What Jesus Did,Does and May Do in Future: Gospel Miracles,Human Augmentation,Transhumanism and the Future of New Testament Studies

1. New Testament Studies, Christian Transhumanism and Jesus’ Healing Miracles

That the Covid-19 pandemic has ushered in a difficult period for the humanities disciplines cannot be denied; higher-education institutions in many nations are coming under increasing financial pressure and in response are taking hard, even brutal, decisions to cut fixed-term contracts, tenured posts, programmes, and even subjects altogether. But for some areas of study, New Testament studies among them, living in worrying times is hardly a new thing. How many worthy volumes, articles, conference panels and keynote speeches have been produced in recent years, each concerned with the ‘future’ of our discipline (e.g., Boer and Segovia 2012; Sherwood 2017; Liew 2018)? Though we can confidently assert that we have made progress in many areas, the question of whether or not our discipline has become sufficiently future-proofed remains open; there is still work to do.

A decade ago, in an article published in a guest-edited ‘Reception History’ edition of this journal, I argued that New Testament studies in its traditional historical-critical guise was in danger of finding itself without audiences willing to support it at its 2010 institutional level (i.e., to fund its posts). With the steady decline of the church traditions which had long implicitly ‘underwritten’ payments for its ‘product’, the discipline has had to face up to the fact that it is somewhat ill-suited to the task of building relationships with new academic partners interested in critically exploring how the Bible – and not just the New Testament! – was either an important factor in other historical contexts or a central factor in some present-day concern. I exhorted fellow New Testament scholars to rethink the assumptions behind their approach to these texts and to consider re-inventing themselves explicitly as ‘reception historians’, as investigators of the near-infinite range of scenarios in which the New Testament and its interpretation either had played or could play, a significant, even essential, role. This shift I saw as both eminently feasible and as one to be pursued with rigour, while time allowed (Lyons 2010).

Taking advantage of the publication of Joan E. Taylor’s edited conference volume, Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and his Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian (2015), I further argued that traditional New Testament studies could also reasonably expect an intellectual pay-off from its willingness to liberate itself from its usual limits (Lyons 2016). While Jesus and Brian contains much that falls within the purview of the reception history I favour myself, most of its content is dominated by the notion of ‘reception exegesis’, an approach outlined and developed by Old Testament scholars Paul Joyce and Diana Lipton in their Blackwell’s commentary on Lamentations (2013: 1-25) and helpfully summarized by the former in his foreword to Taylor’s volume:

The point is that biblical scholars bent on interpretation of the Bible in traditional scholarly ways do not have a monopoly on explicating the ancient text. Illumination can also be derived from textual and other media that are better characterized as responding to or using the biblical text, rather than exegeting it. Use of the Bible in later times can thus shine a spotlight on biblical verses that have been dulled by familiarity; it can foreground biblical concepts and concerns that have faded over time into the background; and it can even give rise to new readings of difficult Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek terms (Taylor 2015: xviii).

This article seeks to look for a new conversation partner beyond the New Testament guild and to take a chance on uncovering what Joyce referred to as a ‘serendipitous bonus’ from that risky venture. As such, it proposes to take this journal’s readers into an area of intellectual inquiry with which they will likely have very little familiarity and by a route that may seem overly convoluted to some. If readers will stay with the argument, however, it will hopefully surprise them by defamiliarizing a number of well-known New Testament texts, opening them up for reassessment and, potentially, for reapplication. The area of humanistic study we are entering is known as ‘posthumanism’ or ‘transhumanism’, in this case specifically a variant of the latter based upon developments occurring within traditional Christian ideologies. ¹ As Denise Kimber Buell has pointed out, transhumanism considered broadly is a ‘baggy category without a single origin in the academy, ranging from cybernetics to continental philosophy; it overlaps with animal studies, environmental studies, and new materialisms’ (Buell 2019: 197). Buell proceeds to demonstrate just how baggy, noting that ‘“posthuman” may connote pop cultural depictions of nonhuman sentience that may or may not appear in humanlike form’, before continuing:

[a]lternatively, ‘posthuman’ may connote humans transformed, willingly or unwillingly, by either technology … or by nonhuman organisms or inorganic matter. (think vampires, werewolves, zombies, or fears about alien invasion as depicted in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Aliens; think of those living with HIV, chronic lyme disease, malaria, or with pharmacological cocktails, prescribed or illegal; consider debates about how to address ‘invasive’ species of plants and animals or toxified environments resulting from activities such as mining, industrial manufacturing, and energy production). (Buell 2019: 197)

Questions about Jesus and his potential place in discussions about human transformation first arose for me while working on a grant application concerned with future technological interventions into the lives of deaf and intersex people and their echoing of forms of treatment implemented during the last two centuries. ² If humanity’s future truly is to become ‘cyborg variants’ through the implantation of technology of some kind into their minds or bodies – whether as individuals or as a collective population augmented in line with some society’s ‘normative template’ ³ – what might a study of past experiences of bodily or psychological interventions in the lives of their forebears offer to deaf and intersex people today? What might other kinds of historical intervention offer to those beyond these particular communities?

It was while concerned with the experiences of these communities that I came to realize that discussions of transhumanism within Christian circles make minimal use, if any, of the earthly healing miracles of Jesus. ⁴ One illuminating example can be drawn from the work of Karen Lebacqz, a now retired Professor of Bioethics who taught at the Pacific School of Religion in the Graduate Theological Union for thirty years and is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. When she discusses earthly healings in the context of humans acting as creative beings made in the image of God the Creator and hence as enhancers of the world, she first implies that they are relevant for Christian transhumanism, but then constructs her discussion so as to side-line them completely.

The story of Jesus’s actions may be taken to suggest the overcoming of limits. Healing stories certainly play a central role in depictions of Jesus’s life and ministry. But some would say these show only that we are meant to attain the ‘normal healthy’ functioning of human life and not to go beyond it. If such stories never go beyond our natural limits, then they hardly suggest support for enhancement efforts. Is there any evidence in these stories of genuine transcendence of human life and limits or enhancements beyond the simple restoration of health? I believe so. Setting aside the ultimate resurrection, we might look at the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (Jn 11.1-44). This story at a minimum suggests transcendence of the most crucial limit on human life, which is death. Further the Gospels are full of stories where water is turned to wine or a few loaves and fishes feed thousands. Can there be any doubt that, in these stories, normal limits have been set aside? Nor are these acts limited to Jesus’s behaviour; the disciples are also meant to do such ‘miracles’ (Rom. 8.14). (Lebacqz 2011: 57)

Despite Lebacqz’s statement that the gospel stories do contain miraculous actions showing a ‘genuine transcendence of human life and limits or enhancements beyond the simple restoration of health’, the examples she includes relate only to a resurrected body, that of Lazarus, and to ‘nature’ miracles; she ignores the healing miracles of Jesus’ ministry altogether. Presumably, despite her opening statement, she is edging towards agreement with her unnamed interlocutors that Jesus’ healings are irrelevant to discussions about human enhancement.

While having no abiding interest in the wider Christian transhumanism debate myself, nonetheless the response of transhumanists like Lebacqz to these biblical texts has the potential to be a significant source of exegetical illumination for New Testament studies. By show-casing a specific response to Jesus’ healing miracles, the implicit, but clear view that none show any form of human enhancement, the positions of the Christian transhumanists and the critical response they have provoked in us as a result of our interaction with them do provide New Testament scholars with a clear example of the merits of Joyce and Lipton’s reception exegesis proposal. In what follows, I wish to pursue this question of human enhancement in relation to certain of Jesus’ healing miracles further, first in regard to the healing of the deaf man in Mk 7.32-37 as seen by nineteenth-century deaf interpreters and then in relation to the healing of two blind men, Bartimaeus in Mk 10.46-52 and the unnamed man in Jn 9.1-41. I will conclude that not only have the Christian transhumanists tended to mischaracterize each of these healing texts as acts of restoration rather than as involving the creation of new human possibilities, so too have most New Testament exegetes, with their translations and expositions similarly failing to do justice to the augmentative possibilities of Jesus’ earthly miracles.

2. A Preliminary Example of Human Enhancement in the Bible (Mark 7.32-37)

In an article entitled ‘How the “New Testament” Shaped Deaf People at St Saviour’s Oxford Street: A Study in Reception History and in Reception Exegesis’ and published in Relegere in 2016, I introduced and discussed an interpretation of the deaf man of Mk 7.32-37 that was published in 1874 by Richard Rowland Williams (1825–1879), an Englishman deafened through accidental exposure to vitriol at ten years of age (Lyons 2016: 178-80, 185-86). In contrast to modern exegetes who see the man as deafened late in life and restored through a miraculous physical healing to a previous-enjoyed life of hearing and speech – scholars such as Adela Yarbro Collins (2007: 370) and William L. Lane (1974: 266) – Williams saw the man as either deaf from birth or as deafened at a sufficiently early age that he had not yet gained a working knowledge of the local spoken language. ⁵ Unable to conclude that Jesus had only performed a physical healing of the mechanisms related to the man’s hearing (his ears) and speech (his throat and mouth), he posited that Jesus had also given the man two additional ‘things’: a competence in the local spoken language and a knowledge of how it applied to the world around him (Williams 1874: 54-55).

Williams’s argument was echoed across the Atlantic, at the Eighth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1907 by that organization’s President, George Veditz (1861–1937); Veditz had also lost his hearing as a child, to scarlet fever at eight years of age. The context was a speech in which he discussed the future of America’s signing deaf people against the backdrop of Europe’s conversion to ‘oralism’ over the previous three decades (Veditz 1907: 24-28); oralist ideology held that deaf people should only be taught to speak and to lip-read and, in extremes, banned sign language and even deaf friendship. Veditz noted that oralism’s proponents freely used ‘catch phrases’ such as ‘“the deaf hear and the dumb speak,” “the age of miracles is not past,” [and] “the deaf are restored to society”’ (Veditz 1907: 27). But such language, he went on to argue, was justified only during Jesus’ ministry in Judaea:

Then only were the deaf truly restored to society in the sense in which those which claim to educate the deaf exclusively by speech understand the phrase – the perfect ability to communicate by word of mouth with the hearing – and this restoration required what was to my mind a greater miracle than the resurrection of Lazarus, or of the daughter of Jairus, or of the son of the widow of Nain. For the Ephphatha of the Savior brought about not a mere restoration of a condition which had before existed, but called into being a new and wondrous faculty. Not only the physical ear and tongue but also the mind was freed from its shackles, and in an instant, there were acquired the use and comprehension of a complete language. (Veditz 1907: 27, emphasis mine)

The provision of ‘language competence’ and of ‘a knowledge of applicability’ by Jesus are both intimately bound up with the needs of a man born deaf or deafened in infancy, with little or no previous exposure to a verbal language. But we should also be clear what they mean in terms of the augmentation of wider humanity implied by transhumanist ideology. If the deaf man had either never heard nor spoken language before or had lost his hearing so early that he had never gained competence with verbal language, the terminology of ‘restoration’ is rendered deeply problematic; Veditz’s first use of the term to denote this miracle in the above quotation is fatally undermined by the second use, where he explicitly states that this particular healing was ‘not a mere restoration of a condition which had before existed’ (Veditz 1907: 27). In my 2016 article on how the New Testament shaped the deaf people of Victorian London, I referred to the man in Mk 7 as being augmented ‘to the max’ by Jesus, but did not define the nature of his augmentation or explore the meaning of that term in such a context (Lyons 2016: 185-86). The mind of the deaf man was instantaneously altered by the incorporation of Veditz’s ‘new and wondrous faculty’ within it, a transformative occurrence which provided him with these knowledges in a way never before witnessed in human history (or so the gospels imply). It is the significance of this action and its implications for transhumanist ideology that should cause us to think further about the ministry of the earthly Jesus and the potential role of these healing miracles in discussions, especially Christian ones, about the future of an enhanced humanity.

3. Two Blind Men, the Jesus Seminar and Psychosomatic Healing

We now turn to examine two more of Jesus’ healing miracles, those involving Blind Bartimaeus (Mk 10.46-52) and an unnamed blind man (Jn 9.1-41). Utilizing the insights of Williams and Veditz, I will suggest that these texts should also be understood as involving enhancement of the person involved to a new state of being and not as involving restoration to a previously enjoyed sighted state. That the unnamed man of Jn 9 is explicitly described as being blind from birth (9.1; τυϕλὸν ἐκ γενετῆς) should have made part of the extended argument that follows unnecessary, but since Liddell–Scott–Jones, a major New Testament lexicon, is not alone in including ἀνέβλεψα in Jn 9.11 within the category of ‘recover one’s sight’ without ever explaining how the man could recover something he never possessed (LSJ: 99), we will need to deal with questions of translation as we proceed.

Until recently biblical scholars have focused on the historicity of the miracles, a concern which reflects longstanding Enlightenment concerns. Viewing healing enhancement miracles as fictional stories would not in itself render them useless for transhumanist purposes (so long as they remain stories about physical enhancement), but what would be more problematic is seeing them as accounts which should not be read as examples of physical healing at all; J.D. Crossan’s argument that Jesus’ actions should be understood as reflecting a social reality involving meal and magic and not as presenting physical healings of any kind, for example, would likely preclude any useful exchange with the transhumanists (e.g., Crossan 1991: 303-53). A potentially more open position is the still influential work of Crossan’s colleagues, the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar. In their work, the trend in New Testament studies in which the healing of those with a condition from birth is translated out of existence is given explicit form in their published translations, undergirded by an insistence that behind all such miracles is the curing of a psychosomatic illness, a label which then seriously limits the applicability of the texts we are discussing to a transhumanism interested in physical bodies. In pursuing our Christian transhumanist interest further, I will use the popular published corpus of the Jesus Seminar to open up the twin questions of psychosomatic illness and of problematic translations before moving onto recent interpreters who view the idea of physical healings more positively.

In The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998), the views of the Jesus Seminar on Jesus’ miracles are summarized; Jesus’ words had already been covered in an earlier volume, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (Funk 1993). On page 531, the ancient understanding of Jesus as a healer is briefly mentioned, before it is explained that the Seminar ‘had difficulty in finding stories it believed to be reports of actual cures’. Nevertheless, six healings are listed that the Seminar’s ‘coloured beads’ voting methodology had rendered as ‘pink’, a colour colloquially defined as: ‘[t]his information is probably reliable. It fits well with other evidence that is verifiable’ (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 36); a second, more formal definition on the same page reads: ‘I would include this narrative information with reservations (or modifications) in the database for determining who Jesus was’. The six listed are:

Notably the healing of the deaf man of Mk 7.32-37 is absent from the list.

Of these six, only the first is unequivocally viewed by the Seminar as a historical event: ‘The Fellows believe that Jesus actually cured Peter’s mother-in-law …’ The rest are introduced with less assurance: Jesus ‘probably cured someone with skin rash’; he ‘may well have cured a paralytic’; ‘it is entirely plausible that Jesus cured some woman who was afflicted with a vaginal haemorrhage’; and ‘Jesus might have caused a blind man to see’ (Mk 8.22-26 and 10.46-52//Lk. 18.35-43). Regardless of such ‘hedging’, all are described as being ‘[f]rom today’s perspective … related to psychosomatic maladies’, a conclusion which serves to defuse for the Seminar’s Fellows the troubling notion that these healings were supernatural in origin (all quotations from Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 531).

It is the consistent invocation of psychosomatic causes for these maladies which has implications for our investigation. Psychosomatic illnesses are not understood by medical science to be present from birth. Instead, they arise from an interaction between body and mind as the individual moves through their life (cf., e.g., Kumar and Clark 2016: 899). The fever of Simon’s mother-in-law and the discharge of the woman over twelve years are obviously post-natal. The origins of the skin disease and paralysis are perhaps ambiguous but can be set aside for now; if this article’s arguments are not dismissed out of hand, these cures can be examined in detail later. Instead, I wish to concentrate upon the question of when the man of Bethsaida in Mk 8.22-26 and Blind Bartimaeus in Mk 10.46-52 became blind. For the Jesus Seminar, seeing psychosomatic illness as the only possible causal explanation for their blindness means that these historical individuals can only have lost their sight sometime after birth. The Seminar’s translations as they are published in The Acts of Jesus make the impact of this assumption on their work abundantly clear:

Mk 8.24-25: ‘when his sight began to come back [ἀναβλέψας] … his sight was restored [ἀπεκατέστη] and he saw [ἐνέβλεπεν] everything clearly’. (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 103)

Mk 10.51-52: ‘Rabbi I want to see again [ἀναβλέψω] … right away he regained his sight [ἀνέβλεψεν] …’. (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 118) ⁷

Both of these men regain sight that they had previously possessed and then somehow lost.

We should note for the sake of completeness that healings of other blind men are also mentioned in the canonical gospels, and these are discussed by the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar. All are viewed negatively, however. The healings of two blind men in Mt. 9.27-31 (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 186-87) and in Mt. 20.29-34 (1998: 229) are regarded as a Matthaean fiction and as a Matthaean modification of Mk 10.46-52 respectively. Jesus’ general words to the Baptist via his disciples about the ‘blind’ being able ‘to see again’ (Mt. 11.5//Lk. 7.22) are seen by the Seminar as being derived from prophetic texts and hence are coloured black, so are considered inauthentic (Funk 1993: 177). In The Acts of Jesus, the Fellows also colour the story of the man born blind in Jn 9.1-41 ‘black’, with the use of ‘mud’ alone being coloured ‘gray’ (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 404), defined colloquially earlier in the book as ‘[t]he information is possible but unreliable. It lacks supporting evidence’ (1998: 37). Possible links with the blind men in Mk 8 and 10 are also discussed, before it is concluded that ‘the core of the story … might well have been coloured pink had the author not so completely adapted it to the controversy in which it is now embedded’ (1998: 404). The significance of the man’s being born blind – whether for John’s theology of light and dark (cf., e.g., Lincoln 2000: 96-105) or for the question under consideration here – are left undiscussed, but viewing Jn 9 as largely ‘black’, as inauthentic, meant that the Fellows felt under no pressure to consider the implications of a story in which Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth.

4. Blind Bartimaeus and the Limits of Psychosomatic Explanations

Were we to accept the Jesus Seminar’s contention that the blindness of the two historical figures in Mk 8 and 10 was post-natal and psychosomatic in origin and that the man blind from birth in Jn 9.1-41 was a fictional, indeed in their terms, a nonsensical character, our ability to reflect the interests of transhumanism onto these texts would be heavily constrained; we might be tempted to join with the interlocutors mentioned by Lebacqz in consigning these texts, with the other restorative healing miracles, to the dustbin of the transhumanist argument. However, the Jesus Seminar’s description of Bartimaeus in Mk 10.46-52 as blind due to a post-natal psychosomatic cause is not without its problems.

We can uncover the issues within the Jesus Seminar’s reasoning by comparing their translations of these two texts to how they were rendered in the 1971 second edition of The Revised Standard Version (RSV). There we can see that the translation of Mk 10.51-52 reads very differently to that offered by the Jesus Seminar:

Jesus Seminar, Mk 10.51-52: ‘Rabbi I want to see again [ἀναβλέψω] … right away he regained his sight [ἀνέβλεψεν]…’ (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 118).

RSV, Mk 10.51-52: ‘Master, let me receive my sight [ἀναβλέψω] … immediately he received his sight [ἀνέβλεψεν] …’ ⁸

For the RSV, Bartimaeus does not regain his sight as a consequence of his healing; he receives it. With Mk 8.24-25, however, the RSV translation matches that of the Jesus Seminar rather more closely:

Jesus Seminar, Mk 8.24-25: ‘when his sight began to come back [ἀναβλέψας] … his sight was restored [ἀπεκατέστη] and he saw [ἐνέβλεπεν] everything clearly’ (Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 103).

RSV, Mk 8.24-25: ‘he looked up [ἀναβλέψας] … and was restored [ἀπεκατέστη] and saw [ἐνέβλεπεν] everything clearly’.

There is a fundamental difference between the Greek of these two verses, the appearance of ἀπεκατέστη in Mk 8.25, derived from ἀποκαθίστημι (BDAG: 100), and unambiguously meaning ‘to restore, to re-establish’ (BDAG: 111-12; cf., e.g., Acts 1.6; LXX Exod. 4.7; LXX Lev. 13.16); the blind man of Bethsaida can only be viewed as someone who had been restored to a previous sighted condition. This would then explain why he is recorded as describing the men that he sees after Jesus’ first attempt to heal him as looking like ‘trees walking around’ (Mk 8.24); how, we might reasonably ask, could a man born blind have formulated such a visually based description while still unable to see clearly?

It is the absence of ἀπεκατέστη in Mk 10.51-52 that opens up the possibility that Bartimaeus was blind from birth. The verb used to indicate the regaining of or receiving of sight in these two passages is ἀναβλέπω, a word defined by BDAG in three different ways: (i) ‘to look up’, (ii) ‘to regain sight’ and (iii) ‘to receive sight’ (BDAG: 59). The first meaning can be seen in the RSV rendering of Mk 8.24a as ‘he looked up’. The Jesus Seminar’s rendering of that same word as ‘when his sight began to come back’ introduces BDAG’s second meaning, to ‘regain sight’. This meaning is applied by the Seminar to each occurrence of ἀναβλέπω in the gospels, with Jesus’ words to the Baptist in Mt. 11.5//Lk. 7.22 being translated as ‘the blind see again’ (τυϕλοὶ ἀναβλέπουσιν) and the descriptions of the post-healing sight of the man in Jn 9.1-41 being rendered as ‘restored’ (Jn 9.7) or ‘recovered’ (Jn 9.18; Funk and the Jesus Seminar 1998: 402-404). Somewhat surprisingly, BDAG not only adds Mt. 11.5//Lk. 7.22 to the category of ‘to regain sight’, it also adds Mk 10.51//Lk. 18.41ff. to that category, seemingly echoing the work of the Jesus Seminar (BDAG: 59). In contrast, the RSV translation of these texts consistently uses BDAG’s third option, ‘to receive sight’.

A selection of BDAG’s illustrative examples show that ἀναβλέπω may comfortably possess either the second or third meanings, with the context usually clarifying which meaning should apply. The second meaning, to regain sight, is usually signalled by an explicit mention of sight being lost. In Aristophanes’ play, Plutus (= ‘Wealth’, c. 380 bce), the eponymous god of wealth describes himself to the Athenian house-owner who has taken him in, Chremylus, as having been blinded by Zeus when he, as a young god, threatened to give wealth only to ‘the just, the wise, the men of ordered life’ (τοὺς δικαίους καὶ σοϕοὺς καὶ κοσμίους; Aristophanes, Plutus 89-90). On hearing that the god is frightened of Zeus, Chremylus, decrying the indiscriminate dispersal of wealth that has resulted from his blindness, exclaims: ‘Do you think Zeus’ rule and all his thunderbolts would be worth a dime if you regained your sight even for a moment?’ (οἴει γὰρ εἶναι τὴν Διὸς τυραννίδα καὶ τοὺς κεραυνοὺς ἀξίους τριωβόλου,ἐὰν ἀναβλέψῃς σὺ κἂν σμικρὸν χρόνον; Aristophanes, Plutus 124-26; translation by Jeffrey Henderson, LCL). ⁹ Other examples of regained sight include Tob. 14.2: ‘He was fifty-eight years old when he lost his sight, and after eight years he regained it’ (RSV; καὶ ἦν ἐτῶν πεντηκονταοκτώ, ὅτε ἀπώλεσε τὰς ὄψεις, καὶ μετὰ ἔτη ὀκτὼ ἀνέβλεψε). Similarly, Ananias addresses the now-sightless Saul in Acts 9.17 thus: ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, has sent me that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit’ (RSV; Σαοὺλ ἀδελϕέ, ὁ κύριος ἀπέσταλκέν με, Ἰησοῦς ὁ ὀϕθείς σοι ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ ἧ ἤρχου, ὅπως ἀναβλέψῃς καὶ πλησθῇς πνεύματος ἁγίου).

BDAG’s third meaning, that of receiving sight for the first time, appears in Pausanias’s Description of Greece (c. second century ce). The seer Ophionieus, described as ‘blind from birth’ (τὸν ἐκ γενετῆς τυϕλόν), is said to have ‘received his sight in the most remarkable way. He was seized with a violent pain in the head, and thereupon received his sight’ (ἀναβλέψαι παραλόγως δὴ μάλιστα ἀνθρώπων: ἐπέλαβε γὰρ τῆς κεϕαλῆς ἄλγημα αὐτὸν ἰσχυρόν, καὶ ἀνέβλεψεν ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ; Pausanias, Description of Greece 4.12.10; translation by W. H. S. Jones/H. A. Ormerod, LCL). Alongside Pausanias, BDAG includes ‘J 9.11, 15, 18’ (BDAG: 59); these references are to the man of Jn 9, who is similarly described as having been ‘blind from his birth’ (RSV, Jn 9.1; τυϕλὸν ἐκ γενετῆς). When asked how he had been healed, the man replies: ‘The man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and said to me, “Go to Silo′am and wash”; so I went and washed and received my sight (ἀνέβλεψα)’ (v. 11). In v. 15, the verb appears again when the Pharisees ask the man how he ‘received his sight’ (ἀνέβλεψεν). Finally, the verb appears twice in v. 18 when the Jews who did not believe he had been blind and ‘had received his sight’ (ἀνέβλεψεν) interrogate the parents of the man ‘who had received his sight’ (ἀναβλέψαντος). As was mentioned earlier, LSJ adds ‘Ev. Jo. 9.11’ to the category of ‘recover one’s sight’ despite the explicit statement that the man had been blind from birth (LSJ: 99).

Given the lack of an explicit statement in Mk 10.46-52 about sight loss, the origin and cause of Bartimaeus’s blindness resist definitive answers. Need we conclude that ἀναβλέπω can only mean ‘received sight’ when paired with ‘blind from birth’? Logically, such a position should also mean that we can only render that term as ‘regained sight’ if post-natal loss is explicitly mentioned, e.g., as with Plutus, Tobit and Saul. BDAG’s decision to add ἀναβλέπω in Mk 10.51 to the category of ‘regaining of one’s sight’ and the Jesus Seminar’s translation of that word as ‘he regained his sight’ are both unexplained acts of interpretation. Save for one piece of evidence, previously unnoticed and undiscussed, to which we will return in the conclusion, there is nothing in Mk 10.46-52 to indicate that Bartimaeus was previously sighted, that he had not been born blind. It seems reasonable, especially in light of the man explicitly described as being blind from birth in Jn 9.1-41 and of Williams and Veditz’s interpretation of the deaf man in Mk 7.32-37, to take a different line, to regard Bartimaeus as a man whose blindness was from birth and not psychosomatic in origin. Needless to say, the act of reflecting transhumanist ideology upon these verses is also supportive of such a reading of the story of Blind Bartimaeus.

5. What Would It Mean for a Man ‘Born Blind’ to be Healed?

Since we have rejected the view that Blind Bartimaeus’s condition was acquired postnatally and along with it the psychosomatic cause favoured by the Jesus Seminar, we need to examine recent changes in scholarly attitudes towards miracles. In his Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), for example, N.T. Wright concludes his discussion of miracles with a threefold suggestion as to how to view them in the light of their role in Jesus’ ministry. His second and third elements are that the gospels’ understanding of miracles arose among those who saw them and among the earliest story-tellers, and that the themes of prophecy and fulfilment clothing them belong to that period respectively. It is Wright’s first element that is of interest to us, however. Having earlier disavowed a supernatural worldview (Wright 1996: 187), he writes that:

[m]any scholars from widely different backgrounds now accept that Jesus did remarkable ‘mighty works’; this consensus is strong enough to sustain the point at least that Jesus’ contemporaries, friend and foe alike, believed him to be doing such things and that the best and simplest explanation of this is to accept that it was more or less true. (Wright 1996: 194)

Ultimately, it is not absolutely necessary for us to accept a historicist view of the healing event related in Mk 10.46-52 and certainly not of that found in Jn 9.1-41. These accounts remain of interest to the transhumanists as long as they can be plausibly discussed in terms of possible forms of healing and their implications. With this in mind then, what would a man born blind actually experience when he ‘receives sight’?

In a letter to the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), dated 7 July 1688, the Irish writer William Molyneux (1656–1698) described a thought experiment which was explicitly tied to the relationship between touch and sight: ¹⁰

A Man, being born blind, and having a Globe and a Cube, nigh of the same bignes, Committed into his Hands, and being taught or Told, which is Called the Globe, and which the Cube, so as easily to distinguish them by his Touch or Feeling; Then both being taken from Him, and Laid on a Table, Let us Suppose his Sight Restored to Him; Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube? Or Whether he Could know by his Sight, before he stretch’d out his Hand, whether he Could not Reach them, tho they were Removed 20 or 1000 feet from Him? (Molyneux 1688)

Locke answered no, arguing that the mental connection between a shape known through touch and a shape known through sight developed through lived experience (Locke 1689). Others such as Edward Synge (1695) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1765: 136-38) answered yes, arguing that such knowledge was innate.

In the present day, Molyneux’s problem has been effectively solved. There are individuals blind from birth whose conditions mean that they can be given sight through surgical procedures, either through the removal of cataracts or the treatment of ‘corneal opacities’. In many societies, the state of medical services means that such individuals are treated at an early age, but in other parts of the world treatment may be delayed until early adulthood. In 2011, an article by Richard Held et al. described an experiment carried out on five individuals in India (Held et al. 2011). These ranged in age from eight to seventeen. Within forty-eight hours of surgery, the subjects were tested in three different ways. From a set of twenty objects, the subjects handled or looked at one object and then identified it by choosing from one of two offered objects, one matching and one dissimilar. Objects handled and then picked out through touch were correctly identified in 98% of cases. Those viewed by sight were identified correctly by sight in 92% of cases. When forms were handled and then chosen by sight, however, the proportion identified correctly fell to 58%, only just above chance. The researchers concluded that:

[t]he newly sighted subjects did not exhibit an immediate transfer of their tactile shape knowledge to the visual domain … Whatever linkage between vision and touch may pre-exist concomitant exposure of both senses, it is insufficient for reconciling the identity of the separate sensory representations. However, this ability can apparently be acquired after short real-world experiences [based on tests carried out five days later]. (Held et al. 2011: 552).

This may sound like a technical problem, something unlikely to be disruptive in everyday life. In a New Yorker article, however, Patrick House described a video from the experiment – shown to him by one of the researchers involved, Dr Pawan Sinha – in which the bandages were removed and the patient, a boy, saw for the first time:

The boy sits still and blinks silently, the room around him reflecting in his eyes as a kind of proof of their new transparency. Sinha believes these first moments for the newly sighted are blurry, incoherent, and saturated by brightness – like walking into daylight with dilated pupils – and swirls of colour that do not make sense as shapes or faces or any kind of object. ‘The moments immediately following bandages removal are not quite as “magical” as Hollywood movies would have us believe,’ Sinha told me. (House 2014)

House concluded: ‘To answer Molyneux, then: No. A cube and a sphere are lost in this confusion’ (House 2014). Clearly, a period of adjustment exists between sightlessness and effective sight as the brain makes sense of the new information being received.

6. Conclusion: The Significance of the Lack of an Adjustment Period

Comparing the experimental data described by Held et al. with the behaviours immediately ascribed to the figure of Bartimaeus in Mk 10.46-52 and to the unnamed man in Jn 9.1-41 suggests that, just as with the deaf man in Mk 7.32-37, something would have had to have happened to these men that went far beyond the miraculous conforming of their eyes to human norms. In Mk 10.52, Bartimaeus is said to have received his sight ‘immediately’ (εὐθὺς) and then ‘followed him [Jesus] on his way’ (ἠκολούθει αὐτῷ ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ). In Jn 9.7, the man follows Jesus’ instruction to wash and comes back ‘seeing’ (βλέπων), quickly becoming embroiled in conversations with onlookers and authorities. Neither appears to have required a significant period of time while they adjusted to their new condition as sighted individuals; just as with the deaf man of Mk 7, their mental processes appear to have been enhanced by Jesus with virtually instantaneous effect; a new cognitive thing had been added to them which helped them leap from blind to sighted without delay. As a consequence of each of these three healing miracles, understood in the light of transhumanist ideas, the humanity portrayed has effectively become a new thing, something which should be of great interest to such as Karen Lebacqz. Equally, viewing these texts in this way also makes very clear how the imposition of modern assumptions about healings being essentially restorative in nature by the Jesus Seminar, by Collins and by Lane has often served to flatten biblical texts that are in fact capable of offering richer portraits of humanity than has hitherto been recognized.

7. A Postscript Addressed to Christian Transhumanists from New Testament Studies

Mention was made earlier of a new piece of evidence concerning Bartimaeus’s blindness, one absent from previous literature. Pace the interpretation offered here, it might be argued that the immediacy of Bartimaeus’s acquisition of sight suggests that he had experienced sight before, that he was not blind from birth. Of course, this would minimize the miracle performed by Jesus, perhaps moving us back towards the miracle-lite territory of the Jesus Seminar and of Yarbro Collins and Lane. This representative of New Testament studies prefers to keep the miracle large, however, not least because it demonstrates that biblical texts have more to offer to the transhumanists than they might be expecting. In Mk 10.51 Jesus seeks permission from Bartimaeus before he does anything for him, asking, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ (Τί σοι θέλεις ποιήσω;). In stark contrast, the man of Jn 9 was healed without any question ever being asked of him. When talking about the healings of Jesus and any lessons for the future augmentation of human beings, the difference between these two gospel accounts in terms of permission being asked of the subject must surely be of fundamental importance to transhumanists. As this article has demonstrated, New Testament scholarship may learn to understand these texts anew by appreciating the focus of other users, but it may also produce in turn significant information to impart to those others. For the sake of the future of the discipline, especially if the aim is to keep it at its current size, these conversations need to be developed rapidly, as a way of warding off the severe consequences mentioned earlier.

It is easy to assume that modern technological advances can be easily rejected by those physically affected. But even a brief consideration of, say, cochlear implants in babies shows that this is not always so. Decisions about what is best for human beings are often understood as taking place amongst those most qualified to make such judgments; commentators on Jn 9 do not question the propriety of Jesus’ action, though perhaps they should. Plans about human enhancement are often far reaching, under theorized and lacking in ethical reflection. They may be carried out by zealots convinced of the normative nature of their vision of humanity, conform us to a normative template not of our own devising, with physical and neurological biodiversity almost inevitably being reduced as a result. Given broad and growing interest in human augmentation across the modern world today, there is perhaps no compelling reason why Jesus and his non-restorative acts of healing should come to play a significant role in discussions about transhumanism, even among Christians. Equally, however, there is no compelling reason as to why he should not become a vocal champion of human enhancement if those involved find his example useful. In arguing for Blind Bartimaeus to join the man of Jn 9 as blind from birth, though, it is pleasing that the gospels can bring something more to the table than a Johannine Jesus uncritically supportive of destroying biodiversity without asking for permission; they can also bring to the discussion a Markan Jesus who is capable of hearing the wishes of those whose bodies and minds are often all too quickly slated for destruction; those who are blind and the deaf do not always dream of sight and sound as the sighted and hearing so complacently, and wantonly, believe.