> The water refers to the normal process of physical birth. Even in
> English we still say of that a woman's "water" breaks when she is
> giving birth. The child is born "from water" (EX UDATOS). Likewise,
> we must be born from spirit (EK PNEUMATOS).
One difficulty here would perhaps be that this interpretation does away
with the ambivalence of ANWQEN ("from above", "again") in v. 3 --
supposing, of course, that EX hUDATOS KAI PNEUMATOS in v. 5 elaborates
on the meaning of ANWQEN. (I think it is Carson who makes this point in
his commentary on John).
Adrian Popa