Parable of the falling blind

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In the parable of the so-called fall of the blind (also: parable of the blind guide for the blind or parable of the blind guide for the blind ), Jesus uses the image of a blind man leading another blind man - and both of them fall into a pit together. It is handed down in the Gospels in the New Testament of the Bible by both Matthew ( Mt 15.14  EU ) and Luke ( Lk 6.39  EU ). It is therefore assumed that both evangelists found the saying in the source Q of the logia. The saying can also be found in the Gospel of Thomas (Logion 34).

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Painting The Fall of the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder , tempera on canvas, 1568

In the version of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus is asked by the Pharisees why his disciples do not wash their hands before eating. Jesus replies that it is not what enters a person through the mouth that makes him unclean, but what comes out of the man's mouth makes him unclean. When his disciples point out to Jesus that these words outraged the Pharisees, he told them to let the Pharisees out because they were “blind guides for the blind”. And if a blind man led a blind man, both would fall into a pit.

With Luke the parable in the field speech is in a completely different context in a sequence of different individual words of Jesus. In contrast to Matthew, the statement here is clad in the form of two rhetorical questions and specifically introduced with a short introductory sentence ("He also used a comparison and said: ..."). The parable, which consists of two questions, is believed by some commentators to be the more original form of the logion .

The Gospel of Thomas offers the saying like Matthew in the form of a conditional sentence.

interpretation

According to Fritz Rienecker , blindness represents the Pharisees' lack of spiritual knowledge. Anyone who follows them - and their defective spiritual ideas - falls into a pit with them and does not come into the kingdom of God.

Wolfgang Wiefel refers to the claim of the spiritual leaders in Judaism to be “leaders of the blind”. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus therefore demands that the leaders of the disciples' congregation must be seeing, since only those who can see can show the way.

Artistic reception

Various artists have taken up the parable, the most famous work being The Fall of the Blind (1568) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder , which is exhibited in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples .

Elias Canetti , the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature , gives in the chapter “Simsons Blendung” of the second volume of his autobiography, The Torch in the Ear (page 111), a pictorial description of this painting, which - like Samson's Blinding - is the key motivic function for his novel Die Has glare .

With the story Der Blindensturz (Darmstadt 1985) the writer Gert Hofmann contrasted the master picture with a master story about the painting.

Similar parables in other cultures

According to Wiefel, the image of the blind guide for the blind “had a proverbial character in antiquity” and was already known by Plato .

Similar parables about the blind leading the blind are found in Indian religious scriptures. Thus it says in the Katha Upanishads :

"So the gates run aimlessly back and forth, like blind people who are also blind leaders."

The early Buddhist sutras of the Pali Canon also use the parable:

“Suppose there were a number of blind men, each in contact with the next: the first one sees nothing, the middle one sees nothing, and the last one sees nothing. Likewise, Bhāradvāja, the Brahmins are like a series of blind men in their assertion: the first one sees nothing, the middle one sees nothing, and the last one sees nothing. "

literature

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Schott (Missal) ( Commentary on the Gospel on Friday of the 23rd week of the year ).
  2. ^ Fritz Rienecker, Gerhard Maier: Lexicon for the Bible. R. Brockhaus, 6th edition. 2006, p. 275.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Wiefel: The Gospel according to Luke. Berlin 1987, p. 139.
  4. ^ Vlg. Plato, Pol. VIII, 554b, after: Wolfgang Wiefel: The Gospel according to Lukas. Berlin 1987, p. 139.
  5. ↑ Sixty Upanishads of the Veda, translated from Sanskrit and provided with introductions and notes by Dr. Paul Deussen, p. 272.
  6. ↑ Canki Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 95) , translated by Kay Zumwinkel.