This post is the transcript of a Youtube Short by Mark Goodacre titled “Born again or From Above”. He says the Greek word clearly means from above as “being born from above, being a citizen of heaven, that’s one of the key messages of John’s Gospel.“
Scroll past the transcript for ChatGPT’s long and interesting response to: Prompt: In John Chapter 3 Jesus says you must be born from again or from above. A scholar [Goodacre below] said the Greek word is correctly translated “from above”. Is that correct? He also said being born from above, being a citizen of heaven, that’s one of the key messages of John’s Gospel. Do other critical bible scholars suppport that view?
Transcription of a Goodacre Short by TurboScribe from https://youtube.com/shorts/BU2_-eldlMk?si=-BRSsMLt5mqfUh2o
Hello, my name is Mark Goodacre. I’m sitting at New College, Oxford, at the moment. You know, it’s funny how often people talk about John chapter 3 and the very famous language about being born again, and you will hear in Christian sermons the line that, well, this could mean two things.
It could mean born from above, or it could mean born again, and you know, Jesus probably means it in both senses, but Nicodemus, when he replies to Jesus, only understands it in one sense. Well, do you know what? I think this actually oversimplifies things. The meaning really is from above.
I mean, the word in Greek is anothen. You must be born from above if you’re to see the kingdom of God. I think this language of anothen, it almost always means from above, and it only means, again, insofar as we will say things in English like, and take this from the top, right? The obvious, clear meaning in John’s Gospel is birth from above, because this is the whole way that the Christology of John’s Gospel works.
The whole Gospel is about above and below. Jesus is the stranger from heaven who has descended from above to earth to call his own. I think that when Jesus is saying to Nicodemus that you need to be born from above, he’s talking about getting that heavenly revelation, becoming one of those people like Jesus and his disciples whose true destination is heaven, just as that’s Jesus’s origin in the fourth Gospel.
It’s kind of ironic that when the fourth Gospel is probably meaning to say that you need to be born from above, that the almost universal translation and the really kind of famous way of seeing John 3 is about being born again, so you even get people talking about born again Christians and all the rest of it. I can’t help whenever I hear that phrase in popular culture about being born again, I always think, but is that quite the right translation? At the very least, it’s a translation that’s lacking the full nuance of what we’re doing in John chapter 3, because being born from above, being a citizen of heaven, that’s one of the key messages of John’s Gospel.
From ChatGPT – Prompt: In John Chapter 3 Jesus says you must be born from again or from above. A scholar said the greek word is correctly translated “from above”. Is that correct? He also said being born from above, being a citizen of heaven, that’s one of the key messages of John’s Gospel. Do other critical bible scholars suppport that view?
Response: Yes—with an important qualification. “Born from above” is a very defensible, and probably preferable, translation of John 3:3 and 3:7, but it is not correct to say that the Greek word can only mean “from above.” The Johannine author appears to exploit a deliberate double meaning: Nicodemus hears “born again,” while the reader is meant to understand “born from above.”
The scholar’s second claim—that being born from above and belonging to the heavenly realm are major themes of John’s Gospel—is substantially supported by critical Johannine scholarship, although I would phrase “being a citizen of heaven” more cautiously because that is an interpretive formulation rather than John’s terminology.
1. What does the Greek actually say?
John 3:3 has:
ἐὰν μή τις γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν
ean mē tis gennēthē anōthen
Literally:
“unless someone is born ἄνωθεν”
The crucial word is ἄνωθεν (anōthen).
It has several established meanings:
- from above
- from the top
- from the beginning
- anew / again
But there is an important linguistic point: when anōthen means “again,” Greek can also use πάλιν (palin), and in John itself anōthen overwhelmingly has the spatial/vertical sense “from above.”
John uses anōthen elsewhere:
- John 3:31 — the one “from above”
- John 19:11 — authority given “from above”
- John 19:23 — the garment woven “from the top”
The NET translators’ note therefore concludes that the word has a double meaning in 3:3, but that “from above” is probably the primary meaning intended by John. NET Bible
That is also the conclusion of Craig S. Keener in his major critical commentary on John. Keener says that anōthen can mean “from above,” “anew,” or “again,” but that its most common sense and John’s normal usage lead the informed reader toward “from above.” He interprets “from above” as essentially “from God.” Православный портал «Азбука веры»
So I would translate John 3:3:
“Unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
rather than treating “born again” as the only or even necessarily the best translation.
2. But Nicodemus hears “born again”
This is where John’s wordplay becomes particularly important. Nicodemus responds:
“How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
That response makes perfect sense if Nicodemus understands anōthen in the “again/anew” sense. But John’s readers have been given another clue. The Gospel opened by saying:
“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
— John 1:12–13, NRSV
That is extremely important for understanding John 3.
John 1:13 says people are born of God.
John 3 says people must be born from above.
Keener therefore argues that “born from above” means essentially “born from God.” Православный портал «Азбука веры»
This makes the larger Johannine argument look something like:
earthly/fleshly existence → heavenly/divine birth → becoming God’s children → receiving divine life
rather than simply:
old life → second personal conversion experience.
3. Raymond Brown strongly supports this way of reading John
This isn’t just a recent interpretation.
The influential Catholic critical scholar Raymond E. Brown, in The Gospel According to John I–XII (Anchor Bible 29), explicitly treats anōthen as having the double meaning “from above” and “again.” Brown connects the spiritual birth to God and distinguishes it from ordinary physical birth. Scribd
Brown’s interpretation is particularly significant because he is one of the major twentieth-century historical-critical scholars of John. So the statement isn’t some unusual theological reinterpretation. It is well within mainstream critical Johannine scholarship.
4. Craig Keener goes even further in connecting it with John’s “above/below” worldview
Keener’s treatment is especially useful for your question because he places John 3 inside the Gospel’s larger vertical cosmology.
John repeatedly distinguishes:
above / heaven / God / Spirit
from
below / earth / flesh / the world.
Jesus is the paradigmatic person who comes from above.
John 3:31 says:
“The one who comes from above is above all…”
And later John repeatedly describes Jesus as coming from heaven:
- 6:33 — the bread of God comes down from heaven
- 6:38 — Jesus has come down from heaven
- 6:41 — Jesus is the bread that came down from heaven
- 6:50–51 — the bread comes down from heaven
- 8:23 — Jesus says, “You are from below, I am from above”
- 17:16 — Jesus’ followers are “not from the world”
Keener explicitly describes John’s “vertical dualism” and argues that “born from above” belongs to this framework. Православный портал «Азбука веры»
That is considerably stronger than simply saying, “Jesus tells people to have a second birth.”
5. The connection with “citizenship” is more complicated
Here I would make a distinction from the scholar you heard.
“Born from above” — yes.
“Belonging to the heavenly realm” — yes, as an interpretive description.
“Being a citizen of heaven” — not literally John’s terminology.
John doesn’t normally describe Christians as “citizens of heaven” in the way Paul does in Philippians 3:20:
“But our citizenship is in heaven…”
That’s Paul, not John.
John instead tends to use concepts such as:
- born of God
- children of God
- from above
- from God
- not of the world
- having eternal life
- abiding in Jesus
- having the Spirit
- knowing God
So “citizen of heaven” can be a useful summary metaphor, but I would not present it as though John himself uses that terminology.
6. There is a particularly interesting connection to “not of this world”. This is where I think the scholar’s larger point becomes quite persuasive.
Consider John’s language:
Jesus:
“You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world.”
— John 8:23
Jesus’ followers:
“They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”
— John 17:16
And:
“If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world…”
— John 15:19
That is remarkably close conceptually to “being born from above means acquiring a new identity whose ultimate source is God rather than the earthly world.”
John 3:6 makes the contrast explicit:
“What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
Thus:
| Earthly identity | Heavenly identity |
|---|---|
| flesh | Spirit |
| below | above |
| world | God |
| ordinary human birth | birth from above |
| darkness | light |
| death | life |
| unbelief | belief |
| children of the world | children of God |
| earthly origin | divine origin |
This is not an incidental theme in John. It is one of the Gospel’s fundamental organizing ideas.
7. Adele Reinhartz makes the “children of God” connection
Another important critical scholar, Adele Reinhartz, discusses John 3 in connection with John 1:12–13. She observes that those who follow Jesus can become God’s children through being reborn “from above” or “again” through water and Spirit. She explicitly connects this with John’s earlier statement that God’s children are begotten by God. Scribd
That is significant because it shifts the emphasis away from the modern evangelical phrase “have you been born again?”
John’s conceptual question is closer to:
What is your source of life and identity?
Are you generated merely from flesh, or are you generated from God’s Spirit?
8. The “misunderstanding” is probably deliberate
This is perhaps the most important literary observation.
John repeatedly uses a technique in which Jesus says something with a deeper meaning and his interlocutor interprets it literally.
Examples:
Temple
Jesus: “Destroy this temple…”
They think: physical temple.
John explains: Jesus meant his body (2:19–21).
Water
Jesus offers “living water.”
The Samaritan woman thinks: ordinary water.
Jesus means something deeper (John 4:10–14).
Bread
Jesus says he is the bread from heaven.
His hearers think literally about physical bread (John 6).
Birth
Jesus says anōthen.
Nicodemus hears “again.”
John wants the reader to understand “from above.”
Keener specifically identifies this as one of John’s characteristic misunderstanding devices, in which the misunderstanding allows the Gospel to explain the deeper meaning. Православный портал «Азбука веры»
So translating anōthen merely as “again” actually removes an important part of John’s literary technique.
9. What do critical scholars generally agree on?
I would summarize the scholarly situation this way:
| Question | Critical-scholar consensus |
|---|---|
| Can anōthen mean “again”? | Yes. |
| Can it mean “from above”? | Absolutely. |
| Does John use it elsewhere for “from above”? | Yes, consistently. |
| Is “born from above” a legitimate translation of John 3:3? | Yes. |
| Is it probably important to John’s intended meaning? | Yes. |
| Did Nicodemus understand it as “again”? | The narrative strongly suggests this. |
| Is the ambiguity probably deliberate? | Many Johannine scholars think so. |
| Does “born from above” mean birth from God/Spirit? | Yes, particularly in critical readings of the passage. |
| Is heavenly/earthly identity a major Johannine theme? | Yes. |
| Does John literally call believers “citizens of heaven”? | No. That’s a useful interpretive analogy, but not John’s normal terminology. |
Bottom line
I think the scholar you heard is substantially correct, provided his statement is understood carefully.
The best reading is not:
“Jesus meant ‘born from above’ and therefore ‘born again’ is simply wrong.”
Rather:
John deliberately chose the ambiguous Greek anōthen, allowing Nicodemus to hear “again” while the reader is meant to hear “from above.”
And the larger Johannine message is indeed about a new identity whose origin is God rather than merely earthly/fleshly existence.
That fits exceptionally well with John 1:12–13, John 3:5–8, John 3:31, John 8:23, John 15:19, and John 17:14–16. Keener, Brown, and Reinhartz all provide important support for different aspects of that interpretation. Православный портал «Азбука веры»
One additional point is particularly worth exploring: John’s “born from above” language may be connected to his much larger “above/below” framework, in which Jesus himself is the one who comes from above and believers become associated with that heavenly realm through him. That would make “born from above” much more than a synonym for modern “conversion.”
