“The blind, lame and paralyzed” (John 5:3): John’s Gospel, Disability Studies, and Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

T he growing and diverse field of disability studies has sought to increase the levels of visibility of and to secure justice and dignity for those who live with any sort of disability. 1 Some approaches focus on disability as an individual tragedy in which the (superior?) able-bodied care compassionately for the (inferior, passive?) disabled. Other approaches construct disability in social and systemic terms, identifying and seeking to redress societal structures and practices as sources of discrimination. 2 It is these latter social models that frame this discussion of the disabled characters—characters that are presented as deviating from societal corporeal norms and in need of repair 3 —that populate the late-first-century CE imperialized text known as John’s Gospel: 4 the boy ill to the point of death (4:47), the blind, lame, and paralyzed in 5:3, including the man paralyzed at the pool for 38 years (5:1–9), the (unspecified) sick (6:2), the man born blind (9:1–8). 5 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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