Linguists like to play with words, and one of the word-play phrases that gets passed around is “Time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana!” You can even buy a mug with this saying on it! What makes this sentence so fun is that both “flies” and “like” have two meanings, so though the two parts of the sentence use the same words, they mean very different things!

As we have been looking at the book of John, we found something similar happening in the story of Nicodemus in John 3. When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born “again”, the word that is translated “again” has two meanings in Greek. It can mean “another time” or “from above”. Jesus was playing with words here because He meant both things. You must be born another time, and you must be born spiritually, or “from heaven”. Nicodemus, however, didn’t understand heavenly rebirth, so he only understood “another time.” It would be kind of like Jesus saying “Fruit flies like a banana”, and Nicodemus saying, “Well, fruit doesn’t fly, and bananas are a type of fruit that also don’t fly, so this analogy doesn’t make sense!” Jesus goes on to explain to him the true meaning, though Nicodemus still has a hard time understanding. We are so fortunate to know the whole story now, so we can understand what it means to be reborn!

However, we still have a bit of a translation issue. Most languages don’t have a word with a double meaning of “from above” and “again”, so you have to make a choice in translation of which word you are going to focus on. Some translators choose to use “again”, since that is what Nicodemus understood so his follow-up question makes more sense. They add the heavenly meaning in later through Jesus’ answer. This is what most English versions choose to do. Some translators choose to use “in heaven” or “from above” since that is the deeper and more significant meaning, and the reader just has to understand Nicodemus’ confusion as coming from his earthly perspective. In the translations we are checking, two chose “again” and one chose “from heaven”. What would you choose?