What does John 3:16 say?

The verse

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only born Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

The King James Bible has the wording many people know by heart: “only begotten Son.” The Greek word, monogenēs, means one of a kind, the only one. The next verse finishes the thought: “For God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through him” (John 3:17).

Who Jesus said it to

The verse belongs to a conversation. During a Passover in Jerusalem, a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a member of the ruling council, comes to Jesus by night. John doesn’t say why at night: caution, curiosity, or simply the hour when teachers talked. He opens politely: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God.”

Jesus answers with a riddle. “Unless one is born anew, he can’t see God’s Kingdom” (John 3:3). The Greek word, anothen, means both “again” and “from above.” Nicodemus hears only “again,” and asks how an old man could go back into his mother’s womb. Then Jesus plays on a second word, pneuma, which means both “wind” and “spirit”: “The wind blows where it wants to, and you hear its sound, but don’t know where it comes from and where it is going.”

The serpent on the pole

Just before John 3:16, Jesus points back to a strange story from Numbers 21. Snakes are biting the Israelites in the desert, and Moses makes a bronze serpent on a pole. Anyone bitten who looks at it lives. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:14). In John, “lifted up” points to the cross. A copper snake turned up at a desert shrine at Timna in 1969, and King Hezekiah later smashed Moses’s serpent as an idol (2 Kings 18:4).

Why “3:16”?

John never wrote “3:16.” The Gospels had no chapters or verses. Chapter divisions came around 1227, and verse numbers in 1551. Since the 1970s fans have held up “John 3:16” on placards at stadiums, and in 2009 the quarterback Tim Tebow painted it under his eyes. Many Christians call it the Gospel in miniature: love, a gift, belief and life, in one sentence.

Nicodemus himself returns twice in John. He asks the council for a fair hearing (John 7:50–51), and after the crucifixion he brings about a hundred Roman pounds of myrrh and aloes to bury Jesus (John 19:39). The man who came by night ends the story in daylight.