John 3:13

John 3:13. And no one hath ascended up into heaven, but he that came down out of heaven, the Son of man. The connection is this: ‘How will ye believe if I tell you the heavenly things? And it is from me alone that ye.can learn them. No one can tell the heavenly things unless he has been in heaven, and no one has been in heaven and come down to earth save myself.' Repeatedly does our Lord in this Gospel speak of His coming down out of heaven (John 6:33; John 6:38, etc.), using the very word that we meet with here; and hence it is impossible to give the phrase a merely figurative sense. He came forth from the Father, and came into the world (John 16:28), that He might declare the Father (chap. John 1:18) and speak unto the world what He had heard from Him (chap. John 8:26). But this requires that we take the other verb ‘hath ascended up' in its literal sense, and then the words seem to imply that Jesus had already ascended into heaven. ‘ Hath ascended up ' cannot refer to His future ascension; and there is no foundation for the view held by some, that within the limits of His ministry on earth He was ever literally taken up into heaven. What, then, is the meaning? There are several passages in which the words ‘save' or ‘except' present the same difficulty. One of the most familiar is Luke 4:27, where it seems at first strange to read, ‘Many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed saving Naaman the Syrian,' no leper of Israel cleansed except a leper who was not of Israel! The mind is so fixed on the lepers and their cleansing, that the other words ‘of them' are not carried on in thought to the last clause: ‘none of them was cleansed, indeed, no leper was cleansed save Naaman the Syrian.' So also in the preceding verse (Luke 4:26). In other passages (such as Galatians 2:16; Revelation 21:27) the same peculiarity exists, but it is not apparent in the Authorised Version. The verse before us is exactly similar. The special thought is not the having gone up into heaven, but the having been in heaven. This was the qualification for revealing the truths which are here spoken of as heavenly things. But none (none, that is, of the sons of men; for this is a general maxim, the exception is not brought in till afterwards) could be in heaven without ascending from earth to heaven. No one has gone up into heaven, and by thus being in heaven obtained the knowledge of heavenly things; and, indeed, no one has been in heaven save He that came down out of heaven, the Son of man. Observe how insensibly our Lord has passed into the revelation of the heavenly things themselves. He could not speak of His power to reveal without speaking of that which is first and chief of all the heavenly things, viz. that He Himself came down out of heaven to be the Son of man (on the name ‘Son of man' see chap. John 1:51). The reference to our Lord's humanity is here strikingly in place. He came down from heaven and became the Son of man to reveal these heavenly truths and (John 3:14-15) to give the heavenly blessings unto man.

The weight of evidence compels us to believe that the concluding words of this verse, as it stands in the Authorised Version, were not written by John. We can only suppose that they were a very early comment on, or addition to, the text, first written in the margin, then by mistake joined to the text. Were they genuine, they would probably refer to the abiding presence of the Son with the Father; but in such a sense it is very improbable that ‘Son of man' would have been the name chosen. At all events, we have no other example of the same kind.