greek to be of supernatural and human parentage. So, keeping Josephus’s thought regarding angelic cohabitation in mind, while further noting that Paul, in his address to the Athenians on Mars’ Hill, actually states that from one blood came all men and nations, it appears that John, in his use of the plural bloods, may have been referring also to the traditional Greek belief of another blood-the offspring resulting from the cohabitation of supernatural beings with humans. In fact, the concept of such cohabitation was the consistent viewpoint of all Antiquity. I myself incline to Josephus’s view that angelic cohabitation did occur in Genesis, but even if John, hypothetically speaking, knew that angelic cohabitation had never occurred in history, he certainly would have wanted to refute the idea that those born of God in verse 12 were anything of the kind his readers might imagine.
The Jewish reader, on the other hand, may have taken the term bloods here to mean the Jews’ various blood sacrifices-such as those found in Leviticus. (The idea of blood sacrifices was also common to Greco-Roman life.) Commentator John Gill (a man who occupied the same pulpit as Spurgeon but a century earlier) suggests that the term bloods, to the Jew, may have meant the blood of circumcision and the blood of the Passover.[216] Thus in the above cases, a misguided Jew at the time of John’s writing (post-resurrection Christ) might, besides trusting in his descendency from Abraham,[217] imagine vainly that his observance of the Passover, the rite of circumcision, and (when possible) the observance of animal sacrifices under the Mosaic Law (such sacrifice ceased with the destruction of the Temple prior to John’s Gospel writing), could continue to provide atonement for the hearer of the gospel of Christ, when in fact Christ had superseded and made such ‘bloods,’ i.e., in terms of continuing atonement, obsolete to such hearers. Note what John will clarify later in the first chapter, i.e., when he describes John the Baptist as recognizing that Christ 1) superseded Moses and the Law, and 2) was the fulfillment of the Lamb symbol in the Old Testament (vss. 17, 29). Now observe in the preceding paragraph that the general meaning of cohabitation, for the Greek, would also have been relevant to the Jewish mind, since the Jew likewise held the view of de facto supernatural cohabitation with humans; but the association of ‘bloods’ with cohabitation would, for the Jew, probably have occurred later to his mind than the association of the Levitical system and the Mosaic Law. In short, when he saw the word “bloods,” his first thought would be of the Levitical system of sacrifice, etc. (while for the Greek it would be of cohabitation). We will come back to this point later.
It should be mentioned in passing that there are two common interpretations for “blood” in the (KJV) phrase, “not of blood.” The first takes the word ‘blood’ to mean race (being ignorant, it seems, that the term is in the plural), esp. that of Abraham’s particular line from which the Jews descended. In fact, many Jews of Jesus’ day believed that their physical ancestry guaranteed their status as children of God. But again, regarding this view it must be remembered that Paul states to the Athenians in Acts 17 that all men descended from one blood, and that here in John 1:13 John uses the word blood in the plural. As for the second common interpretation, this holds that ‘blood’ (Gr. lit., bloods) refers to human procreation. It has been suggested that bloods in the plural might even refer to the blood of the mother plus the blood of the father. This interpretation is not essentially different than the above argument for race, and for the same reason does not therefore qualify as “bloods” [since we have no indication that John was trying to define race any differently than Paul did in the book of Acts, when Paul assigned to the idea of a line of human progeny, or race (presumably however segmentally considered) the word blood in the singular]
Nor of the Will of the Flesh
Moving along, we now come to John’s second correction, i.e., that those born of God were not born “of the will of the flesh.” This book takes the view that “will” (Gr. thelo) means desire, i.e., desire which, depending on the context, also may include a corresponding act of the will (i.e., desirous intent; see p. 421ff, question re: Phil. 2:13). The main point I wish to draw out about John’s 2nd correction is this: the term flesh in John 1:13 at one level of meaning, may be defined with due emphasis on the near, rather than on the far, context. Some may wonder why we should do this. Here is the reason: To rely on the far context of scripture would mean defining flesh according to Paul’s extensive treatment of the term flesh in Romans, in which the flesh is defined as that state in which a man has the knowledge of good and evil (see chpt. 18). Applying this definition of flesh to Christ’s incarnated flesh in the verse following John 1:13 would certainly be problematic. (It would be even more problematic if one took the traditional view that Paul’s Romanic use of flesh equals sinful nature.) That is, I’m saying we ought not to think that Christ was incarnated in the kind of flesh (v. 14) which Adam acquired by sinning. Nor did Adam pass down this acquired element (the knowledge of good and evil) onto Christ, for Christ preceded Adam and was therefore not subject to this aspect of Adamic inheritance in His flesh. Thus, a proper lexical rendering for the word flesh in verse 13’s phrase “nor by the will of the flesh” should mean, at one level of meaning, as I think it may mean in the mind of the apostle, the same benign form of flesh as that which the word flesh means in the following verse (v. 14), that is, flesh as it is meant to be understood when John says that the Word (Christ) became flesh. (We will explain further the meaning of this interpretation in a moment).
These considerations of the term flesh lead us to another point regarding interpretation. There appears to be two chief reasons why Calvinists misinterpret John 1:13. First, they do not seem to take seriously John’s three demarcated negations in the phrase “not of bloods nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man.” All three negations are clearly delineated in the Greek. Each of these distinctions thus argue for an essential difference among themselves. Of course, these three categories will overlap somewhat because all three by definition share the characteristic that they cannot lead to a rebirth in God; but again, essential distinctions should nevertheless be evident among them. (In fact, they remind us of John’s tri-part distinction of things that are in the world but not of God-the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.) Yet the Calvinist appears to see no essential distinction between the last two, i.e., “the will of the flesh” and “the will of man.” In fact, Calvinists are so focused on wanting the last phrase to be understood as teaching man’s total inability, that the second phrase is often taken to mean the same essential thing as the third in order to bolster their argument. This means that the 3rd phrase is subsumed within the 2nd phrase and therefore did not really need to be stated by John. Such an approach by the Calvinist is similar to the interpretation which takes the three phrases “blood,” “will of the flesh,” and “will of man” to mean, respectively, “natural generation,” “sexual desire,” and “a husband’s will,” thus maintaining only the barest of distinctions instead of the fairly strong delineations evident in the original Greek (because of the appearance of “ouk… oude… oude…”). Note that we might at first suppose that a contemporary Greek reader of John might likely, IF he believed that flesh equaled the state of being sexual, assume that the Logos, in becoming flesh, meant that the Logos became sexual, i.e., in much the same way that Zeus did when the god reputedly had children by human women. But this concept of another blood was already addressed and corrected in the first part of the tri-part statement. So, presumably, the reader would think John is correcting something else-to wit, the common bias held by many of his readers, namely, that the immortal God and Creator of the universe could not become human, i.e., that the divine realm could not inhabit the human realm because of the latter’s humbled state. This view was held by those Jews who argued that a man could never also be deity.[218] [60 years later John was still battling this error in the form of the Gnostics, who likewise seemed to have applied a Hellenizing assumption to God and thus accepted the Platonic notion that the Ideals were incompatible with physical matter, which (Ideals), for the strongly Hellenized Jew, included God. Thus John counters by saying that the Logos was not demeaned in His incarnation but was beheld in His glory and was full of grace and truth.] Incidentally, though the term “flesh” readily connotates to today’s English reader something sexual in nature, Paul’s treatment of “flesh” in Romans 7 and his link with that word to Abraham’s life of works (”What shall we say then, of our father Abraham, as pertaining to the flesh hath found?”) arguably shows that “nor of the will of the flesh” would have a broader meaning for John’s contemporary readers than what we might likely infer today.
Second, Calvinists do not seem to have understood the lexical meaning of the word man in the phrase, “nor of the will of man.” (At least those are my findings after visiting about 10-15 Calvinistic websites.) That is, they appear not to know that the Greek word translated man in John 1:13 does not mean mankind (i.e. gender inclusive) but means a grown male (e.g., man). And yet they all state or imply that the phrase “nor of the will of man” means that all persons cannot receive Christ because of their total inability. But if this is what John is stating, why would he restrict his third term to mean the will of a male?[219] To argue as the Calvinist does [and thus not according to the lexical knowledge of what the Greek word aner (man or male) means, since Calvinists seem not to recognize that here], would be to unwittingly say that John is making a special point about the depravity of males. Obviously, that does nothing to support the Calvinistic argument ofuniversal gender inclusive depravity. Once this point is understood, it becomes evident that the phrase “[not] of the will of man” is no real argument for the Calvinistic view of universal depravity.
Up to this point we have established two things regarding the overall phrase “not of bloods nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man” as found in the KJV[220] and NAS: 1) The three phrases in John’s tri-part statement form three essentially different categories wherein each is not to be subsumed under one of the other categories; and 2) the term flesh ought to be essentially consistent between verses 13 and 14, at least at one level of meaning, so that Christ is not thought to have been incarnated with the post-Adamic form of flesh.
Regarding this last point, commentators from across the denominational spectrum-i.e., those from the Reformed-based Geneva Study Bible (GSB) (1599) (who draw on Calvin, Zwingli, Luther, etc.) to the free will Methodist, John Wesley-seem untroubled in taking vastly different meanings for the two appearances of flesh in its successive occurrences in John 1:13-14. Yet one can hardly expect that a contemporary reader of John’s gospel might have done the same. For although a Hellenized but nevertheless Old Testament literate Jew might understand in the context of John 1 that those born of God were men who, unlike the Logos, had a flesh intensified with the knowledge of good and evil (since they were born of the seed of fallen Adam and had acted to love darkness rather than the Light), a pagan Greek would hardly understand this point, except insofar that those born of God were previously darkened. That is, presumably, the Greek reader would understand John’s formal point that man in the state of his flesh was in need of redemption (having rejected the Light), while the Logos was not in need of redemption, though the Latter too was in the flesh. And, at the least, this would challenge the Greek reader’s assumption that all flesh by its material nature was imperfect. (And by “imperfect” here I do not mean that the Greek would regard the flesh to be something sinful, but rather something less fully real, as the Shadows to the Realities.) For if redemption could come by One who was in the flesh, then material nature could not also be inherently imperfect. Yet John’s way of expressing the phrase might also explain why the evangelizing apostle didn’t bother drawing a stronger distinction regarding the term flesh. For John could have stated the respective phrases in verses 13 and 14 according to normal Greek idiom, i.e., “nor the thelo of the flesh of them” and “the Word became the flesh of Him” (or, “the Word became the flesh as the flesh of the first man when he was created”). But to draw such a fine and contrasting distinction of flesh would only confuse the Greek reader, and possibly lead him to think that the kind of flesh of the Logos was too fundamentally different than that of man’s flesh, for the Logos to have truly been incarnated in sufficiently human form. So then, by leaving his statement more formalized, John (or at least the Spirit of God inspiring John) seems to have tailored the phrase about flesh so that 1) those Jews (or Judistic Greeks) who could more readily understand such fine distinctions might do so (and, in doing so, understand Gr. thelo as meaning desire variably, see p. 568, footnote 236); while 2) those who would not understand them would nevertheless be prevented from making certain unwarranted assumptions about the nature of flesh, the Logos, and man. Thus we see that John’s way of expressing the phrase about flesh allows his different groups of readership their ongoing respective lines of proper inferences each might make.
Again, however, there is the contrary, if nearly universal, Evangelical view. In this view the term flesh is regarded as a sinful nature in verse 13 (since it refers to man),[221] but as a pure form of pre-Fall Adamic flesh in verse 14 (since it refers to Christ’s incarnation). Typical are the statements of the aforementioned GSB, which first defines “the will of the flesh” in verse 13 as “that shameful and corrupt nature of man, which is throughout the scriptures described as an enemy of the spirit ” to a definition for verse 14 which reads, “That is, man: so that, by the figure of speech synecdoche, the part is taken for the whole: for he took upon himself our entire nature, that is to say, a true body, and a true soul.” This kind of fantastic turnabout in definition found in the GSB is unfortunately the common approach of Evangelicals when defining the term flesh in its two appearances in John 1:13-14. Yet, again, it is obvious that any contemporary reader of John’s gospel, including those familiar with the Old Testament, would never have understood flesh to flip-flop in definition to a point of espousing a flesh that was inherently sinful.[222] The reason it seems logical to Evangelicals that flesh should flip-flop in such a way as they describe it, is chiefly because tradition has taught them to interpret these verses this way. Thus they have applied themselves to making arbitrary lexical changes whenever their theology demands it. Indeed, Evangelicals seem to act as though John’s new readers will see such plain differences between what flesh must mean in verse 13 compared to verse 14. They will not! Neither did John’s original audience; for the Jews never held to such a doctrine as original sin, and the Greeks held that all material creation was imperfect by its material nature, a belief hardly similar to the doctrine of original sin. Thus, besides the Greek, what John appears to be expecting the Jew to do interpretively (regarding the term flesh) is to EITHER assume that the flesh referred to in verse 13 has an intensive nature regarding knowledge (i.e., had the knowledge of good and evil in accordance with the Jewish understanding of the nature of man), etc., as represented here by those born of God who, as events proved, followed after the flesh during their probation, and thus chose darkness, OR, to assume that the term flesh does not here flip-flop in definition, and therefore might be inferred (though improperly) to mean man as altered somehow but not per se lost through the course of his probation. If the latter, then such a reader may feel that he can act relatively good within what he supposes is a probationary state like man in the first form of his flesh (Adam and Eve in the Garden), in which he mistakenly thinks God weighs works in a relative, not absolute, scale. And so he strives to act like the Pharisee in the temple, who, in comparing himself to the hapless sinner, trusted in his relative goodness instead of in the mercy of God.[223] In any event, John’s point here appears to go to an overarching argument, in which each of the three phrases of his tri-part statement will reference at least something of human involvement, namely, the history of men and women[224] which has never shown, even in its description of people in their most exalted[225] positions and activities, that people have accomplished or become that which God reasonably required of them.[226] For though a man is not in need of redemption in his pre-Fall state, redemption becomes necessary once he sins-and his rebirth is made possible only by God’s grace alone as appropriated by his faith in the provision of the substitutionary death and resurrection of the incarnated Logos. Therefore those born of God were born not of the want (desire) (or desirous intent) of the flesh, because man-individual man simply powers not to come toward the Logos apart from the pulling of the Father. This is evident since post-Fall man’s acquired knowledge (which altered his flesh) has proven itself useless in aiding man toward his reconciliation with God. Still, while the birthing (i.e., ‘midwifery’) of God’s children is of God, the taking/ receiving of God is of man. That is, the “of God” is not meant by John to indicate a unilateral acting of God in relation to man unto man’s annihilation (i.e., annihilation because of an erasure of the will), as the Calvinist (unwittingly) proposes.
It should be noted in passing that if someone should ask the question why John would, within the verse’s aforementioned polyvalent meaning, be bothered to assume his reader’s inference of the short-lived condition of persons under probation, it might be argued that John was slipping into the discussion the fact[227] that such a condition was indeed short-lived, and that persons have never shown a diligent inclination for God. This gentle, side-on challenge of John would, in fact, be consistent with the apostle’s demeanor.
The Will of Man
Now if we grant that the tri-part statement in John 1:13 ought to meet the two qualifications we have been discussing, i.e., 1) that there are three essentially different categories in view; and 2) that there ought to be a relatively consistent definition for flesh in verses 13-14, then unfortunately we must also say that it is hard to find these criteria embraced by many (any?) translations and commentaries in common use. (I am ashamed to admit that I myself merely contributed to the confusion about John 1:13 in an earlier version of this book.) Nevertheless, let me propose what I now believe is an acceptable translation of John 1:13:
who are born, not of bloods, nor of the want (or desirous intent) of the flesh, nor of the want (or desirous intent) of a man (or male), but of God.
By default of what each of the words ‘blood,’ ‘flesh,’ and ‘man’ should not mean, in terms of any being subsumed under one of the remaining terms, we come to establish the reasons for proper translation. The word will has been changed to want [desire (ordesirous intent)] as contextually understood here as desire which may include the will, depending upon which path one takes within the polyvalent meaning. See p. 421ff, argument re: Phil. 2:13).][228]
Now, regarding this 3rd phrase in John’s tri-part statement, “[not] of the will of man,” a few things must be noted. First, the essential differences between the three phrases of verse 13 would appear to be thus to the Greek: The 1st speaks of a process outside his control, the 2nd of a process he may control as resourced ofhimself, and the 3rd of a process in which he agrees to assign control to someone else, i.e., to some ‘Over-MAN‘ [or ‘Over-MEN,’ (to borrow loosely Nietzsche’s term)]. Moving on, the second thing to be noted is that the word man in John 1:13 is singular, without the Greek article in front of it, and it is gender specific of male. While the Greek word for man in John 1:13 may indeed have a collective meaning (i.e., as when the word ballplayer in the phrase “a ballplayer’s salary” may be understood in some contexts to mean “ballplayers’ salaries”), it does not appear to be used in Scripture nor in John to mean mankind. In fact, when John 2:25 states that “[Jesus] needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man,” the word man (Gr. anthropo), which appears in this verse twice, means a group composed of both sexes, i.e., mankind (see also Jn. 1:4, 9). But this Greek word, anthropo, in John 1:4, 9 and 2:25 has a different meaning than the Greek word, aner, used in John 1:13. (Moreover (we anticipate the objection), arguably the reference to John the Baptist as an anthropos, rather than an aner, sent from God, is not proof that John used the terms interchangably, but only that he was was intending to mean “person,” to the Greek who knew nothing of Malachi’s prophecy that John would be as Elijah.) The biblical commentator Thayer cites a handful of instances of aner (not involving Jn. 1:13) in that word’s approximately 200 appearances in the New Testament, in which he believes the word means both male and female. But he notes that the commentator Meyer does not agree. Having looked up the few exceptions that Thayer cites, I personally agree with Meyer. (See Thayer’s comments under Strong’s word #435 (Gr. aner) at BlueLetterBible.com, where none of the alleged exceptions are clear examples of gender inclusivity.) So, while aner is translated 147 times as man and 50 times as husband, we must note that aner is not contested by either Thayer or Meyer to be gender inclusive in John 1:13.[229]
Unfortunately, the NAS’s use of the phrase “nor of the will of man” in John 1:13 fails, along with the KJV, in bringing attention to the gender restriction of aner, making it appear that man means mankind. I have noted elsewhere (see p. 421ff again, question regarding Phil. 2:13) that the NAS sometimes (consciously or not) seems content with rubber-stamping the KJV’s long-standing phraseology if it helps to maintain a Calvinist position in a controversial passage. The NIV does better in its translation, rendering the phrase in question as “a husband’s will.” Thus the NIV recognizes the omission of the article in front of aner, while appropriately defining “man” as male. While the NIV rendering stands on better lexical grounds than either the KJV or the NAS, I believe it remains problematic. This is because the second and third phrases in John’s tri-part statement are actually combined in the NIV to read “nor of human decision or a husband’s will.” The word or instead of nor before “a husband’s will” between the 2nd and 3rd phrases arguably makes the tri-part statement into a two-part statement. Note the NIV: “Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” The or thus refers to either human decision or a husband’s will, but not both, unless the “or” is taken idiomatically to mean “and.” But even if this were the case, “a husband’s will” and “natural descent” are too close in reference to the same process to really qualify as categories of essential difference. Thus the NIV eliminates the idea of three separate categories ofessential distinction. Furthermore, unless the “or” is taken idiomatically to mean “and,” the NIV seems to be stating that John was unsure of the case, i.e., whether it were not of human decision or not of a husband’s will. Or, if the NIV is stating that the phrase “human decision” is the general definition more closely and particularly defined as “a husband’s will,” then even here they are still contending merely for two categories, or even one. In other words, at the least, they have eliminated a 3rd category of essential distinction. But again, in the Greek, the apostle’s distinction between the three categories is clear:
“ouk(not)…oude(nor)…oude(nor)…”
On the positive side, I do think the NIV’s phrase “a husband’s will” assumes it is not “one husband’s will” but rather the will of husbands in general, that is, a collective subset. But again, I think the phrase “a man’s (or male’s) will,” rather than “a husband’s will,” is to be preferred, since again, the 3rd phrase in the NIV is subsumed within at least one of the other phrases.[230] Now, if we translate the 3rd phrase to read “a man’s (or male’s) want (or desirous intent),” and further understand that John is using “man” (or, “male “) as a subset of men (or males), then we may assume that John is saying that those born of God (v. 12) are not born of a man’s (or male’s) want (or desirous intent) (v. 13)-e.g., not by the want (or desirous intent) of men (or males) who, e.g., have invented or exalted a false idea, religion, or philosophy and, while doing so, promoted the notion that by desiring (or desiring and then following) such an idea or system one becomes a child of God. All such governmental, philosophical, or religious attempts by men, (or males)-whose gender, most especially in John’s day (e.g., various Caesars, the Pharisees, etc.) and previous to that time, seems to have given them particular opportunities to teach falsehood and become spiritual leaders of people-are the ones whom John cites as particularly failing to lead their followers into becoming children of God.[231]
It might be objected at this point that I have not maintained the essential separateness of the three categories in John’s tri-part statement. I say this because it might be thought that I have already previously assigned the Jewish[232] Levitical system to the term “bloods,” which, if practiced as a false religious system,[233] would also meet the criteria of the above phrase “the want (or desirous intent) of man.” But I think the solution may be found in recognizing that these two categories-the first and the third-may actually be held in meaning for the other, that is, as long as the order of these two is not held to be the same for each of the two (Greek and Jewish) audiences. In other words, a Greek reader would presumably have understood the first clause, involving “bloods,” with ‘human’ generation and human/supernatural cohabitation, and the third clause, involving “a male’s will,” with false religious/philosophical systems[234]–whereas a Jewish reader would presumably have understood the first clause, involving “bloods,” with the (despite its destruction in 70 A.D.) Levitical system of sacrifice, and the third clause, involving “a male’s will,” with the kind of angelic, perverted desire and cohabitation recognized by Josephus, or race, as having arisen through “a man’s (or male’s) desire,” i.e., of Abraham (Isaac, and Jacob),[235] or, both angelic cohabitation and race.
Such a view, if correct, that the first and third parts of John’s tri-part statement was intended by the Spirit to speak differently to respective audiences, would thus be continuing the process that John (by the Spirit) had begun with the term Logos. This would account for John’s not-too-closely defined and therefore somewhat flexible terms, i.e., “bloods” and “a male’s want (or desirous intent) which ironically result, not in ambiguity, but in his contemporary readers being corrected more quickly in the first mistaken assumptions they would be likely to have as they began reading his gospel. This approach would have enabled John to have the widest possible audience as he emerged his definitions early in the first chapter, so that by the end of the chapter his readers might coalesce into a single group that could understand the nature and mission of the Logos.
Now, observe that the argument put forth in the preceding two paragraphs is not at all a necessary one for the general interpretation of John 1:13 as presented in this chapter. Indeed, one could just as easily say that John is correcting the Jewish reader upon the same exact points and in the same order as the Greek reader, in which case John is assigning the determination for the Levitical system by the Jew into the 3rd category of false religious, philosophical, and governmental systems, and therefore not concerning himself with culturally different viewpoints and whether everyone’s first objections are immediately answered in the first clause of correction (that is, as long as they are answered in the course of the gospel). But I think this idea of the Spirit speaking differently to respective audiences through the same word symbols is a real possibility in this passage. Further, the accusation that some might bring against this possibility-i.e., that words are being treated in such an abstract and deconstructed manner that it invites the reader to insert his own particular and esoteric meaning into the text-is not a fair one. The hermeneutic I’m suggesting for the tri-part phrase of John 1:13 does nothing to violate the traditional historical-grammatical approach of proper biblical interpretation, though it may indeed offend the sensibilities of some who, perhaps through an over-zealousness for Evangelical systematic theology, so called, might insist that every Scripture can only have one primary meaning, that is, because it is assumed that there can only be one primary audience. While that principle would certainly be true in many cases, I do not think it applies here for the reasons already given.
Conclusion of John 1:13
Taking all these thoughts into consideration, the meaning of the phrase in John 1:13, “not of bloods, nor of the want(or desirous intent) of the flesh nor of the want[or desirous intent] of man,” appears to be the following for Greek (and strongly Hellenized Jewish?) readers: Those born of God, i.e., those granted the authority by Christ to become God’s children upon receiving Him, are birthed not of bloods-i.e., not a result of human intercourse or the cohabitation of supernatural beings with humans; nor by the want (or desirous intent) of the flesh-i.e., not by the want (or desirous intent) of any works effort through his own flesh; nor by the want (or desirous intent) of a man (male)-i.e., not through any man (or male)who, in particular, has thought (or thought and also sought) to lead others to think they may become children of God apart from trust in the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ. [236]
Once John 1:13 is understood in its proper cultural context according to the historical-grammatical method of interpretation, it should be evident that John 1:13 is in harmony with the Scriptural view of man as a free will person able to receive Christ (see Jn. 1:12). Moreover, it should be equally evident that John 1:13 has nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called ‘total depravity’ of mankind as the Calvinist seeks to define it. Rather, John’s overall thought for the Greek reader, as may be amplified by the apostle’s implications in verses 12 and 13, is that one becomes a child and is born of God through receiving the Logos, and 1) not born by any natural or perverse procreation, 2) nor by the want [or desirous intent] of the flesh as practiced inefficiently in its consideration of the Logos, 3) nor by the want [or desirous intent] of men (males) who have imagined-or imagined and promoted-vain systems for the goal of Divine appeasement.
[206] This fact leads to a sidebar discussion, namely this-to go from Calvinism to today’s most popular spin on the gospel-the prosperity gospel-one merely needs to employ the same methodology of Calvinism but ‘resolve’ the dialectical emphasis in favor of man instead of God. In other words (dialectically speaking), if A) someone who trusts Christ by an act of his will is privileged to be a child of God; and if B) those who are born of God are born apart from any process involving a man exercising his own will; then, C) those who are said to receive Christ as His children must themselves be God, since they cannot be man. Thus they ‘receive themselves,’ i.e., they accept the divinity within themselves which is themselves. For either treatment of the two terms, “man,” or “God,” e.g., as shown above or as treated in Calvinism, employs the same bogus methodology whenever either of the terms “man” or “God” is absolutized ‘against’ the other. I say ‘against’ because both views actually lead to a total indistinction of definition regarding the terms God and man (as my readers up to this point will understand), so that, technically speaking, there are no terms to which any description can be applied, including a comparison or contrast of the one to the other.
I hasten to add that, in some Evangelical circles, the current emphases on the prosperity gospel and other similar forms of the “words are containers” movement, in which God is assumed to be obligated to bring to the prosperitors’ lives that which they themselves actualize by the choice of words they use, is nothing more than the aforementioned version of Calvinism turned on its head, i.e., as just noted, the Calvinistic method but with the dialectical resolution upon man instead of God. Indeed, some within the prosperity movement actually teach that whatever happens to us is solely because our thoughts actualize it. Thus according to the prosperity gospel, one’s words or thoughts-and nothing other than these-actualizes the prosperitor’s history (or non-prosperitor’s history, depending on the case). Therefore the prosperity gospel is like Calvinism, insofar as regarding the world as moved only through the One. The only “difference,” so imagined, is that in Calvinism this One is interpreted as “God,” whereas in Prosperity the One is interpreted to be the “Self,” i.e. ‘the blessed Christian’ (i.e., ‘the enlightened one’). The term God or even the idea of God is not really necessary to the Prosperitors any more than it is to Calvinists, since God is nothing more than the ManGod’s construct upon the material world. (By the term ‘ManGod’ I mean that man and God are defined synonymously.) (In other words, God, in prosperity theology, becomes one’s own thought determination. Terms like “faith,” “blessing,” and “God,” are simply kept in play and made to sound Evangelical. The only real distinctions that exist in (not between) Calvinism and Prosperity in the use of God and man in the distinctive elements of these respective theologies, are 1) the aural difference of sound when these ‘words’ are spoken, and 2) the visual difference on paper when seeing these ‘word symbols.’ Sadly, each group’s followers never imagine how much they are like the other. Calvinists, for example, by far the more analytical of the two groups, hardly suspect that their intellectualized theology and the simple narcissism of prosperity gospel are the brainchildren-the mirrored twins, in fact-of the same theological method.
But to return to a consideration of John 1:13, we see that the Scripture teaches neither of these viewpoints but rather one in which God alone provides man the atonement he needs to be born of God, while allowing man to decide for himself whether or not he shall receive God’s salvation. This is the only view that allows an honest use of the terms man and God.
[207] that is, the earliest copies of New Testament writings, all of which were written entirely with Greek capital letters)
[208] Though defined more closely here, throughout this chapter I generally use the term “Greek reader” to mean the Greco-Roman reader.
[209] The meaning of Logos was modified later in various philosophies, including Aristotle (to mean reason), the Stoics (to mean the rational principle of harmony inherent in the universe), Philo the Jew (to mean the Platonic Realities as opposed to the ’shadows’ of physical matter ), and finally by John himself (to essentially mean the Stoic and Platonic idea of the Logos as overarching Reason, though with its full and correct realization being found in Jesus Christ, the Incarnated Son of God, equal to the Father in His eternal Deity).
[210] Some Christian thinkers have argued that John never would have used the term Logos as derived from a Greek understanding of the term. In this view, Philo, the contemporary Platonic-Judaic philosopher whose thought has sometimes been claimed as influential upon the New Testament and upon John’s use of Logos in particular, is not supposed to have influenced John toward such a pagan view, because such a Philoan view could never support the idea of Divine Incarnation. It is also claimed by some Christian thinkers that the idea of “wisdom” as personified in Proverbs 8:22-26 is the true tradition for John’s concept of the Logos, since 1) it owes nothing to Greek influence, and 2) John was aiming to show Christ as the fulfillment of Old Testament symbol.
But I find these views inadequate for the following reasons: 1) Paul, in his speech on Mars’ Hill in Athens, did not allow the Greek idea of “The Unknown God”-which, whatever form it may have been speculated by the Greek mind to involve (if theoretically, they had bothered to hypothesize about it and given it a description, in which case it surely would not have approximated the idea that Paul would give it)-to stop him from borrowing a rather abstract inscription from the Greeks and proceed to add and subtract from it until it reflected true Christian theology. Paul does the same thing again by quoting one of their Stoic philosophers, borrowing where he could, while not at all coming to the general conclusion of the Stoic. (The goal of bringing divine truth to man looks for such a contact point. Even God did not begin conveying His Scripture with “In the beginning God…” but rather “There was in the land of Uz a man, whose name was Job…”) Why then, could not John also borrow a rather abstract term familiar to the Greek mind and add and subtract to its Stoic and Platonic form of definitions, respectively, until it too reflected true Christian theology? 2) The word wisdom in Proverbs in the Septuagint, while it can be argued to represent Christ in symbol, is not the word logos, but sophias. Why, then, if in fact John wanted to show that he was building his definition in John 1:1ff from such an Old Testament Judaic derivative, wouldn’t he have used the word sophias in John 1:1-14 instead of the word Logos? While in one sense John did appeal to the Old Testament (and thus to his Jewish readers) by his use of the word Logos (i.e. “word” as understood in the phrase “the word of the Lord”), John’s intended audience was also Greek; 3) It is not accurate to state or imply that John’s goal was only to demonstrate Christ as the fulfillment of Old Testament symbol (i.e., at the expense of reshaping the meaning of Logos for the Greek). John’s use of the term Logos and his concession to a Greek readership (Jn. 6:4, in which John bothers to define the Passover as “a feast of the Jews”) clearly shows that his intended audience included Greeks unfamiliar with aspects of Jewish religion.
[211] I am not suggesting here that Paul was not led by the Spirit to have written so. I am merely pointing out the differences in personality between Paul and John at the time of their particular writings as under the full inspiration of the Spirit. Neither am I questioning Paul’s demeanor toward the Early Church, for we know he was a man who admonished each one of the Ephesians for three years night and day with tears (Acts 20:31).
[212] The title “Son of Ammon-Zeus” was actually bestowed upon Alexander the Great by Egyptian priests of the god Ammon at the Oracle of the god in the Libyan Desert.
[213] This erroneous assumption was akin to that expressed by Nicodemus, who (if we assume he was not being sarcastic) had in mind the process of natural generation (or perhaps reincarnation), when he asked Christ if spiritual rebirth meant a man’s re-entry into his mother’s womb.
[214] (Note: John’s phrase should be properly rendered in 1:12 as “children of God,” not “sons of God.”)
215 The “angels” Josephus refers to would be regarded by biblical scholars (sympathetic with Josephus) as fallen angels.
[216] A.T. Robertson states that bloods (in the plural) is found commonly in the Old Testament and in that corresponding era, as, for example, in the term bloodguiltiness (or bloodshed, as in drops of blood), though he expresses some puzzlement for its appearance in John 1:13. But perhaps “bloods” in John 1:13 (for the Jew) refers to the bloodshed of animals in sacrifice and/or the sprinkling of blood (drops) upon the altar and upon the clothes of Aaron and his sons, etc., that is, that which involves bloodshed according to the Levitical system.
217 i.e., further qualified in the sense that many Jews held that their physical ancestry to Abraham was itself the qualifying feature of being a child of God. For this reason Christ rebuked those who trusted in paternity, reminding them that others among their fathers had killed the prophets (Mt. 23:29-31).
[218] See John chapter 11.
[219] (If there are or have been Calvinists unlike those I found online, their views appear not to have affected the mainstream of their movement.)
[220] The KJV actually uses commas to set off the three categories even more decidedly, i.e., “Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” I believe this extensive use of the comma was the general practice of that period.
[221] …and so, according to the demands of their theology, it must.
[222] Obviously, the example of to eat in John 6:52-53 is an exception because of its parabolic use by the Lord; but that is an entirely different thing than how flesh is being presented in its two appearances in John 1:13-14.
Incidentally, I am not arguing here that all of Scripture must be thought easily understandable to the unsaved man. There is a difference depending on the audience, often based on their willingness to hear the truth of a message. John assumes his readers are interested in the truthful message he relates and thus uses terms meant to be understood by his audience (or properly speaking, audiences). However, God’s message is not always greeted enthusiastically, and in these cases, especially, it should not be assumed that the terms God uses will necessarily be understood by those in rebellion to Him. (In fact, we are told that sometimes even the Lord’s prophets themselves did not understand the full implications of all that they wrote about while under the Spirit’s inspiration.) In the case of Isaiah’s message to rebellious King Ahaz in Isaiah 7:14, the prophecy states: “A virgin (Heb. almah, i.e., lass as veiled, or private) shall conceive,” and the king almost certainly would not have understood that God was using almah as a double for something besides “lass,” such that the thought would include “virgin.” That is, God was, in fact-besides giving the king a prophecy about Isaiah’s young wife (”lass”) who would conceive a child (a child who, in the near aspect of the prophecy, would not reach a tender age before Damascus and Syria were judged)-also giving the king a prophecy about a Child who one day would be born of a virgin. Note that God named Isaiah’s child Maher-shalal-hash-baz, which means “swift is the booty, speedy is the prey,” but that it was prophesied that the woman would call the child “God with us”). Like the name “Lemuel” in Proverbs 31, which is thought by some to be a diminutive form of the name “Solomon” which was given to him by his mother, so too may we suppose that Isaiah’s wife would have called her child “God with us” upon seeing her husband’s prophecy by the Spirit fulfilled in its time (i.e., that which we understand to be the prophecy’s near-aspect fulfillment). Thus the appearance of the name “Immanuel” in Isaiah 8:8 may be taken as having double reference, on the one hand to Isaiah’s child as born of the young lass (almah) who was the prophet’s wife, but also to the coming Child born of a virgin (almah). This future aspect of almah reproved the spirit of the king, by stating a Messianic prophecy that Ahaz was not inclined to understand. So the insistence of theologians that almah be translated “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14, based on the restrictive Greek word for “virgin” in Matthew 1:23, is indeed legitimate in the sense that God Himself intended this as one of the meanings for “almah” in Isaiah 7:14, that is, when He spoke this Messianic prophecy. But such a restricting translation in Isaiah (solely rendering almah as “virgin”) fails to show the near sense in which the prophecy was fulfilled in the time of King Ahaz, a layer of meaning God intended, insofar as (in the near aspect) He meant it to refer to an almah, “lass,” who was Isaiah’s young wife. Therefore this insistence on “virgin” for Isaiah 7:14 appears to have come from translational bias (stemming, perhaps, from a preference by theologians for Evangelical ’systematic’ theology, which, if I’m not mistaken, esp. regarding the American form, generally believes that only one primary meaning of a passage can be in evidence). What generally fails to be seen, then, regarding Isaiah 7:14, is that there is an audience which finds the full relevance of almah in its Messianic aspect (the Savior who was virgin-born), but another audience which found the only relevance of almah in the Ahazaic aspect (if even in that). To insist only on one audience for “virgin” seems suspect, for it forces Isaiah’s prophecy to have no real meaning for Ahaz unless the king sees the far-off view of Messiah as virgin-born. (Incidentally, Isaiah’s prophetic statement about the destruction of Damascus and Samaria appears to be relevant to the prophecy’s near aspect only.) This restricted meaning would practically assign God’s motive in giving a prophecy about a “virgin” as that given to Ahaz to deliberately mislead him. Moreover, Isaiah’s prophecy in 7:14, if it only meant “virgin,” might thus be thought by Ahaz (who would have been able to know of the naming of Isaiah’s newborn child, as begotten of the prophet’s wife, i.e., a non-virgin) disproven, since a virgin in Isaiah’s time never conceived (i.e., while a virgin). This assumes that Ahaz would not make the finer distinction we drew a moment ago, in noting a difference between the name that God gave Isaiah’s child, and the “pet” name we presume was given him by his mother. Thus God, as it were, shows King Ahaz-a king who is summarized in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles as one who did not do right-that He is a God able to bring appropriate judgment against those He prophesizes. I believe this thought implies an additional point God was showing King Ahaz about Himself, i.e., that God is able to judge all who are rebellious against Him, including King Ahaz and the nation he rules.
But the reason this entire point must be stressed about almah is to show that certain terms in the Bible may have more than one meaning, depending on the number of intended audiences. Further, though in the case of Isaiah 7:14 the two audiences in view are contemporary and far away, respectively, this does not exclude the possibility that God could have had John write to two contemporary audiences (Greek and Jew) with certain terms understood variably by each of them.
[223] As to what the term flesh would have meant to the Greek in terms of guilt, it would have meant nothing at all. For in Greek religion there was no real distinction between the flesh of men and the flesh of the gods except that the gods were thought immortal because of a diet of nectar and ambrosia. In a religion where the gods were no more moral than the men from whom they expected homage, there was certainly no concept by the Greek, despite his view that the physical/material was imperfect, that his flesh was inherently sinful, nor any concern that he would give an account before a holy God because of His nature. Thus the Greek, while he fell short of understanding that post-Adamic man has in his flesh the knowledge of good and evil, nevertheless accepted (in the abstract) the understanding that a man’s behavior, not his flesh, was the thing morally culpable.
[224] i.e., Eve before she sinned; also, women used in angelic cohabitation (which has reference to the first of John’s tri-part phrase, “bloods”).
[225] By “exalted,” I do not mean righteous.
[226]And as history has shown, all men have proved they are in need of a Savior.
[227] (at least for the Jew familiar with the Old Testament)
[228] A.T. Robertson also demonstrates that thelo can mean desire by translating it as such for the 2nd phrase. Throughout this book I have maintained that desire and will are different things. Thelo may correspond to eventual will, but it does not have to. Thelo is a desire that may continue during deliberation. Deliberation’s completion ends in a choice, either congruent or not congruent with the desire. Further, if Calvinists were right to say that man only wills his greatest desire, then, by definition, man can never have lesser, competing desires that might lead to other choices. Thus, vacillation ought to be regarded by the Calvinist as man under the illusion that he could make another choice than that which he finally chooses. Furthermore, perhaps the Calvinist has never been in the position of asking a teenager to take out the trash and seeing in the boy’s face the kind of greatest desire of which they speak. And assuming the further Calvinist argument that the teenager has in view the goal of gaining other privileges, and thus takes out the trash according to his greatest desire, we would respond that this greatest desire of the teenager has reference only to the other privileges and not at all to his taking out the trash, i.e., the act which Calvinists claim correspond to the boy’s greatest desire. But if the matter is still disputed we have only to observe that Christ in Gethsemane chose His Father’s desire, not His own, and that if Christ could only choose according to His greatest desire, then, according to the definition which Calvinists insist upon, we must also say that Christ was under delusion for having imagined falsely that he could have chosen something else (avoiding the cross) than His greatest desire, a course of action He clearly believed was contingently possible.
[229] Incidentally, if one substitutes for ‘husbands’ the word ‘men’ in Jesus’ statement to the woman at the well (in which John uses the Greek word, aner ), the meaning appears clearer. In effect, Jesus was saying, “How true that you say that you don’t have a husband; for you have had five men, and the man you have now is not your husband.”
[230] Again, if one should make the 3rd phrase read “a husband’s will ” it would subsume the 3rd phrase at least under the 1st phrase, “natural descent.”
[231] If the argument should be made that Mary Baker Eddy, for example, was the counterpart to men like Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (Mormonism), Judge Rutherford (Jehovah’s Witnesses), James Jones (the “Father” of Jonestown), etc., and that John the Apostle was mistaken to think women could not create and lead significant false religious movements, it must be understood that John is simply making a statement of general observance about men and the predominant opportunities certain of them have had (and employed negatively).
[232] Obviously, I do not mean all Jews.
[233] Again, many Jews trusted in their ethnicity as from Abraham.
[234] i.e., since he recognized that there were three distinct categories and that the sexual and race dimensions had already been addressed by the first term “bloods.”
[235] The term aner can also mean sir, i.e., a term of respect, such as would be due the progenitors of the Jewish race.
[236] Someone may object that, within the polyvalent meaning of the 2nd phrase (”nor by the wanting of the flesh”) in its relation to the 3rd phrase, I am, at one level of meaning (as understood by the biblically literate Jew or Judistic Greek reader), using the term thelo (to want) with different definitions in successive phrases (thus doing in principle the kind of flip-flopping I condemn in the GSB or John Wesley, in their treatment of the word flesh). Their argument would presumably be thus: In the phrase “the flesh’s wanting,” I regard the desire of a person in the first form of (continued from p. 568) his flesh as having desire apart from intention, but then I define the thelo of a male [in the phrase, “the man’s (or male’s) wanting”] as including intention, e.g., such as the choice a man makes to invent a false religion, claiming that he and his followers are the children of God. Therefore it would be alleged that I contradict myself, having claimed two different ‘flip-flopping’ definitions for “thelo.”
In my defense are at least three considerations: 1) In accord with how the word thelo was understood in John’s time, I have defined thelo (to want) (see p. 421ff) as desire which may or may not come to include intention as part of that word’s latitude of lexical meaning. (For note further that even one’s greatest desire does not necessitate the will). This is different than what the GSB does with the word “flesh,” for the GSB assumes, besides one definition of flesh as that pure form in which Christ was born, also the traditional and erroneous definition of “flesh” as that element in man affected by original sin, a wholly disproven assumption on their part which then informs what latitude of lexical meaning they imagine the word “flesh” may navigate, a journey they assume the reader is also obligated to make between verses 13 and 14. In contrast (regarding the word “flesh,”) I am suggesting that the flesh in persons of any age in any circumstance is not inherently sinful, even hypothetically; 2) the polyvalent meanings, while harmonious with each other, do not crisscross with each other. That is, the meaning of “thelo” does not change between the 2nd and 3rd phrases insofar as that word relates to a wanting which includes intention within one level of meaning within the polyvalent meaning. For within this one level of meaning ,the meaning of the word thelo in the phrase, “the man’s (or male’s) wanting ” is subject to any context already (or immediately being) established for it; and in the case of “the wanting of (a) male(s)” in John 1:13, note that thelo has already been established regarding a male’s intention (i.e., the males’ intention) as implied in its effect upon all persons in verses 10-11, that is, in which the thelo of males have established the general attitude of “the world” as rejecting the Logos. Thus, when the grown (see note following this footnote), i.e., accountable (that is, no longer probationary) male is introduced into the discussion in verse 13 under the Greek term aner, it has already been implied that aner’s deliberation between desire and intention has proven itself negatively, i.e., in establishing a world that rejected the Logos. Thus the wanting of a male is being contextually defined as a wanting which includes a corresponding negative intention. That is, at this one level of meaning within the polyvalent meaning, the wanting (desire) of the male is seen as sympathetic with the wanting (desire) of all persons in their own individual wanting according to their own flesh, with the result of a universal rejection of the Logos; 3) Whereas, in contradistinction, the phrase “the wanting of the flesh,” is, in another layer of meaning within the polyvalent meaning, in the process of being contextualized by verse 14 to mean a wanting not yet established in regard to intention. For the Logos, in becoming flesh, was yet in His probation until He underwent the baptism of His death according to the Father’s will. Thus during His life the Logos was found as a man [i.e., Adam] in the first form of Adam’s flesh, that is, not in the kind of flesh which bespoke of Adam’s failure, but of the flesh which bespoke of the same uncondemnable kind which John invokes when he tells his readers that the Logos became flesh. In other words, in this other level of meaning, the phrase “nor by the wanting of the flesh” means that those persons born of God were not born of the wanting of the kind of flesh of Adam at the first, because such persons would not need to be born of God (were they to exist). Thus the term the wanting, insofar as it appears to be defined differently by me, appears so only because of the polyvalent meaning which, while harmonious between its lines, is not in its lines to be crisscrossed. Finally, remember that the essential difference in phrases 2 and 3 (as already noted) is that “the want (vb.) of the flesh” refers to that resource of influence of which a person is cognizant and which influences him/ her from within, while “the wanting of a male(s)” refers to that resource of influence of which a person is cognizant and which influences him/ her from without. [Note: The term aner is used to show its distinction between women and children in Matthew 14:21. Furthermore, the term for the group of boys (male children) slaughtered by Herod is paidos, not the plural of aner. Thus aner must mean a grown male.]