by Gaye Strathearn

This text is excerpted from Thou Art the Christ: The Son of the Living God, published by the BYU Religious Studies Center, the 47th Annual Sidney B. Sperry Symposium. Used by permission of the author.

Jesus’s dialogue with the man born blind has points of both continuity and discontinuity with those of Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well. With both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman the dialogue was with only Jesus, but in this example of the man born blind, his interactions with Jesus act as bookends for a narrative that is interrupted by an ongoing dialogue, first with the man’s neighbors and then with the Pharisees, both of whom question him extensively about how he received his sight. Even with this difference, however, there is also a continuation of themes that are important for John’s Gospel as a whole and are also found in Nicodemus’s experience. Continue reading →