Summary John Chapter 9

This is being published on Good Friday, 2024, at 3:15, a quarter-hour after the traditional time of Jesus’ death. The tradition I was taught as a lad at Maple Grove St Michaels is that he was on the cross from noon until 3:00.

According to my records, I have not posted since late January, a full two months ago. Since I’m no longer working for the man–or anyone–I should theoretically have a plethora of time. Theoretically. But let’s also be honest: I got involved in reading  piece of theology written in Latin by St Bonaventure, who went on to found a university in Olean, NY. Naturally, doing the translating took longer than expected, but I cannot stress enough the importance of reading other primary sources in their original Greek or Latin if one wishes to have a reasonable understanding of how other languages work. Bonaventure wrote in the 12th century so he uses a bunch of “standard” words rather differently than Classical authors. This is good practice to help broaden one’s approach: if you’re paying attention, you will become aware of alternative nuances which may color your understanding of what the text could mean. If you approach a work like the NT with this more open understanding, you will realize that some passages can be read in different ways. My latest is paradidomai, “to hand down or hand over”. In that crucial passage of 1 Cor 11:23-29, Paul uses the word at least twice. Once it is translated, pretty much universally, as he “handed down” the word that have become the words of the consecration of the bread in Catholic & Episcopalian (and other?) masses. The other time it is translated as “betrayed”. Both are valid. But–a key aspect of the Passion Narrative is based on that reading of “betrayed”. This is the closest piece we have approaching a primary source for the Lord’s Supper and what happened. If that is not “betrayed”, then the whole Judas thing disappears. Think about that.

Anyway, the point here is that learning “NT Greek” is good, but, by itself, it won’t give you a real grasp of how the Greek works and how reading the original will provide new insights. Of course, I am a Classicist, and we are known to be snobs, and with justification. We are snobbish and pompous and those are our good qualities.

To the text.

The chapter tells the story of how Jesus gives sight to a man blind from birth. Since this was congenital, we cannot say that Jesus “restored” the man’s sight since he had never had it. This detail is meant to emphasize the wonder and power of the mighty work–remember, there are no ‘miracles’ in the NT. Restoration is more readily effected since the apparatus was in place and operational at some point. Jesus is, in effect, creating the man’s sight from scratch, if not quite ex nihilo. And it appears that this is the only instance where Jesus actually gave someone sight for the first time; in other instances, Jesus restored a faculty that had been lost. In fact, John stresses the point in Verse 32 where the healed man says that it has never been heard that someone born blind has had sight given to them. This does help explain why the authorities drag his parents into the discussion. This emphasis explains why the newly-sighted man suggests that this is a sign. More on that later.

The most pertinent passage of this chapter, IMO, starts with Verse 6. This is where Jesus spits on dirt to make mud. As we mentioned in the commentary, this detailed description–or prescription– for restoring or initiating a man’s sight appeared in Mark, but was scrubbed from Matthew and Luke for reasons we can only guess. The process described can only be called a “magical practice”, as I have named it; that is to say it’s the sort of thing one might expect to find in a grimoire. For those who may not know, a grimoire is a book of how to cast spells; sort of a magician’s cookbook, as it were. I’ve read excerpts from a few different ones. I’m about halfway through translating Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy from the original Latin. First, “occult” is misleading. The Latin is de Occulta Philosophia, so the root is obvious, but the meaning is not. This is one of those words where the meaning has shifted over time; occulta, simply means “hidden”, but the meaning can be completely non-sinister. For example, kids might play a game of occulta-and-go-seek. It can simply mean not obvious to the naked eye. Like magnetism. Or gravity. Both could be understood to be “occult” phenomena, or powers, according to the Latin meaning of the term. But in any case, Agrippa has hundreds of little “cures” or “prescriptions” involving body parts of various animals or stones to cure ailments or afflictions. It’s where the “Eye of newt/and toe of frog” came from in Macbeth, IV.1. The description of Jesus’ actions here–and in Mark–are fully consistent with the sort of thing that Agrippa would discuss a millennium-and-a-half later, 

And that is very interesting. Magic, as in the real thing with hocus-pocus and wands went in and out of favor amongst the Roman elite over the course of the first century. Tiberius was dead-set against it, and the records indicate that he executed a large number of magicians during his reign. Interestingly, Jesus was executed during the reign of Tiberius. Coincidence? I am increasingly of the opinion that it may not have been. I have come to suspect that Jesus was executed precisely because he was considered a magician. Pilate could easily have had Jesus arrested and executed as a magician and his boss Tiberius would have applauded the effort. Two points: First, there is solid and a not-insignificant amount of evidence that later pagans, into the second century and beyond, considered Jesus to have been a powerful magician, to the point that pagan magicians invoke Jesus as a power that can help cast an effective spell. His name appears on gemstones used as amulets, on lead tablets that were used to cast spells, and he is mentioned in pagan texts on magic. Second, Apollonius of Tyana–who has been called the “Pagan Jesus/Christ”, and whose name still gives the Vatican the willies–also had to fend off charges of being a magician. He, too, lived an ascetic life as a wandering teacher who cured people, and there were those who said he did it by magic. And “magic” at the time, carried heavy connotations of the invocation of spirits, who were not always benign.

So there was good reason for Matthew and Luke to scrub such magical practices from their versions of the gospel. It was a safe thing to do; it removed the possibility of misunderstandings and helped prevent Jesus’ name from falling into disrepute. It helped keep him respectable. This being the case, we have to ask why John put this back into his gospel? Of course, that brings up the question of whether or not John was aware of his predecessors. Personally, I find the idea that he was not to be rather ludicrous. There was an entity that can justifiably be called a “Church” by the time John wrote, and this Church kept things moving. I think that people don’t realize how much travel occurred within the Roman Empire in the First and Second Centuries. These were the years of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, and trade and commerce were thriving, and all sorts of people were traveling for all sorts of reasons. In fact, in the Second Century a chap named Pausanias wrote a what can only be described as a guidebook for tourists visiting Greece. The Christian communities communicated with each other. The Didache, written somewhere in the early-mid Second Century describes how communities should treat visiting preachers. These various communities were not isolated islands, but part of a network of believers. The aforementioned Apollonius of Tyana and Philipp the Apostle both supposedly traveled to India. Part of the reason people want to believe that John was not aware of the Synoptics is that this keeps John as an independent source, which bolsters the credibility of the records preserved in the gospels. But, as with Q, wishing it true don’t make it so.

The description of the process by which Jesus made the man whole is, while not verbatim, identical. The closeness of the details of the account can only have come about in two different ways. The first is that John read Mark. Otherwise, we almost have to posit that the early Christian communities continued a tradition of restoring sight by using saliva to make mud which is then applied to the eyes of the sufferer. Honestly, this argument would be easier to make, and make coherent, than the “argument” for Q. The ritual was described in the 70s, and then again 30-50 years later.

So why does John bring this back? Because it was omitted by Matthew and Luke? We have seen how ofttimes Luke restored things that had been in Mark that Matthew omitted. The Gerasene Demonaic is a good example of Luke restoring detail to the account that Matthew cut from his. Of course, it’s difficult not to suggest that the overall opinion of magic had changed since the times Matthew and Luke wrote. What had been scandalous, perhaps to the point of dangerous, for them had become benign in the subsequent generation.

Was Jesus a magician? Some people thought so. Josephus has an unusual term for Jesus: a man who performed paradoxōn ergōn, a man who did unexpected or extraordinary things, deeds one  normally wouldn’t expect. The word itself is rather unusual, rarely used by pagan writers and appearing less than a dozen times in the NT, and in most of these instances it is used to indicate someone (usually Jesus) who was not acting as one would expect a practicing Jew to act. Often this meant transgressions against the Sabbath. It’s difficult to tell what Josephus means by using the word; a single instance by an author is not really sufficient to get a sense of what s/he means by the word. It generally gets translated as “wonderful” as in the sense of a “wonder-worker”, but given the usage in the NT, one has to wonder what Josephus is saying about Jesus. Was he calling him a wonder worker? Or was he calling Jesus someone who did not behave as a pious Jew might be expected to behave? That’s how it’s used in the NT for the most part, and Josephus was a rough contemporary of Matthew and Luke.

That discussion ran longer than expected. Much longer, in fact. But in the final analysis it’s the most unusual aspect of the whole chapter. Most of the rest is something of a recapitulation of the themes that we have encountered to this point. Jesus is in contention with “The Jews”, the leading citizens and/or prominent members of the synagogue or the community. If you’ll recall, it’s not entirely clear where exactly Jesus is, and where this action unfolded. He was “passing by” and saw the man born blind. Not that the end of Chapter 8 is necessarily going to provide reasonable information on this, but he was in the Temple last chapter. If we are to assume, or infer, or surmise that he still is, that would make the authorities truly “The Jews”, the religious and more or less (puppet) secular leaders of the population of Jerusalem. With one exception, it’s interesting to note that the name of Caiaphas, who was supposedly the High Priest, does not occur in any of the gospels until we get to the Passion Narrative. That exception will crop up in Chapter 11 of John. I will have more to say on that when we get to it.

Regardless of where this occurred, we have the authorities refusing to accept that Jesus is an agent of God. The Man Born Blind is incredulous about this; surely, he said, Jesus has performed a Sign, and yet the authorities question whether he is from God? How can that be? This is largely a recapitulation of the interactions Jesus had with “The Jews” in most of the other chapters we’ve read. In some ways this is analogous to the “Messianic Secret” encountered in Mark. To underscore, we get the loaded question at the very end of the chapter when some of the Pharisees ask “are we blind?” I referred to this as a loaded question; perhaps “rhetorical question” is more accurate. Of course they are blind. That is why John is writing this gospel: to show the world just how blind “The Jews” were. After all, in this chapter Jesus performs an actual Sign and they ask how he can be from God if he doesn’t observe the Sabbath? How much more blind can one be? Recall that the crowed asked for–demanded?–a sign in Mark 10, and earlier in this gospel when Jesus crossed back to Caphernaum from feeding the 5,000. I guess they wanted it hand-delivered with a bow and an instruction manual and “SIGN” written in big red letters.

Really though, the insistence that this was, indeed, a sign just makes the inclusion of, and description of, the magical practice all that more curious. Why does God need to make a plaster? God made the eyes to begin with; surely he can retrofit an operational pair of them into a factory reject? The biggest problem that people had with magic was that it usually involved the invocation of a spirit, or daimon, or some lesser superhuman entity, and that these entities were often not to be trusted. God created the kosmos in six days ex nihilo, from nothing. And if Jesus is one with the father, the mere thought or intent should have been enough to give the man his sight.

Curious, indeed.