Note 136 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

It is true that according to correct principles of interpretation, one Evangelist ought not to be explained immediately by another, and in the present case it is very possible that while the synoptical writers ascribe to Jesus the common opinion of his age, the more highly cultivated author of the fourth gospel may make him reject it: but that he also confined the rejection of the current opinion on the part of Jesus to that single case, is proved by the manner in which he represents Jesus as speaking on another occasion. When, namely, Jesus says to the man who had been lame thirty-eight years (John v.) and had just been cured, μηκέτι ἁμάρτανε, ἵνα μὴ χεῖρόν τί σοι γένηται (v. 14), Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee; this is equivalent to his saying to the paralytic whom he was about to cure, ἀφέωνταί σοι αἱ ἁμαρτίαι σου, thy sins are forgiven thee: in the one case disease is removed, in the other threatened, as a punishment of sin. But here again the expositors, to whom it is not agreeable that Jesus should hold an opinion which they reject, find a means of evading the direct sense of the words. Jesus, say they, perceived that the particular disease of this man was a natural consequence of certain excesses, and warned him from a repetition of these as calculated to bring on a more dangerous relapse.136 But an insight into the natural connexion between certain excesses and certain diseases as their consequence, is far more removed from the mode of thinking of the age in which Jesus lived, than the notion of a positive connexion between sin in general and disease as its punishment; hence, if we are nevertheless to ascribe the former sense to the words of Jesus, it must be very distinctly conveyed in the text. But the fact is that in the whole narrative there is no intimation of any particular excess on the part of the man; the words μηκέτι ἁμάρτανε relate only to sin in general, and to supply a conversation of Jesus with the sick man, in which he is supposed to have acquainted the former with the connexion between his sufferings and a particular sin,137 is the most arbitrary fiction. What exposition! for the sake of evading a result which is dogmatically unwelcome, to extend the one passage (John ix.) to a generality of meaning not really belonging to it, to elude the other (Matt. ix.) by the hypothesis of accommodation, and forcibly to affix to a third (John v.) a modern idea; whereas if the first passage be only permitted to say no more than it actually says, the direct meaning of the other two may remain unviolated!