Saturday, June 15, 2019

William Barclay on Jewish Beliefs in Personal Pre-Existence of Individuals and John 9:1-5


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: