BAPTISMAL REGENERATION
3.1-36
St John’s method of presenting the truth concerning Christ is often to cast his teaching into the form of a discourse between Jesus and some enquirer or of a controversy between Jesus and ‘the Jews’ The teaching thus given is clearly a meditation upon certain aspects of Christs’ words and works as recorded in the Synoptic tradition. It is usually a development of what is already implicit in the Synoptist, and it represents the Church’s reflection upon the Gospel tradition at the end of the first century AD. How far the actual words of the historical Jesus are preserved in the Johannine discourses it is impossible to say, and different readers of the Gospels will make different estimates. The theme of Chapter 3 is the meaning of Christian Baptism and its connection with Judgment, and there are appended some further reflections upon the mission and witness of John the Baptist. St John believes that the Holy Spirit has enlightened the mind of the apostolic Church so that it understands, as the disciples before the crucifixion could not have understood, what is the true meaning of the actions and words of the Jesus of history. He puts into the mouth o the historical Jesus the teaching which the Spirit of the Risen Christ had given to the apostolic Church through the prophets (see 12.16; 13.7; 14.26; 15.26; 16.12 f.; Rev. 2.7, 11, 17, 29; 3.6, 13, 22; 13.9). Thus in the conversation with Nicodemus the necessity of Christian Baptism is affirmed. The Church since the apostolic age has understood Jesus to have taught that salvation is appropriated by the individual through baptism into the Church, his resurrection body; St John is here asserting this catholic and apostolic doctrine. He does not use the word ‘baptism’, doubtless because in his day Christians were very reluctant to speak of their ‘mysteries’ in documents might fall into the hands of pagans or of the Roman government officials. As the Apocalypse vividly reminds us, the latter were avid to punish and suppress any religion for which Caesar was not King of kings and Lord of lords. The Christian mysteries had to be celebrated in desert places or behind locked doors. But now it is Nicodemus who comes to Jesus secretly.
Alan Richardson, Saint John (London: SCM Press, 1959), 68-69.