“3 Jesus answered and said to him: Truly, truly, I say to you, if someone is not born again (from above), he cannot see the Kingdom of God 4 Nicodemus says to Him: how can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born? " – what is it all about? Oh – about the mystical experience of Adoption to God through the Baptism of the Spirit and Birth from Above, experienced personally by Jesus, who was born from Above as the Son of God. Which is now revealed by Jesus to all who believed Him. Jesus shares HIS experience, which is summarized by Him in the realization of the need to be Born from Above for every person seeking the Heaven Kingdom and Eternal Life – you cannot enter the Heaven without being born again.
“5 Jesus answered: truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, cannot enter the Kingdom of God” – this obsessive repetition of what has already been said is aimed at mentioning WATER (which has nothing to do with it, the Spirit in no way depends on water), as a necessary condition for the Baptism of the Spirit. Here one can immediately feel the biased hand of the students of John the Baptist, the Nazarenes, who wanted to include a mention of the mission of their first teacher, who baptized “for the remission of sins,” as, supposedly, without this the Spirit will not deign – an obvious forgery and fake. However, from what follows, it is clear that Jesus Himself did not baptize anyone with water – and, if so, where did the water come from and why it was mentioned together with the Spirit, which “breathes where it wants (Jn 3.8)” regardless of any water.
“6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be surprised that I told you: you must be born again. 8 The Spirit breathes where it wants, and you hear its voice, but you do not know where it comes from and where goes: this is the case with everyone born of the Spirit”– these are the priceless grains of Jesus’ personal mystical experience, which, apparently, He shared not with some Jewish sage who dropped by to sit by the fire, but rather with the closest circle of his disciples. Who, by the way, were the disciples of John before Him, and from old affiliations could not resist writing about Water as a condition for “forgiveness of sins.” In this utterance, Jesus very clearly points out the impossibility of the Spirit to be born from flesh, the idea by which all the Gnostic and Hellenic wisdom of the Christian trinitological constructs is refuted and overturned, sent into the roadside ditch of history, with just this one phrase. This is a very important and deep idea: in the world of matter Spirit does not exist, and matter does not exist in the World of Spirit. A person with his Mind is born spiritually by the Spirit not into the world of matter, but into the Kingdom of Heaven, and begins his stay in it from the moment of birth from Above, that is, eternal life for him has already begun here and now, and not sometime in an uncertain future. A person hears the voice of the Spirit only in his own mind, which (this mind) is already “reflected” in the Heaven and therefore is subject to the Spirit – and nowhere else.
“9 Nicodemus answered and said to him: how can this be? 10 Jesus answered and said to him: you are the teacher of Israel, and do you not know this? 11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and we testify what you have seen, but you do not accept Our testimony. “These “we” are echoes of the subsequent Gnostic “revelations” to the disciples after the departure of Jesus, as well as the disputes between Jesus’ disciples and the Jews and their resentment against them for not being interested in the preaching of Jesus. Where and when exactly these disputes took place is unknown, but the compilers tied them to the very first visit of Jesus to Jerusalem, which, most likely, I repeat, did not happen at all – we will see this from what follows.
“12 If I told you about earthly things, and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” – Jesus is not going to reveal any “heavenly secrets” to his listeners at all – why? Well, simply because they do not need this for their personal salvation through the faith in the Son of God. And they will not understand anything… and will not believe it.
“13 No one has ascended to heaven, except the Son of Man, who is in heaven, descended from heaven” – a crude insertion is obvious, Jesus suddenly jumps from one subject to another, which does not apply at all to what was said in verse 12 – what for is this a separate statement? Well, to again persistently promote the Gnostic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul and, at the same time, of the Eternity of the Word, which we have already analyzed in the Prologue – the author decided leave his mark here too.
“14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that everyone who believes in Him, did not perish, but had eternal life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him. 18 He who believes in Him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is already condemned, because he did not believe in the name of the Only Begotten God’s Son "– and here the Jews join the chorus with Moses and the bloody sacrifice “for the sins of the world ": gave the Son where? Oh – to sacrifice Him to himself; here we have the last judgment at the end of times. And the theology of substitution is already in action: the Chosen-ness is taken away from the Jews by God because they did not believe and is handed over to the Christians, who believed in the “Only Begotten Son” – the insertion is clearly a later one, when the final break with Judaism has already been determined.
“19 The judgment is that the light came into the world; but people loved darkness more than light, because their deeds were evil; 20 for everyone who does evil hates the light and does not go to the light, lest his deeds be exposed, because they are evil, 21 but he who does what is righteous goes to the light so that his deeds may be made manifest, because they are made in God”– the Gnostics again intervene with their light “Light” from the Prologue, this is another introduction of the Gnostic secret knowledge through Jesus Himself, through his lips. At the same time, everyone has long forgotten what Jesus was talking about at the beginning, they were carried away by a conversation with each other about their innermost. Added to this are general complaints about the injustice of the world and wicked people who did not believe Jesus and His disciples. Plus the general morality, God loves the good, but the bad – not, and these bad ones themselves try to hide their bad deeds in the darkness from God’s Light. Light and darkness are both sacred concepts here, and are used in a figurative symbolic sense of comparing the good in plain sight, and the bad – hiding in the closet, where the corpse is in the closet.
So, all who were not lazy, every cricket hurried to take part, to insert its own chirp, to the real story of Jesus.
“22 After this, Jesus came with His disciples to the land of Judea, and lived there with them and baptized. 23 And John also baptized in Aenon, near Salem, because there was a lot of water; and they came there and were baptized, 24 for John had not yet been imprisoned "– that is, he (Jesus) was in Jerusalem and suddenly came to the” land of Judah”, to which Jerusalem apparently does not belong. Obviously, the two narratives are simply mechanically combined. And he decided to live now in Judea, to baptize the Jews in his faith. And John suddenly from Bethabar near the Dead Sea, where he allegedly baptized Jesus, moved to Salim, to Samaria on the border with Judea, near the Sea of Galilee, where, it turns out, upstream of the Jordan “there was a lot of water” – there was not enough water in the river for him, you see. That is, literally in those few days that Jesus spent in Jerusalem and on the way to it, John suddenly decided to go to baptize closer to the Dead Sea, on a collision course with Jesus. By the way, any public preaching of ANOTHER, non-Jewish god would instantly lead to the death of the preacher. At the time of Jesus in Judea the “fourth sect” of zealots was active, [44]who