In Greek the pronouns I and you are in focus.

I talk about what my Father has shown me is more literally “I talk about what I have seen with the Father.” New English Bible translates “I am revealing in words what I saw in my Father’s presence”; Jerusalem Bible has “What I, for my part, speak of is what I have seen with my Father.” There is no problem in translating “the Father” as my Father. It is done by Good News Translation, New English Bible Jerusalem Bible, and Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch, and in this context, “the Father” obviously means my Father. Good News Translation attempts to make this verse easier for its readers to understand by following several other translational techniques. First, it reverses the Greek order of the clauses what my Father has shown me and I talk about, to achieve a more natural English sentence structure. Second, it takes the Greek expression “what I have seen with the Father” to mean what my Father has shown me. Thus Good News Translation takes the phrase “with the Father” (New English Bible “in my Father’s presence”) to have the force of agency, or means. The subject of this clause in Greek (“I”) can be shifted into the object position in English (Good News Translation me), and my Father can be made into the subject of the clause by the use of a causative verb (Good News Translation has shown), in place of the simple verb (“have seen”) of the Greek text. The only problem in doing so is that, in the Greek text, the focus is more on “what I have seen” than on what my Father has shown. It may be argued that Good News Translation is here reading an alternative Greek text (“from the Father”), on the basis of which one could more easily support its exegesis of this verse, but that is not really so.

Two observations are necessary regarding the clause but you do what your father has told you. (1) The verb which Good News Translation translates as an indicative (you do) may also be taken as an imperative (“do”), since the form would be the same in Greek. (2) The phrase your father is literally “the father”; it may mean either “the father” in an absolute sense (= “God the Father”) as in the first half of the verse, or as the father of the Jews (your father = “the Devil”). It is possible to translate the verb as an imperative and combine it with the interpretation that “the father” refers to God: “Do what God the Father has told you.” Good News Translation takes the other possible combination (indicative plus reference to the father of the Jews = “the Devil”); most other modern translations agree with this interpretation (for example, New English Bible, New American Bible, Jerusalem Bible, Moffatt, Phillips, La Sainte Bible: Nouvelle version Segond révisée, Luther, Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch).

The perfect tense of the verb (Greek “I have seen”; Good News Translation my Father has shown) and the phrase “with my father” both imply a pre-existent knowledge possessed by Jesus which continues into the present. This is contrasted with the aorist verb (Greek you “heard”; Good News Translation has told) which would refer to some moment in history, either to the giving of the Law through Moses or the proclamation of God’s truth through Jesus Christ. However, most translators seem to prefer to make no distinction between the tense of these verbs, rendering both in the perfect tense.

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of John. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1980. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .