I Am — Hearing Scripture

Of all the phrases Jesus ever used, the smallest and least obviously remarkable is I am.

In English it’s two words and three letters. It’s the kind of phrase a child speaks before they speak much else. I am here. I am hungry. I am six. It’s among the most ordinary constructions in the language. So when Jesus, in John’s Gospel, scatters I am statements throughout his teaching — I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the good shepherd, I am the way and the truth and the life — most modern readers hear those as warm metaphors. Jesus is telling us what he is like. He is like bread for the soul. He is like light in the dark. He is like a shepherd for his people. The phrase I am is just the connective tissue that holds the metaphor together. It doesn’t seem to be doing any work of its own.

That’s the English again. The Greek is doing more.

To get there, we have to go back, as we’ve done in so many of these chapters, to the Hebrew Bible. There’s one moment in the Hebrew Bible that towers over every conversation about God’s name. It’s on the side of a mountain in Midian, where a runaway named Moses stands in front of a bush that’s burning but not burning up. God speaks to him from the bush and tells him to go back to Egypt, to confront Pharaoh, and to lead Israel out of slavery. Moses asks, reasonably, what name he should give the people when they ask which god has sent him. And God answers him with one of the most enigmatic self-disclosures in all of scripture.

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’“ (Exodus 3:14, NIV)

The Hebrew is ehyeh asher ehyeh. The verb ehyeh is the first-person singular of the Hebrew verb to be. I am. Or, since Hebrew verbs carry more time-flexibility than English ones, sometimes translated I will be what I will be. The point is that God’s name, the name God gives Moses to give the people, is built directly out of the verb to be. God is the one who is. The God who exists. The God whose very name is a form of the verb to be. From this Hebrew root hayah — to be — comes the four-letter divine name YHWH that God then gives Moses in the very next verse, the name so holy that observant Jews to this day won’t pronounce it aloud. The name behind the name I AM.

That moment at the burning bush hangs over the entire Hebrew Bible. Centuries later, the prophet Isaiah, writing to Israel in exile, has God speak in a striking pattern of self-revelation that picks up the same theme. Across Isaiah 40 through 55 — the book of comfort, as some scholars call it — God repeatedly declares his identity with a short, dense Hebrew phrase: ani hu. Literally, I am he. It appears at the high points of Isaiah’s vision of God’s coming salvation. I, the LORD — with the first of them and with the last — I am he. You are my witnesses… so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. In Isaiah, ani hu is one of God’s most direct self-naming formulas — the way the LORD declares, again and again, that he is the unique God of Israel and there’s no other.

And here’s the connection. When Isaiah was translated into Greek, in the famous translation called the Septuagint that Jewish communities used widely throughout the first century, ani hu was rendered into Greek as — egō eimi. Just those two words. I am. The Greek translators reached for the simplest, plainest form of the verb to be in the first person, and used it as a fixed translation for the Hebrew name-formula. By Jesus’s time, egō eimi wasn’t just a phrase. In the Greek scriptures the synagogues read aloud every week, egō eimi was a divine signature. It was the phrase the LORD used to declare himself. The two smallest, plainest Greek words for I am had become, in the right setting, the way God identified himself.

Which brings us back to Jesus.

The Gospel of John is the Gospel where Jesus says egō eimi the most. The phrase appears throughout — in the famous “I am the…” sayings (bread, light, door, shepherd, resurrection, way, vine) where Jesus picks up an Old Testament image of God and applies it to himself, and in another set of sayings where egō eimi appears without any predicate at all. Just I am. No “I am the bread.” No “I am the light.” Just I am, and then silence, with whatever the implied predicate was left hanging in the air.

The clearest, most confrontational example of the absolute I am comes in John chapter 8. Jesus has been in an extended argument with a group of religious leaders in the temple. The argument is about his identity, his authority, and his relationship to Abraham, whom Jesus’s opponents are claiming as their spiritual father. At the height of the exchange, Jesus says something extraordinary about Abraham — that Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad. They snap back at him: you are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham? And Jesus answers:

Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am! (John 8:58, NIV)

Before Abraham was born — egō eimi.

There’s a grammatical strangeness right at the heart of that sentence that English readers usually miss, because English smooths it over. Jesus doesn’t say before Abraham was, I was. He doesn’t say before Abraham came along, I was already there. That would be a claim about pre-existence — an unusual claim, certainly, but not a divine claim. Jesus says before Abraham was born — I am. Present tense. The verb sits exactly where the divine self-naming formula sits in Isaiah and at the burning bush. Abraham came into being, in the past, and lived and died as creatures do. But Jesus is. Continuously. Eternally. The same way the LORD is in the Hebrew Bible.

The audience hears it. We know they hear it because of what happens next:

At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds. (John 8:59, NIV)

Stoning was the prescribed Jewish penalty for blasphemy. Picking up stones in the temple courts wasn’t a symbolic gesture. It was the audience saying, in real time, what you just said is a capital crime against God. Jesus’s egō eimi, in front of the right audience, in the right setting, landed the way a divine self-claim lands. They didn’t mishear him. They heard him exactly. And they reached for the stones.

The British New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado — who spent most of his career as Professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology at the University of Edinburgh, and whose major work Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity is one of the most influential treatments of how the first Christians came to worship Jesus while remaining monotheistic Jews — argues that the I am sayings in John are part of a much wider New Testament pattern in which Jesus is being identified with the unique God of Israel. The first Christians didn’t arrive at the divinity of Jesus by abandoning their Jewish monotheism. They got there because the Jesus they had known — the one who spoke, who taught, who said egō eimi — gave them no other place to land. The Greek of John’s Gospel preserves that recognition for us. The same two words the LORD had used to identify himself in Isaiah, Jesus used to identify himself in front of the temple.

This also reframes the famous “I am the…” sayings. I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. In English they read as warm metaphors. But each of those metaphors is, in the Hebrew Bible, an image of God himself. The Lord is my light and my salvation sings Psalm 27. The Lord is my shepherd sings Psalm 23. Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD says Deuteronomy 8. In every one of those I am statements, Jesus is taking a divine image from his Hebrew scriptures and saying — that is me. The shepherd of Psalm 23 — that’s me. The light of Psalm 27 — that’s me. The bread the LORD gives Israel — that’s me. The English makes them sound like metaphors. The Jewish ear hears them as a series of staggering claims, each one beginning with the formula God had used to name himself.

What Jesus did with egō eimi across his ministry was something for which there was no good first-century precedent. He spoke as God speaks. He used God’s name-formula in the first person. He did it gently sometimes, embedded in the warm metaphors of John 6 and John 10. He did it sharply sometimes, in the absolute form of John 8 that got the stones in the air. But the pattern is consistent, and it’s consistent enough that the people listening to him kept reaching the same conclusion. He was either making the most blasphemous claim a Jewish teacher could make, or he was telling the truth. They didn’t consider a third option.

Reading this yourself

The next time you come across an I am statement in John’s Gospel — and especially if you read straight through John for a couple of evenings — pay attention to the simple Greek phrase underneath the English. Try saying it aloud in Greek: egō eimi. Four small syllables, two words, the smallest possible self-declaration. Then read whatever Jesus says next as if you were a first-century Jewish listener with the Septuagint of Isaiah in your ear. I am the light. I am the bread. I am the good shepherd. Before Abraham was born — I am. The verses won’t sound like metaphors anymore. They’ll sound like what they were — Jesus taking the most loaded name-formula in his scriptures and turning it on himself, again and again, in front of audiences who knew exactly what they were hearing.

The text didn’t change. The Greek didn’t change. The first audience heard egō eimi and they heard the LORD of Isaiah. They heard the God of the burning bush. They heard the divine signature, used in the first person, by a Galilean rabbi standing in their temple. The English I am sounds like the most ordinary phrase imaginable, and Christians will keep reading the sayings of Jesus in English. But once you can hear what the original audience heard, I am stops being the connective tissue of a metaphor and starts being what it always was — the name behind the words. The name God spoke to Moses out of the fire. The name Isaiah heard the LORD speaking in exile. The name a young rabbi from Galilee took on his own lips, and wouldn’t stop using until the day they took him out of the city to kill him for it.