In his
commentary on the Gospel of John, William Barclay offered the following
translation of John 9:1-5:
As Jesus was passing by, he saw a man who was
blind from the day of his birth. ‘Rabbi,’ his disciples said to him, ‘who was
it who sinned that he was born blind – this man or his parents?’ ‘It was neither
he nor his parents who sinned,’ answered Jesus, ‘but it happened that in him
there might be a demonstration of what God can do. We must do the works of him
who sent me while day lasts; the night is coming when no man is able to work.
So long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’’
This is a
text that some Latter-day Saints have used to support our belief that everyone
personally pre-existed. Indeed, many Jews of the time did hold that at least
some people personally, not merely notionally, pre-existed, as Barclay (who
rejected this idea) wrote in his commentary on this passage:
How could the blindness possibly be due to
his own sin, when he had been blind from
his birth? To that question, the Jewish theologians gave two answers.
(1) Some of them had the strange notion of
pre-natal sin. They actually believed it was possible to begin to sin while
still in the womb. In the imaginary conversations between Antoninus and Rabbi
Judah the Patriarch, Antoninus asks: ‘From what time does the evil influence
bear sway over a man, from the formation of the embryo in the womb or from the
moment of birth?’ The Rabbi first answered: ‘From the formation of the embryo.’
Antoninus disagreed convinced Judah by his arguments, for Judah admitted that,
if the evil impulse began with the formation of the embryo, then the child
would kick in the womb and break his way out. Judah found a text to support
this view. He took the saying in Genesis 4:7: ‘Sin is lurking at the door.’ And
he put the meaning into it that sin awaited human life at the door of the womb,
as soon as a child was born. But the argument does show us that the idea of
pre-natal sin was known.
(2) In the time of Jesus, the Jews believed
in the pre-existence of the soul. They really got that idea from Philo and the
Greeks. They believed that all souls existed before the creation of the world
in the garden of Eden, or that they were in the seventh heaven, or in a certain
chamber, waiting to enter into a body. The Greeks had believed that such souls
were good, and that it was the entry into the bod which contaminated them; but
there were certain Jews who believe that these souls were already good and bad.
The writer of The Book of Wisdom says: ‘As a child I was naturally gifted, and
a good soul fell to my lot’ (Wisdom 8:19).
In the time of Jesus, certain Jews did believe
that a person’s affliction, even if it was from birth, might come from sin that
had been committed before that person was born. It is a strange idea, and it
may seem to us almost fantastic; but at its heart lies the idea of a
sin-infected universe. (William Barclay, The
Gospel of John, volume 2 [The New Daily Study Bible; Edinburgh: Saint
Andrew Press, 1975, 2001], 43-44)
Of course,
Jesus does not affirm or deny such presuppositions on the behalf of the
apostles; instead, he rejects the thesis that the man was blind due to sin and
instead, it was, as Barclay notes, “a sign of the glory and the power of God”
(ibid., p. 45).
For a good
discussion of the biblical texts often cited in favour and against the
Latter-day Saint understanding of pre-existence, see Kevin Barney’s excellent article:
On
Preexistence in the Bible (pp. 17-18 discusses John 9:2)
For an article I wrote arguing for the personal pre-existence of all mankind via Christology, see: