Thankfully, we can all become better acquainted with the Lord Jesus without ever knowing John used two different strategies to report responses in conversation (as fascinating and potentially useful as that might be). John’s Gospel, and the Word of God as a whole, reveal the Son of God, who deserves our worship. 

Conversation has been compared to a game of catch. Just as people take turns throwing a ball back and forth, people also take turns speaking. Many people converse in the Gospel of John: Jesus, John the Baptist, Andrew, Philip, Nathanael, Mary, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, and a royal official—those are just the ones in the first four chapters. In each conversation John recorded, one speaker responds to another. But the fascinating thing is, sometimes John does something with the Greek language you can’t see in most English Bible versions.

Did you know there were different ways in Greek to describe how one person responded to someone else? Stephen Levinsohn tells us the default way simply got the job done by using the Greek verb meaning “to answer.” For example, Jesus told Nathanael that He saw him under a fig tree before Philip came and brought Nathanael to Jesus. And John reports how Nathanael answered by writing:

Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:49)

Here, John used his default strategy (called a “quotative frame”, which he did around 45 times throughout his Gospel.

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