Tag Archives: miracles

Mano on the Bethsaida Miracle

Photo credit: Stormseeker (sseeker). Unsplash license.

Our friend Dave Lull, ever generously aware of my fascination with the late author D. Keith Mano, sent me to this 1997 article he wrote for National Review.

The article builds on new medical information, shared by Oliver Sacks, concerning what happens to blind people when they are given (or even regain) their sight. Lacking the experience sighted people have acquired from childhood in recognizing visual clues, these people (he cites a patient named Virgil) see the world as an incoherent jumble of shapes and lines. They can tell color and movement, but all the rest of the data confounds them. Depth and perspective are particular challenges.

Mano relates this information (never available before modern times) to the biblical account of Jesus healing a blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-25:

“And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.”

And the blind man (in what I had always considered a poetic image) replied to Jesus, “I see men as trees, walking.”

Mano notes the sequel, where Jesus touches the man a second time to enable him to process all this new information, and then draws the conclusion:

So let us suppose a man like Virgil, blind since childhood because of traumatic shock. Let us also suppose that Jesus, Messiah-as-therapist, came along and healed Virgil in a non-miraculous way. That does not (and cannot) explain Part Two. Whether Virgil’s blindness was physical or psychosomatic, still his brain would have been deprived of the visual exercise and constant drill essential to clear three-dimensional sight. Only by a miracle could Jesus provide that necessary crash course in visual recognition. Charismatic therapists may be able to unblock sight –but they cannot infuse a human brain with that lifetime of visual experience necessary for normal sight.

Read the whole thing.

Motel, Miracles May Be Likely to Occur

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles is a new documentary on the making and lasting influence of Fiddler on the Roof. It first appeared on Broadway in 1964, was released as a movie in 1971, and has been on stages around the world ever since.

Through cast, crew and luminaries’ commentary, [Max] Lewkowicz examines the play’s time-transcending magic as he wonders why “mainstream America is interested in a bunch of Jews living in a pale of Russia of 1905.”

“Tevye is from the shtetl, but his message is universal,” Lewkowicz told The Jerusalem Post from his New York home. “He could be a family man in Honduras, or anywhere in the world for that matter – a father whose children rebel and want to go a different way against his will. He is a man whose tradition is being seriously challenged.”

Motel may have believed marrying Tzeitel to be a miracle of miracles, but many smarter-than-thou philosophers have argued against miracles being a thing (FWIW, “When You Wish Upon a Star” is now playing on my Your Classical stream). Michael J. Kruger of Reformed Theological Seminary has a post about a popular view on miracles, that “given how unlikely miracles are, it is always more likely that a miracle did not occur.”

But we must remember the context of every “miraculous” event. If God is living and active in our world, then miracles will occur. They may even be likely.