where a crowd of invalids used to lie, the blind, the lame, and folk with shrivelled limbs [waiting for the water to bubble.

As he passed along he saw a man who had been blind from his birth;

and his disciples asked him, "Rabbi, for whose sin ??for his own or for his parents' ??was he born blind?"

They brought him before the Pharisees, this man who had once been blind.

So they asked the blind man once more, "What have you to say about him, for opening your eyes?" The man replied, "I say he is a prophet."

Now the Jews would not believe he had been born blind and had regained his sight, till they summoned the parents of the man who had regained his sight

and asked them, "Is this your son, the son you declare was born blind? How is it that he can see now?"

His parents answered, "This is our son, and he was born blind; we know that.

So the man born blind was summoned a second time, and told, "Now give God the praise; this man, we know quite well, is only a sinner."

To which he replied, "I do not know whether he is a sinner; one thing I do know, that once I was blind and now I can see."

It is unheard of, since the world began, that anyone should open a blind man's eyes.

Then said Jesus, "It is for judgment that I have come into this world, to make the sightless see, to make the seeing blind."

On hearing this the Pharisees who were beside him asked, "And are we blind?"

Jesus replied, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty; but, as it is, you claim to have sight ??and so your sin remains."

Others said, "These are not a madman's words. Can a madman open the eyes of the blind?"

Whereupon the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" ??37 though some of them asked, "Could he not have prevented him from dying, when he could open a blind man's eyes?"

He has blinded their eyes and made their hearts insensible, to prevent them seeing with their eyes and understanding with their hearts and turning for me to cure them.