Born of Water and of the Spirit

Nicodemus opens with a careful, respectful compliment — we know you are a teacher come from God. Jesus does not accept the frame. Before any discussion of teaching or miracles, He states a precondition for seeing the kingdom at all, and it is not something a rabbi can accomplish by being learned.

Christian traditions divide over verse 5. Some read "water" as natural birth, some as the word of God, some as baptism. Latter-day Saint doctrine reads it as baptism by immersion followed by the gift of the Holy Ghost — two ordinances, in that order, both required — and the Restoration's other scriptures make the reading explicit rather than inferential.

Moses 6:59–60 is worth reading beside John 3 because it draws the parallel Jesus leaves implicit: mortal birth involves water, blood and spirit, and so does the second birth. The analogy is not decorative.

The serpent reference is to Numbers 21:8–9: Israel, bitten by fiery serpents, is told to look at a bronze serpent on a pole and live. Nephi and Alma both notice the same detail — that many refused to look, and died, because the remedy was too simple (1 Nephi 17:41; Alma 33:19–20). Alma's phrase for it is exact: "the labor which they had to perform was to look."

"God so loved" in verse 16 is houtōs — thus, in this manner. The sentence is not measuring the quantity of God's love but describing its form: this is how He loved, by giving. And the Greek for "only begotten" is the monogenēs of the prologue.

The Book of Mormon supplies what John 3 does not: a description of what the second birth feels like from inside, and a set of questions for checking. Mosiah 27 gives the narrative case, and Alma 5 turns it into an examination.

Verse 26 is the question that keeps Alma 5 from being a one-time test. He is addressing "my brethren of the church" — people already converted — and asking whether the change is present tense. Latter-day Saint teaching consistently treats being born again as a process to be renewed rather than an event to be dated, which is one of the practical functions of the weekly sacrament.

As for Nicodemus: he appears twice more. In John 7:50–51 he objects, cautiously, when the Sanhedrin condemns Jesus without a hearing. And in John 19:39 he brings about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to the burial — an enormous, public, unmistakable quantity, in daylight. The man who came at night is last seen carrying spices in the open.