---

I. SEVERAL MIRACLES OF A SIMILAR KIND. The miracle here recorded was performed at Bethsaida Julias, or the northern Bethsaida, on the route from the north-east shore of the lake to Caesarea Philippi. It is related by St. Mark alone. The peculiarity of this miracle of restoring sight to the blind is the circumstance of its being wrought at twice; that is to say, the cure was progressive or gradual. In the ninth chapter of St. John's Gospel we have the account of a like miracle of opening the eyes of a blind man; but one peculiarity of the miracle there recorded consists in the fact that the man on whom the miracle was performed had been born blind. There is again the opening of the eyes of two blind men near Jericho, recorded in St. Matthew (20.), one of whom only is mentioned by St. Mark (10.) and by St. Luke (18.), and called by the patronymic Bartimaeus, or the son of Timaeus. There is also the record of another similar miracle in the ninth chapter of St. Matthew, when our Lord, after putting their faith to the test, cured two blind men in the house whither they had followed him. Besides these specially recorded cases, we have several references of a general kind to our Lord's healing of the blind. The great number of instances of this kind is accounted for by the fact that blindness is a disease much more common in the East than in the lands of the West, while several causes have been assigned for that prevalence, such as the small particles of dust and sand impinging on the eye, and persons sleeping in the open air at night.

II. THE CONDITION OF THIS MAN. This man was blind, but, as we shall see, he had not been born blind - he was not blind from birth. He had become blind from accident or disease. At all events, he was destitute of that most valuable sense, the sense of sight. He had been long a stranger to the beauties of nature. "The light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to see the sun;" but that sun, that light, those beauties, those bright colors, those lovely forms that appear in the heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the waters round the earth - all, all had long been to him a blank. He was in that state which Milton, in the days of his blindness, so poetically and pathetically deplores -

"Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the!cheerful ways of men
Cut off! and, for the book of knowledge fair.
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out." We know not whether this blind man had wife or child. It is probable he had; and, if so, when he rose in the morning his wife ministered unto him, his children clung to his knees and kissed him while he blessed them. They led him forth to the street or elsewhere out of doors. He could feel them, but could not behold them. Their smiles, their tears, their bright eyes, and sweet faces were to him unknown and by him unseen. All the region round Bethsaida was charming - the glancing waters of the lake, the lovely flowers of the Galilean hills, were a sight worth seeing; but what were all these to this blind man? The district might as well have been dark and dismal, bleak and black; at any rate, a blank, a night without moon or star, midnight with its darkness visible, even "darkness that might be felt."

III. PECULIARITY IN THE MODE OF CURE. Here the peculiarity is twofold:

1. Jesus took him by the hand and led him out of the town.

2. The cure was effected progressively, or at twice. What reason can we assign for the former peculiarity? Why did he conduct him outside the town? Several reasons have been assigned. Some say that our Lord thereby meant to intimate the unworthiness, through unbelief, of the inhabitants of this town, or rather village (κώμη), and his consequent dissatisfaction with them; this, of course, is a mere conjecture. Others suppose, with more apparent reason, that, as the process of cure in this case was more than usually protracted, our Lord led the man out of the town in order to be free from interruption or any obstruction on the part of the crowd, just as in the preceding chapter he is said to have taken the deaf mute aside from the multitude. Bengel, with his usual ingenuity, conjectures the cause to be the Saviour's intention that, when the blind recovered sight, his eyes might rest on the more cheerful aspect of the sky and of the works of God in nature - that is, in the country - than of the works of man in the town. The thought is a beautiful one, but only the product of a fertile imagination. Of two remaining reasons, which have been suggested with considerable plausibility, one is the avoidance of witnesses on account of the somewhat disagreeable application of spittle, or saliva, to the person of the invalid, exactly as in the case of the deaf mute already referred to; and the other is that our Lord, by varying the mode of cure, "sometimes doing more, sometimes less, and sometimes nothing," signified his freedom from any fixed form of gesture or manipulation. Some, again, reject with regard to the saliva all these, holding that our Lord meant to graft the supernatural on the natural, the saliva being an ordinary medical application in such cases. We are rather inclined to adopt the view of variation, for the purpose of proving independence of any specific or stereotyped mode in such miraculous performance. With respect to the progressiveness of the cure a similar diversity of opinion prevails. Theophylact attributes it to the imperfect faith of the blind man himself, and of those who brought him to the Saviour; others imagine that on a sudden recovery of sight the man would have been unable to distinguish objects from each other. But to this latter, which proceeds on the assumption of his being born blind, it is sufficient to reply

(1) that this man had not been born blind, as is implied in the word ἀποκατεστάθη - he was restored to or reinstated in his once normal condition; and

(2) he was able to discriminate trees from men, so that he must have seen both before this blindness supervened. Before Berkeley's time visual distance was traced to an original law of our constitution, and considered an original perception; but the bishop proved, as is very generally admitted, that our information on this subject of the distance of objects is acquired by experience and association; while, if we judge of the distance of objects solely from the visible impressions on the retina, we fall into great mistakes. The case, too, of Cheselden, who had been born blind, appeared to confirm the theory of Berkeley, for when couched he at first had no correct notions of distances, but supposed all objects to touch and to be in close contact with the eye. It was gradually he corrected his visible by his tangible impressions, and gained a correct understanding of the situation of the objects that surrounded him, as well as of their shape and size. Had the blind man in this passage been thus born blind, we could readily concede the necessity of a gradual operation - first to get his eyes opened, and secondly to gain correct notions of the objects about him. No gradual miracle of this sort was required in the case of this man, because he had originally possessed the sense of sight and lost it. The true cause appears to be either an evidence on the part of the Saviour that he is not tied down to any particular mode of operation, but manifests his mercy in divers manners, according to his sovereign good pleasure; or, if this theory be not accepted, the cause may be assigned to the symbolic nature of the miracle, as exhibiting the gradual recovery of spiritual eyesight, the removal of spiritual blindness being, for the most part and with some rare exceptions, gradual and progressive.

IV. EXPLANATION OF TERMS WITH DIFFERENCES OF READING.

1. Our Lord led the blind man out, having taken him by the hand, which is a very expressive action, for it is a guide which the blind, whether physically or spiritually, so much need; and this is just the kind of guide here mentioned - a Divine and therefore infallible Guide. This guidance is expressed in the received text by ἐξήγαγεν, though some critical editors prefer ἐξήνεγκεν, equivalent to "conveyed out;" while in both the phrase "out of" is strongly expressed by the preposition in composition with the verb and the separate ἔξω.

2. The reading of the common text is properly rendered, "I see men as trees, walking;" that is to say, he saw men, but so indistinctly and at first apparently motionless, that they seemed more like trees; but then he saw them walking, and so discriminated them from trees. The expression is rather abrupt, but most accurate in describing the three stages indicated. The reading of the critical editions is different, and is rightly represented by the following rendering: - "I behold men, because as trees I see [them] walking." Even according to this reading the expression is abrupt, as significant of sudden and joyful surprise; as if he said, "I see men not much differing in shape and form from trees; but I know they are men, and not trees, for I see them in motion."

3. Succeeding this is the expression, he "made him look up," not "see again" - a signification of the word quite admissible, yet not in accord with the sense here; but for this whole phrase Tischendorf Tregelles and Alford read διέβλεψεν, "he saw clearly," that very instant (aorist); then, after restoration, he saw all things or all persons plainly - rather, continued looking on (ἐνέβλεπεν, imperfect, instead of ἐνέβλεψε, aorist) all things with clear vision.

4. The word τηλαυγῶς, from τῆλε, at a distance, and αὐγὴ, equivalent to "bright light," "radiance," and in the plural "beams of the sun," signifies generally "far-shining" or "far-seen;" but here, from shining in the distance, "far-sightedly," "clearly," "plainly."

5. An important distinction is made between ὄμμα and ὀφθαλμὸς in this passage, the latter being the organ of sight, and as such used by prose-writers, the former or more poetic word being here the sense or inner power of seeing; and so the latter is the instrument employed by the former.

V. The spitting and the application of the hands denote, according to Theophylact, word and work; they rather denote - the former the virtue proceeding from the Saviour, which restored the extinct sense of sight, the latter the rectification of the organ. Just as in the case of the person born blind, who was couched for blindness, the recovery here also was gradual; so with the spiritually blind we proceed gradually from one degree of light to another, from grace to grace, and from strength to strength. When the spiritually blind recover sight, they discern many things before shrouded in darkness, but not all things, nor even those many things with perfect clearness, or in their correct relations or relative proportions. We need the hand of Jesus to touch our eyes many a time before our spiritual eyesight is perfected; that sight, by the gentle touch of our loving, living Saviour, goes on improving till our dying day. We are in the hand of our Saviour just as this blind man; and as he led him forth, fully restored his sight, and sent him away frown his old associations, so we must give ourselves up to his guidance, depend on him entirely for full restoration of sight and other spiritual powers, turn our back on old sinful courses or companions, and go with our Lord whithersoever he leads us. The following! context exemplifies the gradual recovery of spiritual sight in those who identified Jesus with John, or Elias, or a prophet, and in the disciples who acknowledged him to be the Christ. The former had a glimmering of the truth; the latter saw its full-orbed clearness. The former only saw "men like trees, walking;" the latter saw it in this particular with perfect plainness. - J.J.G.

---

---

Parallel Verses

KJV: And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him.

WEB: He came to Bethsaida. They brought a blind man to him, and begged him to touch him.