Abstract: Miracles occur relatively often in scripture, as do people who, for various reasons, want or even need to deny their occurrence. The arguments that are deployed to justify such denial haven’t changed all that much over the centuries. In fact, they’re still around today.

Most if not all present or former missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are quite familiar with the first three verses of the ninth chapter of the gospel of John:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. (John 9:1–3)

We know these verses because they seem to presuppose at least the possibility of premortal human existence. Thus, and importantly, they are congruent with the Latter-day Saint belief that we all lived in the presence of our Heavenly Parents before we were born. The notion that undergirds the disciples’ question, that the “man which was blind from his birth” might have been born blind because he had sinned, presupposes the idea that the man could have sinned prior to his birth. Obviously, though, that makes no sense if he hadn’t existed before his birth.

To pursue the typical missionary argument a bit further: Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the disciples’ implicit belief in an antemortal human existence was misguided, the Savior could easily [Page viii]have corrected them. He could simply have informed them that the blind man couldn’t have sinned before his birth because he hadn’t yet existed. That he didn’t do so suggests rather strongly that he didn’t regard belief in human premortal human existence as misguided. He didn’t reject the concept, and the text may even imply that he shared it.

This is, as I say, all quite familiar and unexceptional. I expect that very few Latter-day Saint missionaries, at least among those who have served in predominantly Christian areas of the world, have never used John 9:1–3 in order to ground the restored doctrine of human existence before mortality. What I would like to do here, though, is to look briefly at some of the rest of the account, which takes up almost the entirety of John 9.

So, we return to the account of the healing of the blind man. Of course, a life of genuine Christian discipleship isn’t merely one of subscribing to a set of theological propositions — it entails action. The apostle James is unmistakably clear on this point:

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves …

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (James 1:22, 27)

Accordingly, it’s significant that Jesus doesn’t simply pass on after using the unfortunate blind man as a teaching tool for a doctrinal lesson on the problem of evil. He cures him. Or, anyway, he initiates the process of curing the man:

When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,

And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing. (John 9:6–7)

It may be significant, though it’s quite beyond the scope of this little essay to consider possible explanations or implications, that the Savior doesn’t instantly cure the blind man in this story — as he seems to have done in other cases. Instead, the anointing seems to represent the first stage of a two-stage cure. The man is told that he needs to proceed to the pool of Siloam and wash himself there. Clearly, action on his part,