“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.”
— King James Bible translators, Gospel of John (1611)
Context
In the Temple courts Jesus is locked in dispute with hostile listeners who scoff that a man not yet fifty could claim to have known Abraham. He answers with this doubled affirmation and then the startling clause 'Before Abraham was, I am,' appropriating the divine self-naming of Exodus 3:14. His hearers immediately take up stones to kill him for blasphemy (John 8:59).
How the repetition works
The catalogue's other scriptural epizeuxis, the seraphim's 'Holy, holy, holy,' uses threefold repetition as a Hebrew superlative. Here the doubling does something different: 'Verily, verily' renders the Greek 'amen amen,' a formula unique to John's Gospel in which Jesus swears to the truth of a statement before he makes it. The repetition is therefore a solemn oath rather than an intensifier of feeling, certifying the veracity of what follows — a guarantee-of-truth function no other entry on the site illustrates.