Note 189 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

Of the two cures on the sabbath narrated in the fourth gospel, one has already been considered with the cures of the blind; the other (v. 1 ff.) might have been numbered among the cures of paralytics, but as the patient is not so designated, it was admissible to reserve it for our present head. In the porches of the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem, Jesus found a man who, as it subsequently appears, had been lame for thirty-eight years; this sufferer he enables by a word to stand up and carry home his bed, but, as it was the sabbath, he thus draws down on himself the hostility of the Jewish hierarchy. Woolston189 and many later writers have thought to get clear of this history in a singular manner, by the supposition that Jesus here did not cure a real sufferer but merely unmasked a hypocrite.190 The sole reason which can with any plausibility be urged in favour of this notion, is that the cured man points out Jesus to his enemies as the one who had commanded him to carry his bed on the sabbath (v. 15; comp. 11 ff.), a circumstance which is only to be explained on the ground that Jesus had enjoined what was unwelcome. But that notification to the Pharisees might equally be given, either with a friendly intention, as in the case of the man born blind (John ix. 11, 25), or at least with the innocent one of devolving the defence of the alleged violation of the sabbath on a stronger than himself.191 The Evangelist at least gives it as his opinion that the man was really afflicted, and suffered from a wearisome disease, when he describes him as having had an infirmity thirty-eight years, τριάκοντα καὶ ὀκτὼ ἔτη ἔχων ἐν τῇ ἀσθενίᾳ (v. 5): for the forced interpretation once put on this passage by Paulus, referring the thirty-eight years to the man’s age, and not to the duration of his disease, he has not even himself ventured to reproduce.192 On this view of the incident it is also impossible to explain what Jesus says to the cured man on a subsequent meeting (v. 14): Behold thou art made whole; sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee. Even Paulus is compelled by these words to admit that the man had a real infirmity, though only a trifling one:—in other words he is compelled to admit the inadequacy of the idea on which his explanation of the incident is based, so that here again we retain a miracle, and that not of the smallest.