The first five verses of John’s Gospel herald the rest of his book. John begins at the beginning of time and writes about the coexistence of God with the “Word.” The Word brought all things into being. In the Word is life, and that life is the light of the world. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (1:5). In John’s narrative, this Word and this light become incarnate in the person of Jesus, the divine protagonist and redeemer of the world. Jesus’ life, ministry, and resurrection comprise the Gospel’s sole focus. But these meditative, mystical lines introduce far more than the subject of John’s biography. They also inaugurate an essential characteristic of John’s writing: his penchant for double-sided, semi-poetic, gnomic phrases. Already, by his fifth verse, John has revealed this special practice of his: the pun.
Unfortunately, several of John’s puns—including the pun in his opening meditation—lay hidden in the depths of his ancient Greek verbiage. In John 1:5, the verb “overcome” is translated from the Greek word katalambanō, a word far too tricky and versatile for English to fully capture. Translators must decide which part, or how much, of this verb’s variegated spectrum of meanings they can render. Therefore, just as “the darkness has not overcome [the light]” is a common and accurate rendering of John 1:5, so too is “the darkness did not comprehend it.” Katalambanō has a blurry enough meaning to span both of those English translations. But by choosing a blurry verb, John actually reveals more, not less, about the light and darkness. The former translation (“overcome”) conveys how the darkness is too feeble to smother or extinguish the light. The latter (“comprehend”) reveals how the darkness refuses to even receive the light. John’s Gospel is replete with deft wordplays like this, where subtle ambiguities enrich the Gospel message. In several instances, John puns, not just on a word, but on an entire phrase.
In John 3:8, Jesus tells Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, “‘the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it.’” There are no errors in this translation from the New American Standard Bible, which is remarkable for its accuracy and literality. But there are two words in the original Greek whose ambiguous meanings cannot be fully rendered. They are pneuma and pneō. With these words, Jesus has actually crafted a pun describing the Holy Spirit.
The verb pneō, translated as “blows” in John 3:8, can refer either to the “blowing” of the wind or to “breathing.” Pneuma, translated as “wind” in the same verse, can also mean “spirit,” “soul,” “breath,” or—a uniquely Christian definition—can mean “Spirit,” as in “Holy Spirit.” When Jesus tells Nicodemus, “‘the wind (pneuma) blows (pneō) where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it,’” both Greek words are actually ambiguous. Moreover, the two Greek words originally translated as “it” can rightly be translated as “He” and “Him.” It would be perfectly accurate to translate Jesus’ words as “‘the Spirit breathes where He wishes, and you hear the sound of Him.’” Is Jesus musing about the wind, or is He expounding on divine truths?
Jesus compares the Spirit to the wind, not with a metaphor, but with a pun. The wind and the Holy Spirit are alike in that we “‘do not know where [it/He] is coming from and where [it/He] is going’” (3:8). Jesus soon makes a more formal connection between His teaching about the wind and the Holy Spirit, but as the original text shows, He was probably alluding to the Holy Spirit all along.
Later on, in chapter 8, Jesus is instructing the Pharisees and delivering some of His most famous teachings. He says, “‘I am the Light of the world,’” (12) and “‘if you knew Me, you would know My Father also’” (19). Eventually, in verse 28, Jesus tells the Pharisees, “‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am, and I do nothing on My own, but I say these things as the Father instructed Me.’” Once again, there is a Greek word whose variable meaning struggles to shine through. Hupsoō is the word translated above as “lift up.” As other passages from the Scriptures indicate, “lift up” can mean several different things.
In John 3:14, Jesus tells Nicodemus that “just as Moses lifted up (hupsoō) the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up (hupsoō).” Jesus is referring to chapter 21 in the book of Numbers, which records how the Israelites grew weary of traveling through the wilderness and accused God of leaving them to die. After God sends fiery serpents to punish the Israelites, He instructs Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and to fix it to a pole. The Israelites who behold the bronze serpent survive the snake bites. Jesus, who knew that this episode foreshadowed how He would be nailed to a pole to save others, makes a striking and vivid comparison between Himself and the bronze serpent. His analogy illuminates the word hupsoō, attesting that “lift up” can quite literally mean “crucify.” This meaning is only made more apparent by John 12:32-3. Jesus proclaims, “‘and I, if I am lifted up (hupsoō) from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.’” John notes to the reader that “He [Jesus] was saying this to indicate what kind of death He was going to die.”
Matthew 23:12, however, exemplifies a different definition: “‘whoever exalts (hupsoō) himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted (hupsoō).’” So, when Jesus says, “‘when you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am…’” (8:28), which definition, “exalt” or “crucify,” does He mean? Because Jesus is conversing with the scheming Pharisees, He is likely referring to being “lifted up” on the cross. But John also writes in verse 30 that “as He [Jesus] said these things, many came to believe in Him.” Jesus may also be speaking indirectly to those converts, telling them the wonders that will follow when they worship Him. John’s pun on hupsoō, at once a technical term for crucifixion and a word for glorification, allows Jesus to communicate a twofold meaning: both our exaltations of Him and His suffering on the cross reveals that He is the I am, the same God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush.
John employed the two previous puns to enrich his account of Jesus’ teachings. This next pun, however, is grounded in John’s love of dramatic irony—where John exploits the contrast between the reader’s fuller knowledge of a story and a character’s more limited knowledge. In the seventh chapter of his Gospel, John records how the chief priests and Pharisees argued over Jesus’ fate. Nicodemus, the same ruler of the Jews who questioned Jesus in chapter three, asks for Jesus to receive a fair trial by Jewish law. The chief priests and Pharisees respond to his sympathy for Jesus, whom they perceive to be from Galilee, by asking Nicodemus, “‘you are not from Galilee as well, are you? Examine the Scriptures, and see that no prophet arises out of Galilee’” (52).
The chief priests and Pharisees are convinced that Jesus is neither prophet nor promised Messiah because He “arises” from Galilee. The Greek word translated here as “arise” is egeirō, by which the chief priests and Pharisees obviously mean “come from.” The reader, however, knowing the Gospel story, knows that Jesus “arises” in a more significant way: from the dead. Significantly, there are many instances where egeirō serves as a technical term that means “arise” from the dead. Consider, as just one example among many, John 21:14: “this was now the third time that Jesus revealed Himself to the disciples, after He was raised (egeirō) from the dead.”
The pun, admittedly, is sly and shrouded within the surrounding context. In most cases, if not in every other case, when egeirō means “raise from the dead,” it is accompanied by those clarifying words: “from the dead.” The chief priests and Pharisees, of course, did not use such explicit resurrection language because they did not fathom such a possibility. John’s invocation of resurrection language remains subtle for this reason—but remains nonetheless. John’s pun creates a flair of dramatic irony as those seeking to crucify Jesus accidentally stumble so near—yet remain so far from—the truth. In a completely different context, the chief priests and Pharisees might have meant, “‘examine the Scriptures, and see that no prophet from Galilee arises [from the dead].” John’s pun captures the irony of the chief priests and Pharisees who, in their desperation to suppress Jesus’ ministry, cannot understand the truth when it passes in front of their own eyes.
Closer and closer examinations reveal more and more just how riddled John’s Gospel is with puns and double meanings, and the good news is that many of John’s puns survive translation. As you read John for yourself with an eye open to his ambiguities, you will realize that this account hardly scratches the surface of the punning that you will find.