John 3:13

Ver. 13. “ And no one hath ascended up to heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven. ”

The question, “ how will you believe? ” (John 3:12) implied, in the thought of Him who proposed it, the necessity of faith. John 3:13 justifies this necessity. The intermediate idea is the following: “Indeed, without faith in my testimony, there is no access for you to those heavenly things which thou desirest to know.” Καί : and yet. Olshausen, de Wette, Lucke, Luthardt and Meyer find in John 3:13 the proof, not of the necessity of faith in the revelation contained in the teaching of Jesus, but of that in revelation in general. But this thesis is too purely theoretical to find a place in such a conversation. Hengstenberg thinks that Jesus here wishes to reveal His divinity as the first among the heavenly things which Nicodemus has need to know. Meyer rightly answers that the negative form of the proposition is inconsistent with this intention. Besides, Jesus would have employed, in that case, the expression Son of God, rather than Son of man.

The general meaning of this saying is as follows: “You do not believe my word...And yet no one has ascended to heaven so as to behold the heavenly things and make them known to you, except He who has descended from it to live with you as a man, and who, even while living here below, abides there also; so that He alone knows them de visu, and so that, consequently, to believe in His teaching is for you the only means of knowing them.” But how can Jesus say of Himself that He ascended to heaven? Did He speak of His ascension by way of anticipation (Augustine, Calvin, Bengel, Hengstenberg)? But His future ascension would not justify the necessity of faith in His earthly teaching. Lucke, Olshausen, Beyschlag, after the example of Erasmus, Beza, etc., think that heaven is here only the symbol of perfect communion with God a communion to which Jesus had morally risen, and by virtue of which He alone possessed the adequate knowledge of God and of the things above. This sense would be admissible if the word ascended had not as its antithesis the term descended, which refers to a positive fact, that of the incarnation; the corresponding term ascend must, therefore, refer to a fact no less positive, or rather since the verb is in the perfect and not the aorist to a state resulting from a fact quite as positive. Meyer and Weiss, following Jansen, think that the idea of ascending may be regarded as applying only to men in general and that an abstraction from it can be made with reference to Jesus. Ascending is here only as if the indispensable condition for all other men of dwelling in heaven: “No one...except he who (without having ascended thither) has descended from it, he who is there essentially (Meyer), or who was there previously (Weiss).” This is an attempt to escape the difficulty of the εἱ μή, except; the fact of being in heaven is reserved for Jesus, while suppressing, so far as He is concerned, that of ascending; comp. the use of εἰ μή in Matthew 12:4; Luke 4:26-27; Galatians 1:19. However, the case is not altogether the same in those passages. We might try to take the εἰ μή in the sense of but, like the Hebrew ki im; but in that case John must have written κατέβη instead of ὁ καταβάς : “No one has ascended, but the Son of man descended. ”

The Socinians, perfectly understanding the difficulty, have had recourse to the hypothesis of a carrying away of Jesus to heaven, which was granted to Him at some time or other of His life before His public ministry. As for ourselves, we have no occasion to have recourse to such an hypothesis; we know a positive fact which is sufficient to explain the has ascended when we apply it to Jesus Himself; it is that which occurred at His baptism. Heaven was then opened to Him; He penetrated it deeply by His gaze; He read the heart of God, and knew at that moment everything which He was to reveal to men of the divine plan, the heavenly things. In proportion as the consciousness of His eternal relation as Son to the Father was given to Him, there necessarily resulted from it the knowledge of the love of God towards mankind. Comp. Matthew 11:27. Heaven is a state, before being a place. As Gess says: “To be in the Father is to be in heaven.” Subsidiarily, no doubt, the word heaven takes also a local sense; for this spiritual state of things is realized most perfectly in whatever sphere of the universe is resplendent with all the glory of the manifestation of God. The moral sense of the word heaven prevails in the first and third clauses; the local sense must be added to it in the second. “No one has ascended...” signifies thus: “No one has entered into communion with God and possesses thereby an intuitive knowledge of divine things, in order to reveal them to others, except He to whom heaven was opened and who dwells there at this very moment.”

And by virtue of what was Jesus, and Jesus alone, admitted to such a privilege. Because heaven is His original home. He alone has ascended thither, because He only descended thence. The term descended implies in His case the consciousness of having personally lived in heaven (Gess). This word denotes, therefore, more than a divine mission; it implies the abasement of the incarnation, and consequently involves the notion of pre-existence. It is an evident advance upon Nicodemus' profession of faith (John 3:2). The filial intimacy to which Jesus is exalted rests on His essential Sonship, previous to His earthly life. If the word descended implies pre-existence, the term, Son of man, brings out the human side in this heavenly revealer. The love of mankind impelled Him to become one of us, in order that He might speak to us as a man, and might instruct us in heavenly things in a manner intelligible to us. The recollection of Pro 30:4 seems not to be foreign to the expression which Jesus makes use of: “Do I know the knowledge of the holy ones? Who ascendeth to heaven and descendeth from it?”

The last words: who is in heaven are preserved in the text by Tischendorf (8th ed.) and by Meyer, notwithstanding the Alexandrian authorities; Westcott rightly says: “They have against them the ancient MSS., and for them the ancient versions.” But according to this critic, the testimony of the versions is in this case remarkably weakened by the contrary testimony of the Sinaitic MS. which so often accords with them. The rejection may have been the result of an accidental omission or of the difficulty of reconciling this addition with the idea of the preceding clause; that of having descended. On the other hand, we can understand how these words may have been interpolated, in order to resolve the apparent contradiction between the idea of being in heaven in order to have ascended thither, and that of having descended. At all events, the idea which these words express, that of the actual presence of Christ in heaven, is already very positively contained in the perfect ἀναβέβηκεν, has ascended. This tense indeed does not signify: has accomplished at a given moment the act of ascending (this would be the sense of the aorist), but He is there, He lives there, as having ascended thither. Thus the preceding antithesis is resolved. Jesus lives in heaven, as a being who has re-ascended thither after having descended in order to become Son of man (John 16:28). The Lord led two lives parallel to each other, an earthly life and a heavenly life. He lived in His Father, and, while living thus with the Father, He gave Himself unceasingly to men in His human life. The teaching in parables, in which the heavenly things take on His lips an earthly dress, is the true language answering to that existence which is formed of two simultaneous lives, the one penetrating the other.

Some interpreters (Luthardt, Weiss), understand the participle (ὁ ὤν), in the sense of the imperfect who was (before the incarnation); this word, according to them, expresses the idea of pre-existence as a condition of the καταβαίνειν, of the act of descending. But this participle (ὁ ὤν), if it is authentic, is rather in relation with the principal verb: has ascended, than with the participle (ὁ καταβάς). “He lives in heaven, having re-ascended thither, inasmuch as He has descended thence.” To express, without ambiguity, the idea of the imperfect, the periphrasis (ὃς ὴν) would have been necessary; Lucke sees in ὁ ὤν a perpetual present. This idea may be applied to John 1:18, where the question is of the Son of God, but not to our passage, where the subject is the Son of man.

Meyer, Weiss and Keil maintain that Jesus explains here the knowledge which He has of divine things by His pre-existence. Such an idea can be found in these words only on condition of denying any application of the idea of ascending to Jesus, a thing which is impossible. The higher knowledge of Jesus is, much rather, presented here as the result of an initiation (has ascended), which took place for Him during the course of His human existence, and through which He received at a certain time the immediate and constant, though truly human, intuition of divine things. And, in fact, this is the impression which every word of Jesus produces: that of a man who perceives the divine directly, but who perceives it with a human consciousness like our own. It is impossible for me to understand how Weiss can, on the one hand, make this higher knowledge proceed from a recollection of His anterior existence, and maintain, on the other, that such knowledge “does not go beyond the limits of a truly human consciousness.” The Son of man, living in heaven, so as to have re-ascended thither after having descended, is the sole revealer of divine things: this is the first of the ἐπουράνια, the heavenly secrets, which Jesus communicates to Nicodemus. The second is the salvation of men through the lifting up of this same Son of man, not on a throne, but on a cross, the supreme wonder of divine love to the world: John 3:14-16. This is the essential contents of the revelation which Jesus announced to him in John 3:13.