What Does It Mean to be Born Again?

(0:00 – 1:15) Growing up in the Anglican Church in rural Britain, I wasn’t aware at all of the term born-again Christian. It wasn’t really until I moved to the US in my early 20s that I really started to understand what it meant. Today on Misquoting Jesus, we’re talking about what this term means, how a born-again Christian considers themselves different to other Christians, and what Jesus would have thought about the whole thing. As a former born-again Christian, Dr Bart Ehrman is here to explain all of this and more. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. I’m your host, Megan Lewis.

https://yeshu.se/bart-d-ehrman-to-be-born-again-merged-pdf/

(6:56 – 8:38)
But it’s like a gift that’s been offered to you. If somebody offers you a gift, you have to accept it. And if you don’t accept it, you don’t get the gift.
And so it was that you’ve got a role to play too. It’s not that you’re earning your salvation or anything like that, but you’re accepting a gift. And so you personally, each person has to accept the gift.
If they don’t accept the gift, then they’re doomed. Is this what most evangelical groups are talking about when they use the term born again, or is there any kind of variation or nuance depending on which group you’re a member of? Well, evangelical Christianity has changed so much from what it was when I was an evangelical in the 70s, especially in the 70s. These days, when I became an evangelical, that was it.
You’d be born again, and then you learn about the Bible, and it’s all about mastering the Bible, because the Bible is God’s revelation to you. And you learn what to believe about God. You’ve got to believe the right things.
And these days, my sense is that evangelicals are really not about that so much. They’re about social issues, about social agendas and political issues, and that it’s more of a kind of a cultural movement in some ways. They identify as people who’ve had these experiences, but it’s not what they’re really focused on.But I do think that evangelicals still think you’ve got to make a personal commitment to Christ as your Lord and Savior. And if you do that, it turns your life around. I don’t know that there are differences among evangelicals in this particular thing.

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(8:56 – 10:22) And so the idea is that these are people who preach the good news. And so being an evangelical means you try to convert people to your way of faith because you think that’s the way of salvation. And so there are a range of ways of doing that. But this born-again experience, as I understand it historically, has been principally an American thing. So in England right now, the Anglican church is suffering a lot of losses in terms of congregations and things. But the part of it that is doing the best is the evangelical branch of the Anglican church. And I just don’t know whether they’re focusing on being born again or not. They seem again to be focusing on more kind of a certain kind of spirituality as it’s manifest in social issues. Thank you.

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And Jesus says, you must be born again in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. And Nicodemus is puzzled. He says, so how is it possible for a person who’s gotten old to crawl back into his mother’s womb and be born again? And Jesus goes on to explain that he doesn’t mean that.
He means that you have to be born of water and spirit if you want to enter into the kingdom of heaven. You have to be born of water and spirit. You’ve got to be born again.
And so he repeats it. And so in John, Jesus kind of says the same thing in different words a number of times during a number of his number of his speeches. And that’s what happens in this case.
And so that’s where it comes from, that you’ve got to have a second birth. You’ve got to be born, not just physically, but you have to be born spiritually. And so you’ve had a physical birth.
You’ve been born from your mother, but to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to have a heavenly birth. You’ve got to be born again. What complications are there in this? Well, it sounds pretty straightforward.
And until you actually learn Greek, then all of a sudden, oh my God. Isn’t that always the way? I thought this was easy. This is not easy.
And so the deal is that when Jesus says you must be born again, the word again is a difficult word in Greek. It’s not that difficult. It just means different things in different contexts.
So the word is anothen. You must be born anothen. And the word anothen, which sometimes gets translated again or anew, you must be born anew or again, that word can mean a second time, but it can also mean from above. (17:46

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(18:51 – 21:12)
So where Jesus says something and Nicodemus thinks he understands, but he shows he doesn’t understand. So Jesus corrects him. And that’s what leads into the conversation that follows, which is about how you have to have a heavenly birth and not just an earthly birth.
And so it’s a little bit more complicated. Is that the only complicating factor here or are there other things going on as well? Well, there’s something else going on, which is pretty interesting. Um, this is the part people wouldn’t know about probably because in, in many, uh, in many Bibles, you’ll have a footnote if it says again, or if it says a new, there’ll be a footnote, footnotes say, or from above.
And so that’s fine. The problem is that this word anton is a Greek word that can mean both things. But Jesus at the time is in Jerusalem and Jesus was an Aramaic speaking Jew.
Nicodemus is a Jew living in Jerusalem where the native language is Aramaic. They’d be speaking Aramaic. Um, so the account, you know, John is written in Greek, of course, because it’s a Greek book, but the conversation would have been in Aramaic.And the problem is that this Greek word that means two things, either again, or, uh, or from above the, the, the Aramaic word for from above does not have the double meaning, but the conversation is predicated on the double meaning. So it’s, it doesn’t work because if they’re talking in, in, in Aramaic, the whole conversation doesn’t work. That shows that there’s a problem here with like, did this actually happen? How does it, it doesn’t make sense in Aramaic.

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(6:32 – 6:55)
And when that happens, then you get into God’s good graces. That’s how you’re justified. And then you can join the Christian community once you’re baptized.So it’s faith and baptism for Paul, not for Jesus. But neither one of them had this concept that, you know, you have to ask Jesus into your heart or that you have to commit your life to Christ as your Lord and Savior by a personal decision or you’ll not get in. They don’t have anything like that.

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