What Did jesus mean By use Of "We" IN Chaper 3 Gospel of John?

Reply to DaChaser1;

The commentaries offer a variety of options:

1. Royal we

2. Jesus and John the Baptist

3. Jesus and those traveling with Him

But what seemed right to me was the idea that Jesus was talking about those who had witnessed Christ's miracles and therefore knew and understood the gospel of Christ.

If we (pun intended) look at our verse, John 3:11, we see several things:

1. Whoever the we is, they understand what they are saying, they are not pushing incomprehensible doctrine.

2. Whoever the we is, they have witnessed Christ's miracles which authenticated His good news.

 

This is a very special passage, and not all that uncommon in the Gospel of John.

John 3:11 is not unlike John 1:14, 16, and many other passages in this Gospel.

The hair-raising thing is how John mingles his evangelistic message with the words of Jesus. One sees this in John 3:7, where the eye-piercing gaze of the prophetic narrator turns from the story and interacts directly with his readers (us!): "You must be born again!" The message is no longer toward Nicodemus but toward the readers, namely, us. The same thing occurs in John 3:11: "You do not receive our witness!" We the readers do not receive the witness. So here (and in the powerful verses that follow) the words are the inspired prophet's, and they are shining as a laser beam directly through the hearts of us, the readers, the Holy Spirit using them to convict and lead us to saving repentance through faith in Jesus Christ.

 

Yes, except that the prophet's interaction with the readers is far more pervasive. Unfortunately, literary critics use these features to argue that many different hands have touched the work and we don't know when Jesus is speaking and when John is speaking, basically, we can't know the actual event but only the author's depiction of the event. But this is just the point! We are not to reconstruct the historical event with the words (although the historical event is obviously true); the words are the event -- God breathing and speaking directly to us! Now the evangelicals often seem to hang on to many study habits fostered by the German rationalists, but thankfully they reject all the bad consequences. However, what this has produced is a system of trying to search out the historical event from any and all sources. The problem is that this merely clouds the focus of the text, the emphasis of the inspired author who is in reality the Holy Spirit himself.

 

OTOH, we could accept John 3:11 as written and not speculate beyond the we referred to others, which probably included John the Apostle, the inspired author of our passage.

 

All of the pronouns and verbs are in the plural form (v. 11) might be one of reasons.

One of the "eccentricities" of the HCSB is an odd approach to capitalization.