Not by human seed but born from above to become children of God: Johannine metaphor of the family or ancient science?

Jonathan A Draper

doi:10.4102/ids.v51i3.2201

Abstract

This article provides a critical reflection on Jan van der Watt’s theory of the network of the metaphor of the family in John’s Gospel, taking the Johannine understanding of the seed as a case study. In his reflections on God’s act of creation, Philo uses the language of impregnation and (re)birth of the natural man by his divine seed to produce children of virtue for those who open themselves to divine wisdom. His Middle-Platonic construction is unlikely to have been understood as ‘absurd, irrelevant or untrue’, which characterises a metaphor in Van der Watt’s definition. The discourse on the relationship between seed/sperm and life reflects ancient ‘scientific’ understanding of the world for Philo and John’s Gospel. This article analyses the connections and differences between Philo’s conception and the mysticism of John’s understanding of rebirth from above as contrasted with ‘natural’ birth.

Highlights

In the incident where the Greeks ask to see Jesus, they are answered enigmatically with the riddling metaphor in John 12:24: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit’.1 This seems to draw on the background of Isaiah 6, where a holy seed will remain after Israel is destroyed to renew the covenant and inherit the land again which is reflected in several manuscripts of the Septuagint2 (Draper 2000)
Targum Jonathan3 refers this to the return of the diaspora, conflating the idea of the seed of a tree with the seed of human beings and John seems to have drawn on the same understanding of Isaiah
Jan van der Watt (2006) uses this metaphor of the grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying as a case study of metaphor in his paper, ‘Ethics alive in imagery’

Summary

Introduction

In the incident where the Greeks ask to see Jesus, they are answered enigmatically with the riddling metaphor in John 12:24: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit’ (κόκκος τοῦ σίτου πεσὼν εἰς τὴν γῆν ἀποθάνῃ, αὐτὸς μόνος μένει ἐὰν δὲ ἀποθήνῃ).1 This seems to draw on the background of Isaiah 6, where a holy seed will remain after Israel is destroyed to renew the covenant and inherit the land again which is reflected in several manuscripts of the Septuagint (σπέρμα ἅγιον τὸ στήλωμα αὐτῆς – LC, Origen adds in his Hexapla sub asteriscus)2 (Draper 2000). Family and family metaphors interpenetrate John’s Gospel and Van der Watt has identified a key marker, but one might ask whether the idea of divine seed, divine conception and divine birth would have been seen as ‘absurd, irrelevant or untrue’ in the world of Hellenistic Jewish thought in which John moved.

Results

Conclusion