Charles Ellicott Commentary John 9:2

"And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?" — John 9:2 (ASV)

Who did sin, this man, or his parents?—The disciples noticed that He looked at the man, and it may be that He halted as He was walking by. Their attention is directed to the sufferer, and with suffering they connect the idea of sin. They ask a question that may have come to them many times before, and that has in various forms come to people’s hearts many times since.

Some of them may have heard it discussed in Rabbinic schools, and may have wished to know what answer He, whom they had come to regard as greater than the Rabbis, would give.

But it is a question not of the learned only, but of people generally. Those who now ask it do not propose it as a matter for discussion, but as a mystery of human life brought home to them in all its darkness, and for which they seek a solution at His hands.

His teaching on the wider questions of the existence of evil and the connection of sin and suffering—though coming in the order of events after these words, and in part probably arising out of them—has in the order of the record occurred before them, and has been already dealt with in Notes on Luke 13:1-5.

What is special to the question, as we encounter it here, is that what is considered to be the punishment had come with birth, before the possibility of thought or action, and therefore, as we think, before the possibility of sin.

The form of the question puts two alternatives on precisely the same grounds; and we therefore have no right to assume that one of them is excluded by the questioners themselves. The fact of sin is stated as beyond question. The problem is, “Was the sin that of the man himself, or that of his parents?” The latter alternative is familiar to us, and daily experience shows us that within limits it applies in both the moral and the physical worlds.

It was clearly taught in the Second Commandment, and there is abundant evidence that this belief was widely spread at this time. We have greater difficulty in tracing the origin of the former alternative.

It is not easy to accept the view that they thought of sin in his mother’s womb, though it seems certain that the Jews commonly interpreted passages such as Genesis 25:22 and Psalms 51:5 in this sense at that time. That a more or less definite belief in the transmigration of souls was common among Jews at the time of our Lord’s ministry is made probable by references in Philo and Josephus. We know it was a doctrine of the Essenes and of the Kabbalah; and we find it in the nearly contemporary words of the Wisdom of Solomon, Yea rather being good, I came into a body undefiled .

Still, it has been urged that it is not likely that such a belief would have made its way among the fishermen of Galilee. We have to remember, however, that among the disciples there were now individuals from Jerusalem as well as from Galilee, and that questions which people found hard to understand were constantly being raised and answered in the Rabbinic schools. In the meetings of the yearly festivals, the answers of great Rabbis would be discussed and become generally known, and be passed on as maxims to those who knew little of the principle on which they were based.

It was, then, probably with some thought that the life in this maimed body may not have been the first stage of his existence that they asked, “Did this man sin?”