A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.
ἡ
γυνὴ ὅταν τίκτῃ λύπην ἔχει ὅτι ἦλθεν ἡ ὥρα αὐτῆς· ὅταν δὲ γεννήσῃ τὸ
παιδίον οὐκ ἔτι μνημονεύει τῆς θλίψεως διὰ τὴν χαρὰν ὅτι ἐγεννήθη ἄνθρωπος εἰς τὸν κόσμον.
-- John 16:21
John obviously had to hand τὸ παιδίον to express human being without distinction of sex if he had meant that again, but he uses ἄνθρωπος instead. The birth of a man-child was a default value of Jewish women.
Thayer was infamous in his own time for denying the "unerring verbal accuracy" of the New Testament, claiming that the Lutherans didn't make the Bible the "standard" in the same way as his fellow American Congregational Calvinists had done.
Thayer, lauded for his devotion to the truth by his contemporaries in the scholarly community, believed in a myth.
Thayer got his information second hand, not from personal knowledge of the history of Lutheranism, relying instead on Philip Schaff, who himself was notably ignorant of much about Luther, especially about the enthusiasm for the Formula of Concord in his own time, which states in the opening:
We believe, teach, and confess that the sole rule and standard according
to which all dogmas together with [all] teachers should be estimated
and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and of
the New Testament alone . . ..
Thayer obviously never got the Lutheran memo, either, to let John interpret John. Circumcision was for an ἄνθρωπος after all (John 7:23).
Back in those days, apparently, you could in fact tell a Harvard man quite a lot . . . of hooey.
