birth: How can a person once grown old be born again? Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he? The tone of his response is unclear. It may be a total lack of comprehension, even touched with sarcasm. Or it could also be a rabbinic mode of discourse, which draws an extreme conclusion from a speaker’s statement in order to force the speaker to explain himself more fully. Obviously, a man cannot be born physically from his mother twice, and so Nicodemus invites Jesus to