John 3:4

Ver. 4. “ Nicodemus says to him: How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time, can he, into his mother's womb and be born? ”

This saying, to the view of several modern critics, is a master-piece of improbability. Reuss thinks that “it is indeed, wrong to try to give to this answer a meaning even in the smallest degree plausible or defensible.” Schleiermacher proposes to explain thus: “It is impossible, at my age, to recommence a new moral life.” Tholuck, Baumlein and Hengstenberg, nearly the same: “What thou askest of me is as impossible as that a man should enter again....” These explanations evidently weaken the meaning of the text.

Meyer thinks that the embarrassment into which the saying of Jesus throws Nicodemus, leads him to say something absurd. Lange finds rather a certain irritation in this answer: The Pharisee would attempt to engage in a rabbinical discussion in order to show Jesus the exaggeration of His demands. These suppositions have little probability. Would Jesus speak as He does in the sequel to a man so narrow-minded or so irritable? Lucke explains: “Thou canst not, by any means, mean that...?” This explanation is philologically accurate; it faithfully renders the meaning of the negative μή (comp. our translation).

As Weiss observes, Nicodemus does not answer thus as a man wanting in understanding; but he is offended at seeing Jesus propose to him such a condition; he refuses to enter into His thought, and, holding firmly to the literal sense, he limits himself to a setting forth of its absurdity. The manner in which he expresses this impression does not seem even to be entirely free from irony. It is because in truth, he cannot conceive how the beginning of another life can be placed in the womb of the natural existence. The kingdom of God has always appeared to him as the most glorious form of the earthly existence itself. To what purpose a new birth, in order to enter into it? The Old Testament spoke, no doubt, of the force from above, of the divine aid necessary to sanctify the man, but not of a new birth (see Luthardt).

The words: “ when he is old,” prove that Nicodemus did not fail to apply to himself the: “ If any one ” of Jesus. The word δεύτερον, a second time, undoubtedly reproduces only partially the meaning of ἄνωθεν, from the beginning, in the mouth of Jesus. This is because Nicodemus does not comprehend the difference between a beginning anew and a different beginning. A radical moral renewal seems to him impossible without a simultaneous physical renewal. Thus the explanation which Jesus gives him bears on the absolute difference between the natural birth and the new birth which He demands.