Healing the Blind: Sight, Authority, and Memory in Early Christian History
An account of how the healing of the blind became one of the most influential miracle traditions shaping early Christian identity and memory.
The healing of the blind occupies a distinctive place among the miracle accounts preserved in early Christian sources, becoming notable not as a single isolated event but as a recurring pattern recorded across multiple texts and locations during the first century AD. Within Christian history, these healings are significant because they appear in all four canonical Gospels and were repeatedly referenced by early Christian writers as historical markers of Jesus’s public activity. Recorded in texts composed between approximately AD 65 and 100, the accounts of restoring sight to the blind became central to how early Christians narrated the life of Jesus of Nazareth and explained the authority attributed to him within the religious landscape of Roman Judea.
