The Bethsaida Miracle

I See Men as Trees Walking

The Bethsaida miracle (Jesus healing a blind man) by D. Keith Mano National Review; 4/21/1997

Getting rid of blindness, I'm told, is not such a bargain after all. Human eyes, you see -- even when healed physically -- still need training and rigorous practice before they can transmit what is "real" and "not real" back to the brain. It doesn't much matter how long you've been sightless, either: a decade or so of blindness and your cerebral cortex has to be completely reprogrammed, as if from infanthood. On opening his eyes, the healed seer confronts a nonsensical, frightful, and, well, Cubist landscape. Over that shattered universe he must stubbornly impose the familiar 3D grid we live in.

Oliver Sacks has written about the new seer in An Anthropologist on Mars. Virgil, age 50 and blind since childhood, has had "successful" eye surgery. Five weeks later he "often felt more disabled than he had felt when he was blind...Steps posed a special hazard, because all he could see was a confusion, a flat surface of parallel and criss-crossing lines; he could not see them (although he knew them) as solid objects going up or coming down in three dimensional space."

Furthermore, Virgil "would pick up details incessantly--an angle, an edge, a colour, a movement--but he would not be able to synthesize them, to form a complex perception at a glance. This was one reason the cat, visually, was so puzzling: he would see the paw, a nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together, the cat as a whole." And, as his wife noted, "Virgil finally put a tree together--he now knows that the trunk and leaves go together to form a complete unit."

The word-picture of an unmade tree set off associations in my mind. I remembered Jesus and the Bethsaida blind man (Mark 8:22-25. Mark's is the least adorned and oldest Gospel, dating roughly from 45 to 60 A.D.) "And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto 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."

That is not a poetic image. It is a clinical description. Like Virgil, the Bethsaida blind man can now see, but he cannot yet make sense of what he's seeing. Tree and man run together, as did trunk and treetop for Virgil. (Both men could see movement because, according to Sacks, motion and color are inherent in the brain; they need not be learned or relearned.) All this moreover is not surprising to Jesus. He knows, it would seem, that a newly healed blind man has neither depth perception nor the ability to synthesize shape and form. The blind man's brain must first be recalibrated: it must be taught (in one miraculous instant) what you and I have known since childhood--how to see.

So Jesus heals the blind man a second time. "After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly."

As far as I can judge this is irrefutable evidence that a miracle did occur at Bethsaida. Back in 30 A.D. the blind did not often receive sight: there were few, if any, eye surgeons and seldom a decent miracle-worker. No shill in the crowd could have faked it all by pretending to be blind--because only someone recently given his sight would see 'men as trees, walking,' would see the Cubist jumble that Virgil told Oliver Sacks about. A faker, not knowing about post-blind syndrome, would have reported that Jesus had given him perfect vision.

The most astonishing aspect of this miracle is its double nature: you get not one cure but two. Often even devout Christians downplay the wonder-working Jesus--lest they seem naive or overcredulous. We are somewhat embarrassed by New Testament miracles, as if God were cheating in the competition for our belief...Jesus healed through positive thought, or Essene hypnosis, whatever. Rasputin did the same.

That explanation might still hold for Part I of the Bethsaida event... It does not and cannot explain Part II. --- [Note: The movie, "At First Sight" (1999) starring Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132512/

http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1999/01/011504.html

is based on a true story recounted by neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks. In the movie "Awakenings" Robin Williams played a character loosely based on Sacks.]