John Chapter 9 - From the horses mouth (Greg Thornberg)

Hi Justin,

I researched John 9 and remembered that an excellent commentator on New Testament times is William Barclay. I don't always agree with all of Barclay's theological conclusions, but I trust absolutely his historical insights into how people lived and thought during the time of Jesus. In his commentary on John 9 he does indeed state that many Jews believed in the preexistence of spirits and gives this as one of the possible reasons for the disciples' question about "who sinned this man or his parents that he was born blind." I felt it was important to submit the two pages of commentary here first because it would only be honest of me to do so and secondly because you don't own the Barclay commentary yourself. Below is what Barclay writes concerning John 9:1-5

"This is the only miracle in the gospels in which the sufferer is said to have been afflicted from his birth. In Acts we twice hear of people who had been helpless from their birth (the lame man and the Beautiful Gate of the Temple in Acts 3:2, and the cripple at Lystra in Acts 14:8), but this is the only man in the gospel story who had been so afflicted. He must have been a well-known character, for the disciples knew all about him.

"When they say him, they used the opportunity to put to Jesus a problem with which Jewish thought had always been deeply concerned, and which is still a problem. The Jews connected suffering and sin. They worked on the assumption that wherever there was suffering, somewhere there was sin. So they asked Jesus their question. 'This man,' they said, 'is blind. Is his blindness due to his own sin, or to the sin of his parents?'

"How could the blindness possible be due to his own sin, when he had been blind from his birth? [italics original] To that question the Jewish theologians gave two answers.

"(i) Some of them had the strange notion of prenatal sin. They actually believed that a man could begin to sin while still in his mother's womb. In the imaginary conversations between Antoninus and Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, Antoninus asks: 'From what time does the evil influence bear sway over a man, from the formation of the embryo in the womb or from the moment of birth?' The Rabbie first answered: 'From the formation of the embryo.' Antoninus disagreed and convinced Judah by his arguments, for Judah admitted that, if the evil impulse began with the formation of the embryo, then the child would kick in the womb and break its way out. Judah found a text to support this view. He took the saying in Genesis 4:7: 'Sin is couching at the door.' And he put the meaning into it that sin awaited man at the door of the womb, as soon as he was born. But the argument does show us that the idea of pre-natal sin was known.

"(ii) In the time of Jesus the Jews believed in the pre-existence of the soul. They really got that idea from Plato and the Greeks. They believed that all souls existed before the creation of the work in the garden of Eden, or that they were in the seventh heaven, or in a certain chamber, waiting to enter into a body. The Greeks had believed that such souls were good, and that it was the entry into the body which contaminated them; but there were certain Jews who believed that these souls were already good and bad. The writer of The Book of Wisdom says [most likely Philo, but Barclay doesn't ellaborate]: 'Now I was a child good by nature, and a good soul fell to my lot' (Wisdom 8:19).
"In the time of Jesus certain Jews did believe that a man's afllication, even if it be from birth, might come from sin that he had committed before he was born. It is a strange idea, and it may seem to us almost fantastic; but at its heart lies the idea of a sin-infected universe.

"The alternative was that the man's afflication was due to the sin of his parents. The idea that children inherit the consequences of their parents' sin is woven into the thought of the Old Testament. 'I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation.' (Exodus 20:5: cp. Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18). Of the wicked man the psalmist says: 'May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out' (Pslam 109;14). Isaiah talks about their iniquities and the 'iniquities of their fathers,' and goes on to say: 'I will measure into their bosom payment for their former doings' (Isaiah 65:6, 7). One of the keynotes of the Old Testament is that the sins of the fathers are always visited upon the children. It must never be forgotten that no man lives to himself and no man dies to himself. When a man sins, he sets in motion a train of consequences which has no end."*

*William Barclay, The Gospel of John, Volume 2, pp. 37-39