Bible Question: what is trying to say when Jesus says I am the Life? john 14:6 |
Bible Answer: Hi yony, Primarily, Jesus wants us to know (Him), who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I appreciate your capitalization of Life showing that you believe in the Deity of Christ. Knowing Him is important to John, it was of passing interest to Pilate, see John 18:37, and it has to be important to us for He has the words of eternal life. John 6:69, "And we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy (One) of God." Parenthesis mine. You probably realize that most of the new translations out today do not capitalize Deity. Our beloved NASB is always changing, as I have also, the choices of capitalized words. It is in those capitalizations that we develope the interpretation of a passage and gain knowledge of who God is and what He is saying in essence. For instance, the NASB has capitalized in their new copyright version more of the words concerning Light. I am glad to see that and am glad that we are in agreement in many if not most. One passage that I am working on (and it seems that changes are always being made, for this is a work in progress for all of us), is John 1:4. My choices of capitalization are different from NASB and NKJ which capitalize Deity. Here it is for what it is worth. John 1:4, "In Him was Life, and the (Life) was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it." The new NASB has chosen to capitalize light and both NASB and NKJ do not capitalize life. I chose to leave light in the lower case because light is spoken of as an "it". I chose to capitalize Life because the (Life) is (God) in the flesh; John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with (God)...". I think that it is important to capitalize for the understanding of whether we are talking about the word (the Holy Bible) or the Word (the Son of God). It is important to know if we are talking about the Life or whether we are talking about the life abundant that Jesus gives. Later, Ray |