John 6:62 — “ascending to where he was before”: eternity or rapture?

“But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them: ‘Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?’”

John 6:61-62

Context: not the bread discourse, but its crisis

John 6 is a carefully built unit: the feeding of the five thousand (vv. 1-15), the walking on the sea (vv. 16-21), the bread discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum (vv. 22-59) — and then, clearly set apart from it, the crisis among the disciples (vv. 60-71). Verse 62 no longer belongs to the discourse, but to its aftermath. That is no trifle: the verse is not doctrine, but a reaction to a doctrine that has not been received.

The offense is named precisely. “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” (v. 60) — and what the disciples find hard stands in vv. 53-56: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” The skándalon of this chapter is not a metaphysical claim, but a figurative speech that was taken literally and then found unbearable. Whoever reads v. 62 must know what it answers: a misunderstanding produced by taking words literally.

Jesus’s answer is itself not a statement, but a question: “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see …?” The form is an a-fortiori inference: if this already offends you, what then about that? Whether the greater thing heightens the offense or dissolves it, the text leaves open — and this openness is intention, not negligence.

Decisive, however, is what follows one line later. Jesus supplies his hearers with the key to interpretation himself: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (v. 63). The speaker himself thus rejects the fleshly-literal understanding of his discourse. An interpretation that draws from v. 62 a metaphysical doctrine about two natures does with v. 62 exactly what v. 63 forbids for the discourse as a whole.

And finally the outcome of the scene. Many disciples leave (v. 66); Jesus asks the Twelve whether they too wish to go; and Peter answers with the confession that crowns this chapter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (vv. 68-69). Not “you are God.” The chapter that supposedly teaches the deity of Christ closes with the confession of the Holy One of God — a man consecrated to God.

The Socinian core thesis: the verse names its subject

The traditional interpretation reads v. 62 backwards: because the chapter speaks of the bread that comes down from heaven, he who ascends again must have come from there; therefore he was there before he became man; therefore he who speaks here is the eternal Logos in a human shell. The inference is no nonsense. But it hangs on a presupposition that the verse does not supply, and that one must bring along.

For the verse names its subject, and expressly so: ho hyiós tou anthrôpou, the Son of Man. Not “the Word,” not “the Son of God,” not “the divine nature.” Whoever says “The Son of Man ascends to where he was before” says of a man that he was there before. If one does not want that, one must introduce an artifice: one must assert that here the man is named but the Godhead is meant — that is the communicatio idiomatum. And precisely here Sozzini sets in: this figure of speech is not the result of the interpretation, but its presupposition. One explains the verse with a tool that one would first have to prove from elsewhere.

Then there is the time index. “Where he was before” — hópou ên to próteron — is a relative time reference. To próteron means “earlier,” “formerly,” measured against the moment in which it is spoken. It does not mean “from the beginning,” not “before the foundation of the world,” not “from eternity.” Where John wants to say that, he says it: “before the world existed” (17:5), “in the beginning” (1:1). Here he does not say it. To stretch an unmeasured “earlier” into eternity is to demand more of the word than it bears.

And thirdly the sentence form. In Greek there stands a conditional clause whose apodosis is missing: eàn oun theôrête ton hyión tou anthrôpou anabaínonta hópou ên to próteron; — “If then you see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before …?” Grammarians call that an aposiopesis, a falling silent. What ought to follow does not follow; Luther’s “What if …” renders this honestly. But a sentence that withholds its main clause asserts nothing. It sets its hearers before something — and leaves the conclusion to them. To win a two-natures doctrine from a withheld apodosis is a great weight on a very narrow axle.

Sozzini’s own answer to the question where the Son of Man was “before” is the boldest point of Socinian Christology — and its most consistent. He takes the verse at its word: the man Jesus really was in heaven before he said this, namely caught up between his birth and the beginning of his preaching, in order to hear there from God what he was to say to men. What tradition perceives as an evasion is in substance the opposite: it is the attempt to take the subject of the sentence seriously instead of exchanging it by a figure of speech.

Core statement

Sozzini and the Racovian Catechism on “where he was before”

Sozzini treats John 6:62 not in passing, but exactly where it belongs: in his engagement with the two-natures doctrine. It is remarkable that he first states his opponents’ objection in its full strength before he answers:

“But of course they will say that there are certain things that simply cannot be explained without that communicatio idiomatum, and further without the acknowledgement of two natures in Christ. … or when it is said that the Son of Man was in heaven before he ascended there before the eyes of his disciples (John 6:62); or also that he was in heaven while he yet spoke on earth (John 3:13).”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Sacred Scripture (De auctoritate sacrae scripturae), section “Objections of the opponents from certain passages of Scripture”

Note how precisely Sozzini grasps the point of contention: it is not about whether the verse says something astonishing, but about whether one can explain it without the assumption of two natures. Precisely this the opponents dispute — and precisely this Sozzini’s answer accomplishes. It is the core of his interpretation of this passage:

“Likewise this too, that the Son of Man was in heaven before he visibly ascended there, can and must be referred truly and properly to that man Jesus of Nazareth. For that this true man, after he had been born of the Virgin and before he preached the gospel, was caught up into heaven in order to hear there from God himself what was to be revealed to the human race through him, is so probable that it could not have happened otherwise at all.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Sacred Scripture (De auctoritate sacrae scripturae), section “The Son of Man in heaven”

“Truly and properly” — that is the point, and it stands athwart everything one expects of a “rationalistic” interpretation. Sozzini does not explain the verse away. He refuses to interpret it, because he holds that it needs no interpretation: the sentence says of a man that he was in heaven before, and a man can have been in heaven before — Enoch was (Genesis 5:24), Elijah was (2 Kings 2:11), and what God did with these he could do with him whom he had appointed teacher of the human race. The reproach of evasion therefore falls back upon the other side:

“There is therefore no reason — indeed it contradicts all reason — to do violence to the words; rather one must understand them as they read, in this passage as in other similar ones.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Sacred Scripture (De auctoritate sacrae scripturae), section “The Son of Man in heaven”

But why should the usual interpretation do violence to the words? Because it must exchange the named subject for an unnamed one. Sozzini illustrates this with an example that makes the dispute over the communicatio idiomatum vivid at a stroke — and one need not have learned any scholasticism to understand it:

“For no one would say, to stay with examples: ‘My soul is tall’; or: ‘My soul clothes itself in a long garment’; or: ‘The soul is washed in the bath’ — although the soul is so joined in man to the body, to which these things are proper, that from both there exists one and the same man.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Sacred Scripture (De auctoritate sacrae scripturae), section “Refutation of the two-natures doctrine and of the communicatio idiomatum”

The argument is sharp: body and soul are as closely joined as two things can be — and yet we never ascribe to the soul what belongs to the body alone. We do not say that the soul is bathed. If, then, even this closest of all connections permits no exchange of properties, why should the connection of two natures in Christ permit it? Sozzini concedes what is admissible: one may ascribe what belongs to one nature to the person. But not to the other nature. And his judgement on the practice is unmistakable:

“However this communicatio idiomatum is admitted in passages that treat of Christ — it is nothing other than to play, as it were, with the sacred words and to make it exceedingly easy for the reader to remain wholly uncertain about the sense of the passage and about the matter itself.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Sacred Scripture (De auctoritate sacrae scripturae), section “Refutation of the two-natures doctrine and of the communicatio idiomatum”

The Racovian Catechism builds this interpretation out into a doctrine. To the question how the Lord Jesus attained the knowledge of the divine will, it answers not with an eternal generation, but with a biography:

“By this, that he ascended into heaven and there beheld his Father and that life and that blessedness which he proclaimed to us, and heard from the same Father all that he was to teach; by whom he was then sent down from heaven to the earth and endowed with an immeasurable fullness of the Holy Spirit, by whose inspiration he uttered all that he had learned from the Father.”

Racovian Catechism, section “The origin of Christ’s knowledge”

With that a whole series of Johannine sentences is covered at once, without a second nature being necessary: that he “came down from heaven” (6:38), that he testifies to “what he has seen and heard” (3:32), that he speaks “what I have heard from the Father” (8:26), and that he — in the same chapter 6! — is the only one who has “seen the Father” (6:46). All of these are statements about experience: about seeing, hearing, learning, being sent. A God does not learn what he is to say. A man who was with God does exactly that.

The Catechism draws from this the conclusion that holds for John 6:62 as for 3:13, and grounds it in the subject of the sentence itself:

“… that [is] said of no other … than of the Son of Man, who, since he necessarily possesses a human nature, cannot be that God, indeed could not even have existed before he was born. Add to this that it is expressly said that he ascended into heaven, namely before he said this, which could not belong to Christ by virtue of that divine nature, but by virtue of the human.”

Racovian Catechism, section “The descent of Christ from heaven and his sending into the world”

The last sentence contains an argument that puts the traditional reading in an uncomfortable position: an ascent into heaven cannot belong to the Godhead at all. God does not ascend; he is not at one place in order to reach a higher one. Ascending is something a creature does. If, then, John 3:13 says that the Son of Man ascended into heaven — and indeed, as the Catechism expressly notes, in the Greek in the past tense, before he spoke these words — then something is spoken of that only the man can have done.

Sozzini supports this reading with a text-critical finding that he did not invent, but found among the great philologists of his time:

“Although there is usually read there ‘who is in heaven’, one can nevertheless read from the Greek ‘who was in heaven’, as Erasmus, Beza and others have noted.”

Fausto Sozzini, On the Authority of Sacred Scripture (De auctoritate sacrae scripturae), section “The Son of Man in heaven”

Honesty requires noting that Sozzini himself records how contested his interpretation was — even among those who shared his Christology. He notes soberly that, because the rapture is not acknowledged, “most have interpreted this ascending into heaven as a penetrating … to the knowledge of divine things,” and that one must then consistently interpret the “being in heaven” as “the knowledge of divine things already attained.” Within the Socinian tradition there are thus two ways: the literal (rapture) and the figurative (heavenly knowledge). Both do without two natures. And both show what is really at issue here: not whether the verse says something great about Jesus, but whether it says it about a man or about an eternal nature.

Book overview of the writings of Sozzini and the Polish Brethren

Exegesis: key terms

ho hyiós tou anthrôpou — “the Son of Man”

The verse does not choose its title by chance. “Son of Man” is in the Gospel of John the title under which Jesus speaks of his humiliation and his exaltation: lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness (3:14), glorified in the hour of death (12:23), equipped with authority to judge “because he is the Son of Man” (5:27). The title comes from Daniel 7:13, where “one like a son of man” is led before the Ancient of Days and receives dominion — he does not have it of himself.

That is the decisive point for 6:62: the sentence does not say that the Logos ascends. It says that the Son of Man ascends, to where he was before. Whoever wants to refer the predicate “was there before” to a divine nature must withdraw it from the subject that the sentence names. With that the whole interpretation stands or falls.

And in chapter 5:27 Christ’s authority hangs expressly on this, that he is the Son of Man — not on his being it in spite of his Godhead. John thus uses the title not as a contrast-word to the Godhead, but as the ground of authority. A title that designated the human side, to be thought away whenever metaphysical statements are made, would be senseless in this place.

hópou ên to próteron — “where he was before”

To próteron is an adverbial accusative and means simply “earlier,” “formerly,” “the first time.” It is a comparative without a fixed point of reference — it takes its measure from the moment of speaking. John uses the same word in 9:8 (“those who had seen him previously as a beggar”) and in 12:16, and in related form several times for a plain temporal “before” within the narrated history. Nowhere does it designate eternity.

Compare how the Gospel speaks when it means eternity: “in the beginning” (en archê, 1:1), “before the world existed” (pro tou ton kósmon einai, 17:5), “before the foundation of the world” (17:24). These are unambiguous formulas, and John has them at hand. In 6:62 he uses none of them. He says: earlier. To make out of an indefinite “earlier” a definite “from eternity” is not interpretation, but supplementation.

Add to this the imperfect ên (“he was”). It designates a tarrying in the past — a state that lasted and then ended. Exactly what a sojourn is. An eternal being would not be expressed in this way; in 1:1 John therefore expressly sets the ên over against the egéneto of becoming. In 6:62 every such signal is absent.

anabaínonta — “ascending”

The participle describes a process that one can see — and the verse says exactly that: “if you were to see” (theôrête, the verb of eyewitness). What the disciples will see is the ascension, as Acts 1:9 reports it: a bodily, visible process at which they “were looking on.” A divine nature does not ascend visibly; what ascends visibly is a body.

From this follows a conclusion that the Racovian Catechism draws sharply: ascending is a change of place, and a change of place is something a creature does. God is not here in order then to be there. If, then, the ascending can belong only to the man, then the goal of the ascent — “to where he was before” — must also be a place at which this man was before. Otherwise the sentence would be broken within itself: its verb human, its goal divine.

eàn oun theôrête … — the sentence without an apodosis

Grammatically v. 62 is a protasis (eàn + subjunctive) to which the apodosis is missing. Classical rhetoric calls this aposiopesis — the deliberate falling silent. German translations render it in different ways: Luther supplements it as a question (“What if …?”), the Einheitsübersetzung sets ellipsis points, the Elberfelder lets the sentence end open. All three show the same thing: here stands a little hole in the text.

Both possible supplements have long been proposed, and they go in opposite directions. If one supplements “… will you not then take offense all the more?”, then the ascent is a heightening of the offense. If one supplements “… then you will grasp that my speech was meant spiritually,” then it dissolves it. The second supplement has v. 63 in its favour, which follows immediately and delivers exactly this dissolution.

In both cases, however, it holds: a sentence that withholds its assertion is a conceivably weak foundation for a doctrine about the essence of Christ. Dogmas are not built on ellipses. Whoever wants to prove pre-existence from v. 62 must first invent the apodosis that the evangelist did not write — and then find in this self-written apodosis what he already believed anyway.

Comparison of interpretations

Logical arguments

From the wording, the sentence form, the context and the testimony of the Socinian teachers, the following arguments result:

1. Argument from the named subject. The verse says “the Son of Man,” not “the Word.” Whoever ascribes the predicate “was there before” to a nature other than the one named exchanges the subject of the sentence. Such an exchange needs a proof — and this proof cannot come from the sentence that already presupposes it.
2. Argument from the aposiopesis. The apodosis is missing. A sentence without a main clause asserts nothing; it asks. From a question without an answer no dogma can be derived without first writing the answer into it oneself.
3. Argument from to próteron. “Earlier” is a relative time index, measured from the moment of speaking. John has unambiguous eternity formulas at hand (“in the beginning,” “before the world existed”) and uses none of them here. Where the text chooses an indefinite word, the interpretation may not substitute a definite one.
4. Argument from v. 63. One line later the speaker himself says: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.” Whoever presses v. 62 in a literal-metaphysical way does with it exactly what v. 63 forbids for the discourse as a whole.
5. Argument from the ascent. Ascending is a change of place, and God does not change his place. The ascent can therefore, as the Racovian Catechism holds, not belong to Christ “by virtue of that divine nature …, but by virtue of the human.” A human verb, however, requires a goal that a man can reach.
6. Argument from seeing. “If you were to see” (theôrête) announces eyewitness, and Acts 1:9-11 reports it: a visible, bodily process. An invisible nature cannot be seen ascending. The verse promises a spectacle that only a body can offer.
7. Argument from the communicatio idiomatum. Sozzini’s example decides it: no one says “the soul is washed in the bath,” although body and soul are more closely joined than anything else. If the closest connection permits no exchange of properties, the doctrine of natures cannot ground one. The figure is an aid that cannot bear its own presupposition.
8. Argument from John 3:13. The same Gospel says that the Son of Man ascended into heaven — in the Greek in the past tense, before he spoke these words; and “who was in heaven” is, as Sozzini notes with Erasmus and Beza, readable from the Greek. Whoever interprets 6:62 of eternity must interpret 3:13 against its own tenses.
9. Argument from John 6:46. In the same chapter it says: “Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father.” That is a statement about experience, not about essence. God does not see God; a man who was with God has seen him.
10. Argument from the language of sending. “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (17:18) — the same words for Christ and for the apostles. And Paul says that God sent his Son, “born of woman” (Gal 4:4): thus sent after he was born. If sending proved pre-existence, the Twelve would have pre-existed too.

Objections and Socinian answers

Objection 1: “‘Where he was before’ can only mean eternity.”

The objection equates what the text distinguishes: to have been there and to come from there. Enoch was taken away (Genesis 5:24), Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven (2 Kings 2:11), Paul was caught up to the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:2-4) — and from none of these three has anyone ever concluded that he was eternal or divine by nature. A man can have been in heaven without coming from there. Scripture knows examples enough of this; the interpretation may not overlook them when they happen to be inconvenient.

And the time index does not carry the interpretation. To próteron means “earlier” — measured from him who says it, at the moment in which he says it. John disposes of formulas for eternity and applies them where he means them: “in the beginning was the Word,” “the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” Here he does not apply them. It is methodologically not permitted to lend the indefinite word the meaning of the definite one and then to declare the difference meaningless.

Finally the objection falls back upon itself. It says: whoever comes from heaven is more than a man. But the verse does not say “the Son of God,” it says “the Son of Man.” The objection must therefore first assert that by the Son of Man the man is not meant — and thereby it does not prove pre-existence from the verse, but places it into it.

Objection 2: “The rapture before the public ministry is freely invented.”

The reproach hits a sore point and deserves an honest answer: yes, the Gospels do not narrate this rapture. Nor does Sozzini appeal to a report, but to an inference — to what John 3:13 states in the past tense and what 3:32, 6:46 and 8:26 presuppose: that this man has seen and heard what he speaks of. From these statements he infers the event that explains them, and holds it to be “so probable that it could not have happened otherwise at all.” One may hold the inference too bold. But it is an inference from sentences of the text, not an invention alongside it.

Above all, however: the objection would only be decisive if the other side got by without additions of its own. It does not. It introduces an eternal generation that no Gospel narrates; two natures that no verse names; and a figure of speech that exchanges the named subject for an unnamed one. Sozzini’s remonstrance is at this point factual, not polemical: before one interprets the sacred testimonies “in this strange way,” one would have had to “prove openly from other passages” that eternal generation and that double nature. Whoever reproaches an addition to the text must count his own additions.

And the argumentation does not hang on the rapture. Sozzini himself records that “most” have interpreted the ascending into heaven as a penetrating to the knowledge of divine things — a figurative reading that accomplishes the same without assuming an unnarrated event. Whoever rejects the rapture can go this way. What remains in both cases is the finding on which the dispute hangs: the subject of the sentence is a man.

Objection 3: “The whole chapter speaks of the bread that comes down from heaven.”

The objection has seen the structure of the chapter correctly — and passes over what it treats of. The “coming down from heaven” is in John 6 the language of the manna: Israel ate the bread from heaven in the wilderness (v. 31, with appeal to Psalm 78:24). The manna did not pre-exist; it came from God. Precisely in this sense the Racovian Catechism speaks of the “descending” as something that can be understood in a figurative sense, as James 1:17 says: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights”; or as Revelation 21:2 sees the holy city “coming down out of heaven from God.” No one concludes from this that gifts and cities eternally pre-exist.

Now the Catechism concedes — and this is remarkable — expressly that one may also understand it in the proper sense: “which we very gladly concede.” But then, so runs its answer, it holds “of no other … than of the Son of Man,” and one lands again at the same finding: it is a man of whom this is said. Both ways — the figurative and the proper — lead past the two-natures doctrine. The objection would only be conclusive if a coming down from heaven necessarily meant a prior being-there of a divine nature. But precisely that is the disputed assertion.

And the detail page on John 6:38 shows how the usage functions within the same chapter: “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” The half-sentence that follows interprets the one that precedes: to have come from heaven means here to act on another’s commission. That is the language of sending, not the language of essence.

Objection 4: “Otherwise the verse would be no answer to the offense.”

The heightening remains even without eternity, and a very tangible one at that. These disciples take offense at a man from Nazareth, whose father and mother they know (v. 42) and who expects them to eat his flesh. The announcement that they would see this man ascend bodily into heaven is no small heightening, but the greatest conceivable on earth. The offense in v. 60 is not directed against too low a Christology, but against a speech they held to be madness. The reference to the ascension strikes them in the same place — only harder.

Moreover, the objection assumes that the missing apodosis is a heightening of the offense. But it can just as well be its dissolution: “If you see that — then you will understand that I did not speak of chewing and swallowing.” For this supplement the immediately following verse speaks: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all” (v. 63). The speaker himself dissolves the offense, and indeed by the instruction to hear spiritually. Whoever fills the withheld apodosis with a statement of eternity fills it against the direction in which the next sentence points.

And finally: even if the heightening reading were right, it would prove nothing about the essence. It would prove that something greater is impending. What this greater thing is, the verse says — the Son of Man, ascending. The question whether this Son of Man has two natures is thereby not touched, but only postponed.

Objection 5: “John 17:5 says the same thing more clearly — the glory before the world existed.”

One may read them together — but then in both directions. John 17:5 stands in a prayer whose language one cannot abandon halfway: a few verses later the same speaker prays for his disciples that he has “given them the glory” “that you have given me” (17:22), and that they should see his glory that the Father has given him, “because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (17:24). The love with which God loved him before the world existed is love toward one who was not yet there — a decree, not a being-together. Whoever takes 17:5 as proof of a real pre-temporal existence must take 17:22 as proof of the pre-existence of the apostles. The detailed discussion stands on the page on John 17:5.

The Racovian Catechism reads the passage as a determination in the decree of God: what God has decreed is already real with him before it happens — just as the lamb is “foreknown” “before the foundation of the world” and yet “made manifest in the last times” (1 Peter 1:20). That this manner of speaking is current in the New Testament, Ephesians 1:4 shows: God has chosen us “before the foundation of the world.” No one concludes from this that the Ephesians existed before the world.

Above all, however, the objection makes the weaker passage the measure of the stronger. In 6:62 there stands no “before the world existed”; there stands “before.” Instead of asking why John speaks differently here, the objection declares the difference immaterial and reads the one passage into the other. Philologically one goes the reverse way: one takes each passage at its own word and guards against supplementing the vocabulary of one verse from another.

Biblical cross-references

The following passages open up John 6:62 in its context:

• John 3:13 — “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” The key parallel: the same title, the same verb, the same question — and in the Greek the past tense, spoken long before the ascension. Sozzini notes with Erasmus and Beza that “who was in heaven” is also readable.
• John 6:38 — “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” In the same chapter, and the second half interprets the first: to have come down from heaven means to act on another’s commission.
• John 6:46 — “Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father.” Sixteen verses before 6:62 and the best commentary on it: it is about seeing and hearing, that is, about experience — and God does not see God.
• John 6:63 — “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.” The key to interpretation that the speaker himself supplies one line later. It forbids exactly the literal pressing that the metaphysical reading of v. 62 practises.
• Acts 1:9-11 — “And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up.” That is the seeing that v. 62 announces: a bodily, visible ascent. The angels add that he will “come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” — as the same man.
• John 17:5 — “the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” The unambiguous eternity formula that 6:62 precisely does not use — and which is for its part measured, in the same prayer, by the glory that Christ has given to the disciples (17:22).
• John 16:28 — “I came from the Father and have come into the world; and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.” The same double movement as in 6:62 — and the same finding: the language of sending, which the Racovian Catechism defuses with John 17:18 (“so I have sent them”).
• Galatians 4:4 — “God sent forth his Son, born of woman.” The Catechism draws from this that Christ was not sent before he was born, but after he was born. Sending follows birth; it proves no existence before it. Cf. Galatians 4:4.
• 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 — Paul knows a man “who was caught up to the third heaven.” The proof that Scripture knows of a rapture of men without anyone inferring eternity or Godhead from it — as already with Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11).

Theological consequences

Summary

John 6:62 is a narrow verse that is meant to bear a great load. It names its subject — the Son of Man —, it says “before” and not “before the world existed,” and it breaks off before it is spoken to the end. Three observations that are individually inconspicuous and together decisive: from a sentence without an apodosis, with a relative time index and a human subject, the eternal pre-existence of a second nature cannot be won. One can lay it in; one cannot find it.

Sozzini’s answer is here not the more cautious one, but the more literal. He refers the verse “truly and properly to that man Jesus of Nazareth” and holds that this man was caught up into heaven after his birth and before his preaching, “in order to hear there from God himself what was to be revealed to the human race through him.” The Racovian Catechism makes of this an answer to the question whence Christ had his teaching: he ascended, saw the Father, heard what he was to say, and was then sent and endowed with the Spirit. One need not share this interpretation — Sozzini himself records that most understood the ascending figuratively, as a penetrating to the knowledge of divine things. Both ways lead past the two-natures doctrine, because both remain with the subject of the sentence.

What the traditional reading lacks is not depth, but a tool that it cannot give itself. It needs the communicatio idiomatum in order to say “Son of Man” and to mean “divine nature” — and must first presuppose the doctrine of natures in order to read it out of the verse. Sozzini’s objection therefore remains unanswered: no one says that the soul is washed in the bath, although body and soul are so closely joined that from both there exists one and the same man. But where the closest connection permits no exchange of properties, there the looser one does not permit it either. What stands there remains: the Son of Man will ascend to where he was before — and the disciples will see him, as Acts 1:9 reports it: a man, lifted up before their eyes.