Emma Swai
emjswai@gmail.com
Critical disability readings of impaired mobility are relatively rare within the forum of biblical studies. As a result, there is a danger of recurrent tropes being perpetuated, particularly when disabled people are used as narrative tools. John 5:1–15 situates a disabled person as unable to access healing. When this person is then healed by Jesus, their identity is subsumed by their impaired mobility, even though their disability is, in itself, never fully explained. Impaired mobility is presented as negative within the Johannine text, since it is healed and erased against a cultural context of physiognomic beliefs. Consequently, the person with impaired mobility is often negatively interpreted by later readers. However, there are elements to the text that challenge automatically negative interpretations of the person with impaired mobility; when these are examined without the prejudice of a metanarrative of disability, the agency of the person with impaired mobility can be recognised and, to a degree, reinstated. It cannot be said that John 5:1–15 presents disability in a positive manner, but there are layers to that portrayal in the text. Analysis of John 5:1–15, in relation to physiognomic assumptions of passivity and lethargy, suggests that within Johannine texts impairment carries associated meanings, to the point that a disabled narrative figure is reduced to their impairment, rather than having an independent and/or complex identity. It also shows it is possible to ask questions of what a metanarrative might be obscuring, if metanarrative, in principle, displaces agency.[1]
It is true that there is no overarching concept of disability in ancient Greek.[2] This does not mean negative judgements were not made about physical impairments, but we cannot synthesise those judgements.[3] Neither can we recreate embodied perspectives, when there is a lack of “voice” given to disabled people.[4] What we can do is examine how cultural values are created within texts, how identities are embedded within language and how those who are judged negatively on account of their impairment are positioned within a narrative. Since disability is culturally defined within New Testament writings, disability in John 5:1–15 is created when a specific impairment is used to designate categorisation and identity boundaries.[5]
Using the modern term “metanarrative” might seem anachronistic when looking at a New Testament texts, but considering the implications of key textual elements is not. Metanarratives of disability occur where “an overriding narrative” displaces individual identity and/or agency, with normate reductionism leading to “impairment cancel[ing] out other qualities” and connotations being intrinsically ascribed to an impairment.[6] Looking for the presence of a metanarrative of disability is directly applicable to New Testament writings, where a negative judgement is made of a person on account of their physicality; combining this approach with a cultural perspective on disability allows for the recognition of how previously ignored disability stereotypes are constructed, used and challenged. Cultural assumptions regarding impairments, that a complex disabled person is one-dimensional and can only be described using the stereotype associated with their disability, render a disabled character as automatically expected to possess certain characteristics or attributes.
Disability is not a homogenous category. Therefore, it is important to refer to the plural metanarratives of disability unless referring to a particular metanarrative which relates to a specific impairment. Methodologically, focusing on a specific impairment allows us to show that metanarratives in general are potentially present elsewhere.[7] For the purposes of this article I will focus on how the metanarrative of “paralysis” [8] is present in John 5:1–15. Although each New Testament text contains its own cultural construction of “paralysis,” there are general tropes relating to passivity, which include dependence (c.f. Matthew 8:5–13, Luke 7:1–10; Matthew 9:1–8, Mark 2:1–12, Luke 5:17–26) lethargy (c.f. John 5:1–15; Hebrews 12:12–13) and functioning as evidence (c.f. Acts 3:1–10).[9] “Paralysis” is the general category used to refer to impaired mobility and has been used in this article, thus far, to relate John 5:1–15 to the metanarratives of paralysis present in New Testament writings. However, I will not use “paralysis” to refer to the person who is healed within John 5:1–15. Paralytikos and chōlos are the most common terms used to reference impaired mobility in New Testament writings: they are general descriptions alluding to “paralysis” or “lameness” in some form but lack specific detail and do not provide the information as to how mobility is impaired. Neither term is used in John 5:1–15 to label the person with impaired mobility; the narrative only indicates that they have difficulty walking. Whilst identity first language might be preferred,[10] we have no information as to the person’s identity, other than a reference to “a certain person” who is “in weakness” in John 5:5 and “the weak [person]” in John 5:7. On a practical level, “person with impaired mobility” is the most appropriate linguistic option we have, given that “the impaired mobility person” is our alternative. We cannot and should not assign identities for our own benefit or ease of reference.
A metanarrative’s presence, especially when embedded within language, indicates a dominant cultural understanding that is then “granted legitimacy as truth” through its use.[11] This process occurs within John 5:1–15. Other textual features can, at the same time, suggest details that dispute the dominant metanarrative. In John 5:1–15, the person with impaired mobility is, to use Jaime Clark-Soles’s phrasing, “a pawn in a normate narrative about Jesus revealing his own identity” and the narrative overrides their individual identity.[12]However, the person’s agency is not necessarily completely erased by the text, more by interpretations invoking the assumptions of the metanarrative associated with paralysis. John 5:1–5 is not simply a story where Jesus heals “a lazy paralysed man.” Attributing the person with impaired mobility with the qualities of “laziness, lethargy, dullness and naiveté” is “totally unsupported in the text.”[13] Impaired mobility is portrayed negatively in John 5:1–15 and lethargy and passivity might have been assumed by a first or second century audience, but we should avoid also automatically importing ableism into interpretations.
Helena M. Martin states that, historically, “this man has been seen as lazy, unfaithful,” with negative interpretations originating from physiognomic context rather than the text, as interpreters rely on “ableist biases.”[14] This becomes especially problematic where, as George Parsenois recognises, there are gaps in the narrative as a result of the obscurity of the person with impaired mobility and lack of description regarding his behaviour and motivation. Interpretations tend to aim for either a negative or a positive depiction of the person with impaired mobility, when there is the potential for ambiguity.[15] C. H. Dodd, for example, views the person with impaired mobility as lazy and without any kind of will to be healed,[16] and Raymond E. Brown outlines someone with “a chronic inability to seize opportunity.”[17] For George R. Beasley-Murray[18] and R. Alan Culpepper,[19] John 5:1–15 describes someone without any kind of faith. J. Ramsey Michaels interprets the person with impaired mobility approaching Jesus’s John 5:6 question as an offer of help and an attempt to gain an advantage over others seeking healing.[20] Although Cornelius Bennema considers the nuances within John 5:1–15, he ultimately decides that “the invalid’s actions should be understood negatively.”[21] Coming from a different perspective, Andrew Lincoln uses John 5 as example of the Johannine device of misunderstanding, in that the person with impaired mobility man displayed ignorance of Jesus’s identity in understanding Jesus’s question as an offer to help him get to the pool and access healing.[22]
Perhaps the most dangerous potential within John 5:1–15 is in 5:14, which Lincoln argues demonstrates “fairly clearly that there is some connection between past sin and the illness.”[23] Rudolf Bultmann views Jesus’s words as a warning against further sin and greater misery, a warning which also attributes sickness to sin.[24] However, Louise Gosbell compellingly argues that if sin was of primary importance it would have been mentioned during events taking place by the pool; she also outlines how, if sin was relevant at the pool, “it seems unlikely that [John] would include the information about the longevity of the man’s condition,” given a personal transgression would have been committed at a very young age.[25] Gosbell consequently argues that “the directive to “stop sinning” was not in relation to any specific sins the man had committed prior to or following his healing, but rather, the man’s sin in general,”[26] something Martin echoes when she proposes “Jesus’s admonition is a lesson about faith, not a comment on the man’s body,” a lesson which relates to “the eternal consequences of sin” that are graver than any previous impairment or social exclusion.[27]
If the connection between sin and impairment does not exist for the author of John,[28] then there is space for a less negative characterisation of the person with impaired mobility.[29] These options range from the person with impaired mobility being a narrative tool and example of narrative prosthesis,[30] where the author manipulates the character “almost like a marionette” without concern for motivation,[31] to the interpretation that the person with impaired mobility is a person of faith. Kristos Karakolis is one of the few interpreters to promote an unambiguously positive reading of John 1:1–15. He argues that “the issue of faith is central” to the pericope and the person with impaired mobility’s “response to Jesus as his miraculous healer is very much relevant to the birth and growth of his faith”[32] given that “he trusts and obeys Jesus by immediately taking up his bed and walking away.”[33]
This brief review of interpretive positions, whilst by no means complete, indicates that gaps in the narrative can be filled in a range of ways. What happens to the portrayal of the person with impaired mobility if we identify and look beyond some of the passivity assumed by a metanarrative of paralysis? The focus of John 5.1–15 being on Jesus means that the person with impaired mobility has their identity and personal situation “erased in different ways.”[34] They have no name within the narrative, nor are any real details of their impairment provided. Exegesis of John 5:1–15 also often focuses on the timing of the depicted events, so that the person with impaired mobility is “overshadowed” by Sabbath, as well as Christological, concerns. It is not just the healing of the person with impaired mobility which “alleviates discomfort by removing the unsightly from view,”[35] but the foci of the narrative itself that causes the person with impaired mobility to fade further into the background. If the person with impaired mobility is useful to the narrator only in the sense that their impairment provides an opportunity to evidence Jesus’s power to heal, then readings of the text which attribute meaning to missing information, in terms of what the person with impaired mobility did or did not do, must be seen as problematic.
There is more description of the pool than of any individual gathered there: the description of the space emphasises the number of those with various impairments present,[36] instead of providing any information about those individuals. There is no information as to how those individuals arrived, whether they had been abandoned there or whether they were there by choice. That there were multitudes under the porticoes must suggest that the system of healing at Bethesda had somehow left them behind. The position of being outside of social structures, judged “other” by a society or culture that did not or would not include them, indicates the equivalent of impairment being transformed into what could be considered a disability through the process of practical exclusion.
In John 5:5, our attention is only meant to focus on “a certain person”[37] insofar as they progress the “Jesus narrative” of the text. John 5:5 provides the information that “a certain person was there, who had been infirm for thirty-eight years,” with the following verse expanding that Jesus saw the person and knew their physical impairment was long-term. Jesus already knowing (in John 5:6) could indicate a supranatural understanding of the situation, grasping knowledge unknown to others, but it could also reflect that Jesus, having seen them laying, could discern from both the person’s position and appearance that they had been paralysed for a long time. Some English translations, such as the NRSV, describe Jesus recognising the person as having been there at the pool for “a long time,” whereas others, the NKJV or NASB for example, recount that what Jesus knows is the length of time the person with impaired mobility had lived with their disability; there is no actual indication of how long they had been waiting by the pool itself. Interpretations of the person with impaired mobility’s assumed wait for healing have attributed blame to them as an individual; some commentators, including Dodd and Sandra M. Schneiders,[38] assert that the person with impaired mobility could have accessed healing if they had chosen to, but instead were lazy.[39]The length of time, thirty-eight years, stated in the narrative is sometimes used as evidence that there must have been a way for the person to deal with their impairment[40] and there are disability scholars who attribute responsibility to the person with impaired mobility for not seeking assistance.[41]
The narrative in John 5:6 sees the person with impaired mobility through Jesus’s eyes. The direct speech in John 5.7 deserves more attention than it is customarily given, because it provides the person with impaired mobility’s view of their own situation. Direct speech allows the person with impaired mobility to provide “a provocative revelation of the realities of [their] day-to-day experience.”[42] The fact that the narrative records this direct speech is worth noting, since few characters, let alone disabled characters, are given their own voice in New Testament writings. Although John 5:7 is called by Dodd “a feeble excuse,”[43] when read in conjunction with the context of Bethesda the person with impaired mobility’s words provide an illustration of how the social organisation at Bethesda creates disability: behind the metanarrative of lethargy is a glimpse at the reality of the situation. “I have no one” evidences being ignored by society. It might be true that they have “not made connections or built any community in thirty-eight years,”[44] but Clark-Soles judges connections and community to be those able to help access the pool. There is no reason to assume that the person with impaired mobility has not made connections with other people waiting at Bethesda. However, they are likely to be in a similar position of need, in light of John 5:3, and unlikely to be able to provide the assistance needed. Lack of assistance allows the situation described by the end of John 5:7: someone else always steps down ahead, accessing the pool first because they are faster, not because the person with impaired ability is necessarily alone.
Though omitted from many modern English translations as later addition, John 5:4 adds detail to why someone entering the water ahead of the person with impaired mobility might not be the “feeble excuse” described by Dodd.[45] The ending of John 5:3, in the majority of manuscripts, describes those present as “waiting on the movement of the waters” and that timing was important.[46] Longer explanations, or potential additions, appear in a number of manuscripts, including Codices Alexandrinus, Coridethianus and Tischendorfianus IV, as John 5:4: “For an angel of the Lord would come down from time to time in the pool and stir up the water.”[47]Although manuscripts such as P66 or P75 B do not contain the additions, the idea that the first into the pool would be the one cured could be a way of explaining the congregation of people mentioned within the text and why the person with impaired mobility’s repeated attempts at access were constantly being thwarted by someone overtaking them as they attempted to make their way to the pool. Within the Johannine narrative context, the water itself cannot be curative. If it were curative, there would be either no one waiting or people spending as much time as possible in the water.[48] The importance of timing his supports the idea that John 5:7 contains valid assertion, not excuse.
Clark-Soles correctly asserts that a “society disables people with impairments when it refuses to take steps to ensure that all members of society have equal access to the benefits of society.”[49] Access to the pool at the appropriate time for healing is denied to the person with impaired mobility, precisely because as they make their way they are pushed aside by those who can move faster than they are able to. It is not because the person with impaired mobility lacks the will or determination that they have been left discarded by the social structures of society. They have attempted to engage on multiple occasions, thereby providing evidence of will. If John 5:1–15 were to be interpreted as an illustration of a person’s willingness to engage with faith, it would also be a damning illustration of a community preventing access to belief. The “social institution” at Bethesda requires the person with impaired mobility “to ‘cooperate fully’ and enter the pool at the prescribed time”[50] to access treatment for their impairment. Kerry H. Wynn describes the situation in John 5 the problem being ignoring life for the sake of the inaccessible “miracle cure.” According to Wynn, the person with impaired mobility has “bought into the role of the helpless dependent.”[51] The person with impaired mobility is attempting, though, to engage with life by gaining access and it is others in society who deny access or inclusion. Is the narrative not trying to challenge the normate society of which the person with impaired mobility is on the periphery of?
Jesus prompts the person with impaired mobility’s direct speech in John 5:7 with theleis hygiēs genesthai, which can be translated literally as “you desire well to become.” These English words are usually then re-ordered in one of a number of ways, instead of simply “you desire to become well.” English translations usually render Jesus’s words as a question, though there are options as to the tone of that question. Some, admittedly less scholarly translations,[52] translate in a derogatory tone. The AMPC uses “Are you earnest about getting well?” and the TPT “Do you truly long to be healed?” These suggest that an affirmative answer would be the obvious choice. No guidance as to an expected or desired answer is provided in the Greek text.[53] To press the linguistic angle further, “you desire to become well” potentially contains reference to agency and choice. As in the NRSV, Jesus’s words could be a neutral question, requiring a yes/no response: “Do you want to be made well?” The person with impaired mobility is given a choice out of respect. Grammatically it is also possible that Jesus is issuing a statement as to the person’s will: if Jesus is stating “You desire to become well,” it would negate interpretations which promote the idea that the person with impaired mobility does not want to be healed. Whether question or statement, the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament suggests a reading of “you desire to become well” that does not contain the assumption of lethargy: the metanarrative of paralysis is not explicitly present in “you desire to become well,” other than in healing and the eradication of disability being an option.
John 5:7, as the person with impaired mobility’s response to Jesus’s “question,” is often criticised. The notion of providing excuses stems from the idea that no answer is provided, however their words do respond: the person with impaired mobility has repeatedly tried to access the opportunity for healing presented at the pool but has been prevented from doing so. As has previously been indicated, where interpreters argue for laziness or passivity, they do not appear to take into account those repeated attempts to access healing. The person with impaired mobility has displayed determination in the face of social exclusion, by refusing to give up and continuing to try again. Interpreting the situation as a display of determination places some negative social judgement onto to those ignoring need. It is true that the person with impaired mobility does not declare their desire to be healed, but repeated attempts to access the pool can be interpreted as an equivalent statement of intent.
Narrative focus on Jesus leads to a lack of information on the person with impaired mobility, gaps which are often filled with assumptions made through use of the metanarrative of paralysis. In John 5:8 Jesus says, “Stand up, take your mat and walk,” after which the person with impaired mobility is “made well,” takes up their mat and begins to walk (John 5:9). The “at once” or “immediately” at the beginning of John 5:9 can be used to evidence Jesus’s power, but if the metanarrative of paralysis is set aside, it could also reflect the person with impaired mobility’s character. The Johannine audience is not told how the person with impaired mobility knew they could get up and walk, but the narrative does tell us that they followed Jesus’s instructions and that they did so “at once.” If in Johannine healings there needs to be a willingness to participate, then just as willingness is shown through the person with impaired mobility’s repeated attempts to access healing, willingness is also shown by promptly obeying instructions, especially when there is a choice whether to do so. The person with impaired mobility has the agency to choose whether or not to display the success of Jesus’s power by providing evidence of the healing; without the choice to stand, there is no evidence that a miracle has taken place. Although not made explicit within the narrative, on a practical level the agency of the person with impaired mobility is important. Therefore, it is difficult to understand why the person with impaired mobility is so negatively understood, unless there is an assumption of passivity on the part of the interpreter.
Negative representations of the person previously with impaired mobility are explicitly stated in much of the exegesis surrounding their encounter with Jesus in John 5.14, particularly where Jesus says to them meketi hamartane. Debate has taken place as to “the exact meaning” of Jesus’s directive in John 5.14,[54] whether it is “stop sinning” or “sin no more,” without paying attention to whether the person’s sin has any connection to disability in the first place. Pauline Otieno is one example of a commentator who believes that Jesus’s directive regarding the cessation of a form of sin “clearly indicates that Jesus thought that there was a connection between the man’s disability and some sin.”[55] The “clear indication” of a connection depends on the assumption of a negative metanarrative associated with the previous condition of impaired mobility. Even if the person with impaired mobility is “an ongoing sinner of some sort,”[56] a direct link between impairment and sin in John 5 would depend on “a correlation between physical appearance and moral character” present in physiognomic beliefs of first and second century societies.[57] Referring back to Gosbell, if sins were of primary importance and directly related to impairment, the issue would have been addressed at Bethesda and not later in the narrative sequence.[58] If sin is not the cause of the person previously with impaired mobility’s disability,[59] yet Jesus effectively rebukes them with ”stop sinning” or “sin no more,” then their behaviour must somehow necessitate the warning. There is not enough provided information to suggest that they deserve the warning to not sin more than anyone else.[60]
It is at this point discussions often turn to a narrative or structural link with the person “blind from birth” (anthrōpos typhlon ek genetēs) in John 9. Bultmann is one of many who have examined the literary connections between the two pericopes, arguing for similar textual construction.[61] Comparison does not automatically have to ascribe binary opposition,[62] yet the blind person is interpreted as cooperative whereas the person with impaired mobility is not,[63] clever compared to obtuse,[64] growing in spiritual insight as opposed to unbelief.[65] There is, as Parsenois suggests, more ambiguity than a simple binary comparison of opposites: even if literary structures set up a comparison, from a disability perspective binary opposition is impossible, given the nature of the different impairments. Interpretations which polarise the disabled people of John 5 and John 9 view disability as a homogenous category, something which, as is evident by the listing in John 5:3, the author of John does not do.
Gaps or the omission of information in the Johannine narrative can allow an exegete to identify the person with impaired mobility’s disloyalty, that their physical condition reflected their “moral and spiritual paralysis.”[66] A contemporary audience or modern reader may, according to an expected metanarrative of paralysis, negatively judge the person with impaired mobility for their sinful behaviour “but there has been no hint up to now that Jesus judged or condemned [them].”[67] It has been argued that the person’s lack of response to Jesus is evidence of sinfulness, that there is no evidence of them thanking Jesus[68] or testifying to others.[69] That supposed absence of gratitude arises since the person with impaired mobility is not described as thanking Jesus post-healing.[70] Gratitude is not always described post-healing and the author needs to directly move on to a discussion of the Sabbath, from which further personal interaction distracts. Absence gratitude can lead to a reading in of betrayal when, in John 5:15, the authorities are told of events by the person previously with impaired mobility. Why must it be interpreted that the person “tattles”[71] to tois Ioudaiois, when we do not have information as to their motivation? Since the person simply “told” that Jesus was the one who made them well it is equally possible that they are stating evidence regarding Jesus’s miracle. The only way that the act of relaying the details of events could be interpreted as betrayal, is if spiritual paralysis is asserted. If the focus of the narrative is elsewhere, it cannot automatically be assumed that they did not testify to anyone else whilst they were on their way to the temple, where Jesus later meets them. Readings which import a metanarrative of paralysis into narrative gaps, where no information is actually provided, can be dangerous.[72] Lack of information as to what the person healed at the pool actually said or why leads to the possibility of the interpretation that they do not take any risks for the Gospel.[73] It is not incorrect to assert that there is apparently no “public declaration of faith,”[74] but it is important to acknowledge that alternative interpretations are also possible.
There has been over-interpretation of narrative gaps, the reading in of a negative metanarrative when no information is provided. When the person healed at the pool tells the authorities that it was Jesus who had healed them (John 5:15), there is no real reason why they may not be simply providing evidence as to what Jesus has done for them. Jesus has warned the person not to sin, but there is nothing to prove that they ignore that warning and maliciously denounce Jesus.[75] If this is the case, then acknowledging Jesus’s power and ability to heal would be a risk for faith. The person with impaired mobility, healed at the pool, is not positioned in the text to proclaim Jesus with their words. Impairment, or the erasure of it, functions in John 5 as evidence of what Jesus can do, not any kind of character analysis of the person with impaired mobility. If we conclude the person with impaired mobility sins no more than anyone else, that they have attempted to access the pool as they believe they are meant to, John 5:1–15 has a secondary function as social commentary. John 5:7 and the prevention of access is a social commentary on barriers to belief. Jesus is not shown to criticise the person with impaired mobility for the duration of their impairment, nor comment on those waiting at the pool.[76]
Impaired mobility, as a narrative tool, promotes Jesus’s authority and identity through its erasure, but the person with impaired mobility also concurrently challenges the assumptions made by a metanarrative of paralysis. Narrative gaps can be filled with negative or stereotypical portrayals, or with agency. The proposal made here is that by taking note of the presence of a metanarrative of paralysis, both potentially in the text, but more specifically in interpretations of it, we can look to the text for elements of agency previously ignored. We need to pay more attention to the person with impaired mobility’s determination to access healing, whilst also acknowledging the negative judgements placed upon them by physiognomic social standards and structures. When we reduce a character “solely to an expression or illustration of something or someone else,” [77] we erase any potential agency or identity. In doing so we uncritically uphold supposedly historical physiognomic belief systems and structures. Applying a disability lens to John 5:1–15 allows us to set aside elements of a more modern metanarrative of paralysis and examine the construction of disability within the text itself.
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Waldschmidt, Anne, “Disability Goes Cultural: The Cultural Model as an Analytical Tool,” Pages 19–27 in Culture — Theory — Disability: Encounters Between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Edited by Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen. Bielefeld Transcript, 2017.
Wynn, Kerry H. “Johannine Healings and the Otherness of Disability.” Perspectives in Religious Studies 34.1 (2007): 61–76.
[1] David Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 10.
[2] Anna Rebecca Solevåg argues that, within the context of John 5:3, “many invalids” (asthenountōn) functions as an introduction to a list of impairments, thereby positioning weakness (asthenia) as an overarching term equivalent to “disability”. The John 5:3 list is constituted of “blind, lame and paralysed” as subcategories. See Anna Rebecca Solevåg, Negotiating the Disabled Body (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2018), 59. Whilst I would suggest John 5:3 lists four separate impairments or conditions, Solevåg makes some excellent arguments in relation to John 5:1–15 in its cultural context.
[3] Candida R. Moss and Jeremy Schipper, “Introduction” in Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, ed. Candida R. Moss and Jeremy Schipper (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6.
[4] Saul M. Olyan discusses this in relation to the Hebrew Bible. See Saul M. Olyan, Disability in the Hebrew Bible – Interpreting Mental and Physical and Mental Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3.
[5] For discussion on using a cultural approach to disability, it is helpful to begin with Anne Waldschmidt, “Disability Goes Cultural: The Cultural Model as an Analytical Tool,” in Culture—Theory—Disability: Encounters Between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies, ed. Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), 19–27.
[6] David Bolt, “Prologue,” in Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order, ed. David Bolt (London: Routledge, 2021), xvii.
[7] David Bolt, “Prologue,” xvii.
[8] Some disabled people affected by impaired mobility object to the term “paralysis” and it is only used here as a general term. See Robert F. Murphy’s comments in Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent (New York: Norton, 1990), 3.
[9] Emma Swai “Too Far from Ideal? Disability and New Testament Writings” (PhD diss., Liverpool Hope University, 2023), 197–246.
[10] UK-based disability campaigners use identity-first language when referring to disability. See Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Emily Richardson, At the Gates: Disability, Justice and the Churches (London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 2022), 25–26. This would, ordinarily, be the example that I would follow. However, in the case of John 5:1–15 identity-first language does not feel appropriate on account of the lack of information as to the specific natured of the disabled person’s identity.
[11] Danielle Kohfeldt and Gregory Mather, “The Metanarrative of Chronic Pain: Culpable, Duplicitous and Miserable,” in Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order, ed. David Bolt (London: Routledge, 2021), 141.
[12] Jaime Clark-Soles, “John, First–Third John, and Revelation,” in The Bible and Disability — A Commentary, ed. Sarah J. Melcher, Mikeal C. Parsons, and Amos Yong (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017), 342.
[13] Louise J Lawrence, “Vital (Johannine) Signs: ‘Crip-Tic’ Enactments of a Man at the Pool (John 5:1–18),” Biblical Interpretation 27.2 (2019): 260–61, doi:10.1163/15685152-00272P05.
[14] Helena M. Martin, “In Defense of the Disabled Man at the Bethesda Fountain (John 5.1–15),” Biblical Interpretation 30 (2022): 246
[15] George Parsenois, “The ‘Man at the Pool’ and the ‘Man Born Blind’: Comparison in the Lives of Plutarch and the Gospel of John” in Signs and Discourses in John 5 and 6, ed. Jörg Frey and Craig R. Koester (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 4.
[16] C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 320.
[17] Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John — Volume 1: I–XII (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), 209.
[18] George R. Beasley-Murray, John (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000), 74.
[19] R. Alan Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1983), 138.
[20] J. Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 293; J. Ramsey Michaels, “The Invalid at the Pool: The Man Who Merely Got Well” in Character Studies in the Fourth Gospel, ed. Steven A. Hunt, D. Francois Tolmie, and Ruben Zimmermann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 339.
[21] Cornelius Bennema, Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), 194.
[22] Andrew T. Lincoln, The Gospel According to John (London: Continuum, 2005), 194–195.
[23] Lincoln, The Gospel According to John, 195.
[24] Rudolf Bultman, The Gospel of John — A Commentary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 243.
[25] Louise A. Gosbell, The Poor, the Crippled, the Blind, and the Lame (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 294–295. For initial information as to life expectancy in the Mediterranean during the first and second centuries, see Kristi Upson-Saia, Heidi Marx and Jared Secord, Medicine, Health and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean 500BCE – 600CE: A Sourcebook (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023), 37.
[26] Gosbell, The Poor, 296.
[27] Martin, “In Defense,” 262.
[28] According to Solevåg, it is “unclear” how the reference to sin in John 5:14 connects sin and disability, see Solevåg, Negotiating the Disabled Body, 61. In addition, there is the potential interpretation that any connection between disability and sin is severed by Jesus’s words in John 9:3–5, see Solevåg, Negotiating the Disabled Body, 65.
[29] John Christopher Thomas, “‘Stop Sinning Lest Something Worse Come Upon You’: The Man at the Pool in John 5,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 18.59 (1995), 3, doi:10.1177/0142064X9601805901.
[30] Solevåg, Negotiating the Disabled Body, 65.
[31] Ernst Haenchen, John 1 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1984), 247–248.
[32] Christos Karakolis, “The Lame Man (John 5: 1–18) as a Model for the Johannine Jews — A Narrative and Reader-Response Analysis” in Signs and Discourses in John 5 and 6, ed. Jörg Frey and Craig R. Koester (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 15–16.
[33] Karakolis, “The Lame Man,” 22.
[34] Clark-Soles, “John,” 342.
[35] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 8.
[36] Ramsey Michaels, Gospel of John, 289.
[37] The Nestle-Aland 28 reads anthrōpos and I recognise that the majority of English translations render this as “a certain man” or “one man.” However, technically does not have to be translated as “man” and, therefore, it is conceivable that the text under consideration could describe a woman with impaired mobility. In recognition of the missing information, I have chosen to refer to the “person” within analysis of John 5, unless reproducing a quotation.
[38] Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Herder & Herder, 2003), 163.
[39] Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 319–320.
[40] Schneiders, Written That You May Believe, 163.
[41] Clark-Soles suggests that the evidence available suggests the person with impaired mobility does not actually want to be made well; in not making connections or community they have not created opportunities for themselves. See Clark-Soles, “John,” 340.
[42] Lawrence, “Vital (Johannine) Signs,” 261.
[43] Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 320.
[44] Clark-Soles, “John,” 340.
[45] Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 320.
[46] Haenchen, John 1, 244.
[47] Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John, 290.
[48] Haenchen, John 1, 244–245.
[49] Clark-Soles, “John,” 334.
[50] Kerry H. Wynn, “Johannine Healings and the Otherness of Disability,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 34.1 (2007): 67–68.
[51] Wynn, “Johannine Healings,” 65.
[52] Whilst less scholarly translations may not seem relevant to academic analysis, it is important to acknowledge these more negative translations because they can linguistically transfer the metanarrative of paralysis embedded within them into the ecclesiastical communities which use said translations.
[53] Whilst we may have issues with the translation processes or approaches employed, these translations still exist and do provide an example of where translations can add another layer of dangerous potential to biblical texts.
[54] Gosbell, The Poor, 294.
[55] Pauline Otieno, “Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Disability: Implications on the Rights of Persons with Disability in Kenya,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009), doi:10.18061/dsq.v29i4.988.
[56] Clark-Soles, “John,” 341.
[57] Warren Carter, “‘The Blind, Lame and Paralyzed’ (John 5:3): John’s Gospel, Disability Studies, and Postcolonial Perspectives,” in Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, ed. Candida R. Moss and Jeremy Schipper (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 130.
[58] Gosbell, The Poor, 294–95.
[59] Wynn, “Johannine Healings,” 64.
[60] In John 8:11, Jesus dismisses the woman caught in adultery with “Go on you way, and from now on do not sin again” (mēketi hamartane), using language understood to indicate a future directive from the point of address.
[61] Bultman, The Gospel of John – A Commentary, 239.
[62] Parsenois, “Man at the Pool,” 12–13.
[63] Schneiders, Written That You May Believe, 153
[64] Brown, The Gospel According to John – Volume 1: I-XII, 209.
[65] Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, 138–39; Bennema, Encountering Jesus, 195, 197.
[66] Schneiders, Written That You May Believe, 163.
[67] Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John, 298.
[68] Haenchen, John 1, 246.
[69] Gosbell, The Poor, 296.
[70] Technically, the blind person in John 9 does not “thank” Jesus, though they do worship him in 9:38. John 9 is a longer and more detailed pericope, thereby providing more space for such details. Whereas John 5:1–5 is as much a narrative bridge to Jesus discussing his authority in John 5:19 onwards, as it is a demonstration of power through healing. Narrative space is not given to describe the man’s motivations or responses, except for where it serves the progression of the Jesus narrative.
[71] Clark-Soles, “John,” 341.
[72] Lawrence, “Vital (Johannine) Signs” 261.
[73] Clark-Soles, “John,” 340.
[74] Gosbell, The Poor, 297.
[75] Haenchen, John 1, 247.
[76] Those waiting at the pool are, though, setting the scene rather than considered as characters in their own right. No information is provided on them as their narrative function is to provide background information for Bethesda, both in terms of the number of people approaching the healing sanctuary and how ineffective it was for those who needed it, given the fact that they are still waiting.
[77] Louise J. Lawrence, Sense and Stigma in the Gospels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 31.