소경으로 태어나 다시 보는 사람(요한복음 9)

Congenital Blindness and Recovery of Eyesight in John 9

This paper explores the theme of congenital blindness and recovery of eyesight in John 9 from the perspectives of ancient Judaism and Platonism and their definitions of blindness and seers. The two primary methodologies are the history of ideas suggested by Arthur Lovejoy and some intertextuality theories developed by Stephen Hinds, Richard Hays, and Dennis R. MacDonald. In the Jewish tradition, blindness has several meanings; both physical and psychical. Sometimes, blind people signify sinners who do not obey the voice or word of God (Deut 28:15, 29; Zep 1:17). The servants of the Lord and captive people of Israel are also blind (Isa 42:19; 43:8; 59:10). God Him/Herself, however, will open the eyes of the blind in the messianic era (Psalm 146:8; Isa 29:18; 35:5; 42:7, 18; 61:1). The man born blind who looks up again also parallels Plato' s concept of human being who is congenitally blind, but is able to perceive up again the intelligible world through the recollections of prenatal memory, although the doctrine of the immortality of the human soul is absent from the Fourth Gospel. The works of Philo of Alexandria and of Flavius Josphus attest to the prevalence of Platonism in first century Judaism. Fabius Quintilian who was a Roman rhetorician and contemporary of Josephus equates Plato with Homer and also Homer with Jupiter. This paper is innovative because it discusses some of the similarities and differences between the Johannine concept of human being in John 9 and the visual definition of human being in Plato, which are insufficiently discussed in the previous studies on the Fourth Gospel.