For God so loved…

¶ For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (Jn 3:16, KJB 1769)

The most memorised verse in the Bible, yet so few really understand it.

In modern English, we don’t usually start sentences in English with the conjunction ‘For’ (from Greek γὰρ). (Oh, it can be done, and sadly, still is done in modern English translations, but it’s considered ‘old-fashioned or literary’ according to the Oxford Learners Dictionary.) Note that the KJB above also marks the verse with a pilcrow character (¶) which marks a new paragraph, but should it really be a new paragraph? The (out of place) pilcrow paragraph mark and the outdated ‘For’ lead most readers away from connecting this verse with the previous statements and hence from realising my next point. It should be translated as ‘Because’ in modern English. But ‘because’ what?

Then the main meaning of ‘so’ (from Greek Οὕτως) is not as an intensifier ‘so (much)’, but rather it means ‘thus’ or ‘like so’. Even a look into Strongs concordance can quickly illustrate that, e.g., https://BibleHub.com/greek/3779.htm.

It’s very nice to tell everyone that “God loves them SO MUCH that he sent Jesus”, but that’s NOT the main point here. John 3:16 is continuing from John 3:14-15: ¶ And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. (Jn 3:14-15, KJB 1769)

The ‘so’ or ‘thus’ or ‘like that’ in John 3:16 is telling us that just like in the time of Moses when God provided a bronze snake on a pole that people could voluntarily turn towards to gain life or not, in the same way God would now provide his own son to be born to be lifted up on a pole/stake/cross so that some would turn towards him and gain life—eternal life in this latter case.

Thus the most memorised verse in the entire English Bible is probably also the most often misunderstood and mistranslated. Why haven’t our new translations and revisions fixed this error? (Kudos to LEB, NET, and a few others for trying, though.) The Open English Translation is not bound to continue traditions that haven’t always been helpful to the best understanding of the scriptures. (See https://Freely-Given.org/OBD/par/JHN/C3V16.htm.)

Robert Hunt, https://OET.Bible