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Joh_9:41. Alas! Jesus intends to say, Ye are not blind. Were ye blind (as I intended the μὴ βλέποντες in Joh_9:39), that is, people who are conscious of being destitute of the true knowledge,[55] then ye would be without sin, i.e. your unbelief in me would not be sinful, just because it would involve no resistance to divine truth, but would simply imply that ye had not yet attained thereunto, a result for which ye were not to blame. But now ye assert we see (profess to be possessors of divine truth); the consequence whereof is, that your sin remaineth (is not removed),[56] i.e. that your unbelief in me not only is sinful, but also this, your sin continues to exist, remains undestroyed ( ἀνεξάλειπτος μένει , Theodoret, Heracleon), because your conceit is a perpetual ground for rejecting me, so that you cannot attain to faith and the forgiveness of sin. “Dicendo videmus, medicum non quaeritis,” Augustine. “Si diceretis: caeci sumus, visum peteretis et peccatum jam desiisset,” Bengel. According to Lücke (so also substantially Baeumlein), whom J. Müller follows (Lehre v. d. Sünde, I. p. 286, ed. 5), the meaning is: “Were you blind, i.e. without the capability of knowledge, there would be no sin (guilt) in your unbelief; you would then be unable to believe with knowledge. But so long as you say, notwithstanding all your blindness, We see, and therefore do not put away your conceited self-deception, so long your unbelief cannot depart, but must remain.” Against this view are the following objections: 1. Τυφλοί , because answering to ΜῊ ΒΛΈΠΟΝΤΕς in Joh_9:39, cannot denote incapacity for knowledge; 2. The antithesis λέγετε ὅτι βλέπ . suggests for ΤΥΦΛΟΊ , not the objective, but the subjective meaning; 3. ἉΜΑΡΤΊΑ is thus taken in different senses in the two halves. Other imported meanings are: Were you blind, like the multitude which you regard as blind, perhaps you would have no sin, etc. (Ewald, as though besides ἄν John had written also ΤΆΧΑ or ἼΣΩς ); or (Hengstenberg), if ye suffered merely from the simple blindness of the human race, which is blind from birth, ye would have no sin of decisive significance, no unpardonable sin; as though there were the slightest reference to anything of the kind! Substantially correct are Erasmus, Beza, Grotius, and several others; comp. Luthardt and Ebrard; still ΟὐΚ ἊΝ ΕἼΧ . ἉΜ . ought not to be transposed into, “then would your sin forgive you.” The explanation of Godet is a natural consequence of his interpretation of Joh_9:39, but founders on the words λέγετε ὅτι βλέπομεν .[57]
[55] Not, physically blind, as Nonnus, Theophylact, Euth. Zigabenus, and several others here, as well as in ver. 40, after the example of Chrysostom, wrongly understand.
[56] Not, “The sin remains yours” (Ewald). Comp. Joh_15:16.
[57] “S’ils appartenaient à la multitude ignorante, leur incrédulité à l’égard de Jésus pourrait n’être qu’une affaire d’entraînement (it would be merely a sin against the Son of man); mais éclairés, comme ils le sont, par la connaissance de la parole de Dieu, c’est sciemment, qu’ils rejettent le Messie” (this is a sin against the Holy Ghost). In this case, however, Jesus must have said: νῦν δὲ βλέπετε , not νῦν δὲ λέγετε ὁτι βλέπομεν , which Godet, it is true, regards merely as an allusion to the question in ver. 40; whilst in reality it is the key to the correct understanding of the entire passage.
OBSERVATION.
The absence from the Synoptics of the miracle performed on the man born blind ought to have found its explanation simply in the circumstance that it did not take place in the (Galilean) sphere of the synoptic narrative, and ought not to have been made the ground of an attack on its historical credibility, as was done by Strauss (who compares the healing of Naaman in 2Ki_5:10); by Weisse (who derives the narrative, by means of a misunderstanding, from Joh_9:39); and by Baur (who regards this story as the intensified expression of the healings of the blind recorded by the synoptists, p. 245 f.); whilst Gfrörer, on the contrary, content with asserting the presence of unhistorical additions, comes to a conclusion disadvantageous to the synoptists.
According to Baur (p. 176 ff.), the narrative of the miracle was definitely and intentionally shaped, so as to set forth faith in its pure objectivity, the susceptibility to the divine as it is affected by the pure impression of the divine element in the ἔργα θεοῦ , even when it is not yet aware who is the subject of these ἔργα . “It clings to the thing itself; and the thing itself is so immediately divine, that in the thing, without knowing it, one has also the person.” In such wise are arbitrary, and not even relevant (see Brückner), abstractions from history converted into the ground of history. Ammon makes the occurrence a natural healing of an inflammation of the eyes! a counterpart to the converse travesty of some of the Fathers, who express the opinion that the blind man lacked eyes altogether, and that Jesus formed them out of the πηλός , as God at first formed man from the earth (see especially Irenaeus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Nonnus); comp. on Joh_9:6 f.