Born again

===Historicity===
Scholars of the [[historical Jesus]], who attempt to ascertain how closely the stories of Jesus match the historical events they are based on, generally treat Jesus's conversation with Nicodemus in [[John 3]] with skepticism. It details what is presumably a private conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, with none of the disciples seemingly attending, making it unclear how a record of this conversation was acquired. In addition, the conversation is recorded in no other ancient Christian source other than John and works based on John.<ref name="jesusbefore" /> According to [[Bart Ehrman]], the larger issue is that the same problem English translations of the Bible have with the Greek {{lang|grc|ἄνωθεν}} ({{transliteration|grc|ánōtʰen}}) is a problem in the [[Aramaic language]] as well: there is no single word in Aramaic that means both 'again' and 'from above', yet the conversation rests on Nicodemus making this misunderstanding.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Biblical Errancy: The "Born Again" Dialogue In the Gospel of John |url=https://etb-biblical-errancy.blogspot.com/2012/04/born-again-dialogue-in-gospel-of-john.html |access-date=11 September 2019 |website=Biblical Errancy}}</ref> As the conversation was between two Jews in Jerusalem, where Aramaic was the native language, there is no reason to think that they would have spoken in Greek.<ref name="jesusbefore" /> This implies that even if based on a real conversation, the author of John heavily modified it to include Greek wordplay and idiom.<ref name="jesusbefore">{{Cite book |last=Ehrman |first=Bart |title=Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior |publisher=[[HarperOne]] |year=2016 |isbn=978-0062285201 |pages=108&ndash;109 |author-link=Bart Ehrman}}</ref>