John the Baptist has not just one of the greatest roles in salvation history, but one of the great lines in the Bible. The day after John baptized Jesus, “he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’” The sacrificial image draws on rich symbols from the Old Testament, but since the phrase “lamb of God” appears only in the Gospel of John, does it reflect John’s creation of this descriptive metaphor for Jesus? Possibly. Or it might be that John the Baptist’s contribution of the “lamb of God” is attributable to the translation by the Gospel of John of an early Christian phrase found elsewhere in the New Testament. This does not mean that John the Baptist did not say it, but that its unique form in John’s Gospel draws on one facet of the original phrase.

We know from the baptism narratives and elsewhere that Jesus is the “child of God” and “son of God,” but he is also called the “servant of God” in Mt 12:48, Acts 4:27 and Acts 4:30. The word translated “servant” in these passages is the Greek pais, which in its primary sense means “child.” The word evokes this range of meanings, identifying Jesus as both a “child” and a “servant” of God. The reason for translating pais as “servant” and not “child” is that this identification of Jesus is based on some of the Servant Songs in Isaiah, like Isaiah 42, which is cited in Mt 12:48, Isaiah 49 and Isaiah 52-53.

In the Hebrew versions of these Servant Songs, though, the word used to indicate “servant” is the Hebrew ebed. Early Christians identified Jesus with the “servant” in the Isaian songs, though in the original historical context, the servant might have been seen as Israel, the prophet or some other unidentified historical figure. Why do these words matter? They matter because although “servant of God” or “son of God” seem distant in meaning from “lamb of God,” they might be connected in the original context of John the Baptist and Jesus.

What seems like a Johannine innovation might go back to the earliest strata of the church. The 20th-century biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias claimed that the clue to understanding John’s use of “lamb,” which seems so distant from “child” and “servant,” is the Aramaic word talya. Jeremias said that the “lamb” (amnos) of God who takes away the sin of the world in John 1:29 was a translation of the Aramaic talya, which could be translated “boy,” “child” or “servant,” but also as “lamb.” When Jesus was described as the talya of God, Aramaic speakers of the earliest church would have heard “child” of God, or “son” of God, or “servant” of God or “lamb” of God.

As the Gospel was translated into Greek, however, choices had to be made about how to explain who Jesus was and his mission for the world. Greek used two words to describe Jesus, pais for “child” and “servant” and amnos for “lamb.” Hebrew itself needed more than one word to make all of these identifications, as ebed could stand for “child” or “servant” but not for “lamb.” Aramaic, however, only needed one word to supply the whole range of meaning. John chose to focus on presenting Jesus as the “lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” but in so doing John just draws out another aspect of Jesus’ identity, one which is inherent in his call as “servant” (ebed) in Is 49:6.

In that passage God says of the servant, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” As the servant of God, Jesus, too, is sent on a universal mission, as is the son of God, the child of God, the lamb of God, who atones for the sins of the world. All of these metaphors describe the one person of the Messiah. They point to aspects of Jesus’ complete identity: the unique one who gathered up into himself and fulfilled all the hopes and images of the prophets.

This article appears in January 6-13 2014.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.