You can find my two-part introduction to the Gospel of John at these two links, and my index/outline for it here; for the previous installment on John 8:30-59, go here.
The Gospel of John: Unblinding Light, Part I (John 9:1-34)
The opening verse of our text suggests that there is no pause between 8:59 and 9:1, or no very substantial pause (like the kind implied by 2:12)—the Lord is apparently still on his way out of Yrushalem, and performs this miracle more or less in passing. Notably, there follows one of John’s rare extended sequences where Yeshua is absent from the text, and our attention is instead directed to someone who testifies in his favor.
John 9:1-34, RSV-CE
La Curación del Ciego [The Healing of a Blind
Man] (c. 1570), by El Greco.
As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”a Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.b We mustc work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”d As he said this, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the clay, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent).e So he went and washed and came back seeing. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar, said, “Is not this the man who used to sit and beg?” Some said, “It is he”; others said, “No, but he is like him.” He said, “I am the man.”f They said to him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’; so I went and washed and received my sight.” They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes.g The Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight. And he said to them, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.” Some of the Pharisees said,h “This man is not from God, for he does not keep the sabbath.” But others said,h “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” There was a division among them. So they again said to the blind man, “What do you say about him, since he has opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”
The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight, and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but how he now sees we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age, he will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if any one should confess him to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.i Therefore his parents said, “He is of age, ask him.”
So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and said to him, “Give God the praise; we know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “Whether he is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see.” They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you too want to become his disciples?” And they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.”j The man answered, “Why, this is a marvel! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if any one is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world begank has it been heard that any one opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born in utter sin,l and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.
John 9:1-34, my translation
Now as he was going by, he saw a person blind from birth. And his students asked him [about it], saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this [man] or his parents, so that he should be born blind?”a
Yeshua responded: “Neither this [man] nor his parents sinned, but in order that the works of God should be manifested in him.b It is necessary for usc to work the works of him who dispatched me while it is day; night is coming, when no one is able to work. However long I am in the world, I am light of the world.”d Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made clay from the spit and smeared the clay as ointment onto his eyes, and told him: “Go, wash in the pool of Shiloach” (which is interpreted “Sent”).e
Healing of the Blind Man by Jesus Christ (1871),
by Carl Bloch.
So he went off and washed, and came [back] seeing. Then the neighbors and those who beheld him before because he was a panhandler began saying, “This isn’t the [man] who would sit [here] and panhandle?” Others were saying that “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but he is like him.”
The man told them that “I am [he].”f
So they said to him: “How were your eyes opened?”
He responded, “The person called Yeshua made clay and smeared it onto my eyes as ointment, and told me to ‘Go into Shiloach and wash’; so when I went and washed, I could see.”
They asked him, “Where is he?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
They led him who had been blind to the Pryshaya. (It was a sabbath, the day Yeshua made the clay and opened his eyes.)g Then the Pryshaya asked him a further [time] how he could see. He said to them: “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed myself, and I see.”
So some of the Pryshaya began saying:h “This person is not from God, because he does not observe the sabbath.”
Others were saying,h “How can a sinful person do these kinds of signs?” And there was division among them.
So they asked the blind man further, “What do you say about him, because he opened your eyes?”
He said that “He is a prophet.”
Then the Jews had no faith about him, that he was blind and could see, until they called the very parents of the seeing man and asked them, saying: “Is this your son, about whom you say that he was born blind? Then how does he see a present?”
So his parents said in response, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but how now he sees, we don’t know—or who opened his eyes, we don’t know; ask him, he is of age, he speaks for himself.” His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for already the Jews had come to an agreement so that if anyone affirmed him Anointed, he should become disfellowshipped.i Because of this, his parents said that “He is of age, ask him about [it].”
Relief of Moses (1950) sculpted by Jean de
Marco for the US House of Representatives.
Then for a second [time] they called the person who was blind and said to him: “Give glory to God; we know that this person is sinful.”
So that man responded, “I do not know if he is sinful; I know one thing: being blind, at present I see.”
Then they said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”
He responded to them, “I told you already and you did not hear; why do you want to hear it again? Unless you also want to become his students?”
They vilified him and said, “If you are that man’s student, we are students of Moshe; we know that God spoke to Moshe, but we do not know where this man is from.”j
And the person told them in response: “Now here is a miracle! that you do not know where he is from, and he opened my eyes. We know that God does not hear sinful [people], but if someone is God-revering and does what he wants, he hears them. Throughout the age,k it is unheard of that the eyes of one born blind should open; unless this man were from God, he could not do nothing.”
They responded and told him, “You were wholly begotten in sins,l and you are teaching us?” And they threw him out.
Textual Notes
a. who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?/who sinned, this [man] or his parents, so that he should be born blind? | τίς ἥμαρτεν, οὗτος ἢ οἱ γονεῖς αὐτοῦ, ἵνα τυφλὸς γεννηθῇ; [tis hēmarten, houtos ē hoi goneis autou, hina tüflos gennēthē?]: This is, in a way, a rather strange question. In another sense, far from being strange, it’s as common as dirt—people still ask this question today, in a hundred forms. What’s strange about it is that practicing Jews who knew their Tanakh well enough to be apprenticing under any rabbi, however unconventional, should have been familiar with the book of Job. Part of its central thesis is that suffering is not necessarily the result of the sufferer’s sins.
Job (1880), by Léon Bonnat.
The crucial importance of this theological point often goes unappreciated: without it, our whole attitude toward evil is at risk of a dangerous distortion. I mean, think for even a few seconds about the implications if we had the exact same distribution of goods and evils, past and present, that we know now, but we did have room to conclude that all suffering is in some sense the sufferer’s own fault. I’d call that version of the world even darker than the world we live in—the world that can be (incompletely) summarized in a line from a sermon given at the church my family attended when we lived in Scotland: “If I hit you, I’m a sinner for hitting you, and you suffer; which is not fair.”1
The apostles do change the question slightly by introducing the “or his parents” option. This complication is less, uh, complicating than it appears to us. We’re primed to think of people first and foremost as individuals, but this was not true in the ancient world, either in the Levant or anywhere else: the individual was very consistently subordinated to the family. Part of the reason marriage was so important was that it continued your lineage—the Torah even enjoins that if a man dies without children, his brother must marry his sister-in-law and have children with her, who will count as those of the deceased man, just to avoid any lineage being extinguished (a custom called levirate marriage, from the Latin word lēvir “brother-in-law”).
However, the Lord says that neither of these is the case, which is interesting. In his conversation with the woman at Yaqov’s well in Süchar, when she asked about worshiping at the Temple versus on Mount Gerizim, he said that, while there was a correct answer—and that it was the Judaic answer, not the Samaritan one—it would soon cease to matter; here, he states positively that both explanations are wrong. Christ’s answer doesn’t apply to every dilemma like this in quite the same way;2 after all, there are also bad things that happen to people which are identifiably the fault of the sufferer (or in some cases of their parents). Nonetheless, he recontextualizes the problem of suffering in general by saying this, or at least gestures toward doing so—which brings us to my second note.
b. but that the works of God might be made manifest in him/but in order that the works of God should be manifested in him | ἀλλ’ ἵνα φανερωθῇ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ [all’ hina fanerōthē ta erga tou Theou en autō]: This difficult remark is part of a long line of statements in Scripture that are equally difficult for the same reason: the lineage goes further back in the Bible than Job, at least as far back as Exodus 9:12, where it says that “the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh.” (That text also involves certain tough questions about free will—a distinct topic that I am not attempting to tackle here.) It sounds, on a casual reading, as though the Lord were saying that God callously permits evil more or less in order to show off.
The prophet Hosea depicted on the Maestà3 of
Duccio di Buoninsegna (1311), formerly the
altarpiece of the Cathedral of Siena.
But what is the real meaning of the text here? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. I don’t see another meaning than the callous one, and I’m pretty confident God is not callous. I was exchanging texts with a devout Episcopal friend of mine yesterday, and we happened to touch on the book of Hosea: it’s been a while since I read it, so I had forgotten this, but going back over it, the Lord our God almost seems unable to steel himself to bring wrath upon the Israelites—he can barely stay in angry mode for an entire chapter at any point in the book, unasked mercy pours from him like water from a fountain.
…The Assyrian shall be his king, because they refused to return.
And the sword shall abide on his cities, and shall consume his branches,
…and devour them, because of their own counsels.
And my people are bent to backsliding from me:
…though they called them to the most High, none at all would exalt him.
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
…how shall I deliver thee, Israel?
how shall I make thee as Admah?
…how shall I set thee as Zeboim?
mine heart is turned within me,
…my repentings are kindled together.
I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger,
…I will not return to destroy Ephraim:
for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee …
—Hosea 11:5-9
So—I’m stumped. I hope to understand this better some day.
c. We must/It is necessary for us | ἡμᾶς δεῖ [hēmas dei]: This unobtrusive-seeming phrase is the first hint of an idea which will reach a shocking culmination in the Upper Room Discourse, conspicuously in 14:12-14 and 15:18-20: it associates the apostles themselves with the operation of “the light of the world.”
d. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world/However long I am in the world, I am light of the world | ὅταν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ὦ, φῶς εἰμι τοῦ κόσμου [hotan en tō kosmō hō, fōs eimi tou kosmou]: This “However long I am in the world” is the second time in John that a note of pessimism seems to enter Yeshua’s description of his ministry. He seemed to be expecting the Twelve, or some of them, to desert him at the close of chapter 6; he has also spoken before of people trying to kill him, but until now, there has been no suggestion that they will succeed. This is another low-key contrast between this Gospel and the other three, Mark especially. In the Synoptics, Yeshua both prophesies his Passion and Resurrection, and often orders both his disciples and those whom he heals to keep their mouths shut about what they know (often with no effect, or none in the direction he wanted).
The Pool of Siloam as depicted on a map
(c. 1250) of Jerusalem from Matthew Paris’s
Chronica Majora, a timeline of history from
creation to 1259, when its author died.
e. the pool of Siloam (which means Sent)/the pool of Shiloach” (which is interpreted “Sent”) | τὴν κολυμβήθραν τοῦ Σιλωάμ ὃ ἑρμηνεύεται Ἀπεσταλμένος [tēn kolümbēthran tou Silōam ho hermēneuetai Apestalmenos]: I can’t account for the phonological shift from the ch in the Hebrew שִׁלֹחַ [shiloach] to the m in the name Σιλωάμ (though the latter must have been customary among Aramaic-speakers too—the modern name for the spring and pool in question is Silwan, clearly derived from the Greek form and not the Hebrew). I can tell you that שִׁלֹחַ comes from the radical ש־ל־ח [sh-l-ch], which does indeed encode means of sending, dispatching, or sending word—a very good match for the Greek ἀποστέλλω [apostellō], the basis of ἀπεσταλμένος (a participial form).
f. He said, “I am the man”/The man told them that “I am [he]” | ἐκεῖνος ἔλεγεν ὅτι Ἐγώ εἰμι. [ekeinos elegen hoti «egō eimi»]: This, especially coming so soon after 8:58, is the first of a series of striking verbal parallels between the man born blind, whose name we never learn,4 and Yeshua himself. Note also his remarks in vv. 27 and 33, comparing them respectively with Yeshua’s rejoinder to his opponents in 8:25 and his profession of unity with the Father back in 5:19.
g. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes/(It was a sabbath, the day Yeshua made the clay and opened his eyes.) | ἦν δὲ σάββατον ἐν ᾗ ἡμέρᾳ τὸν πηλὸν ἐποίησεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς καὶ ἀνέῳξεν αὐτοῦ τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς [ēn de sabbaton en hē hēmera ton pēlon epoiēsen ho Iēsous kai aneōxen autou tous ofthalmous]: Here again we find an echo of the sign from chapter 5. If I’m not mistaken, Christ making the “clay” he spread over the blind man’s eyes would strictly qualify as an act of לָשׁ [lâsh], “amalgamation,” one of the thirty-nine kinds of work proscribed on the sabbath (listed in textual note f of this post). Curiously, though we get the impression from the other Gospels that healings formed a vast majority of Christ’s miracles, they are just four of the Seven Signs—that is, if “healing” is quite the right category in which to place the resurrection of Lazarus.
h. Some of the Pharisees said … But others said/So some of the Pryshaya began saying … Others were saying | ἔλεγον οὖν ἐκ τῶν Φαρισαίων τινές … ἄλλοι ἔλεγον [elegon oun ek tōn Fairsaiōn tines … alloi elegon]: Here, as in the quarrels during Sukkot and as embodied in the ambiguous figure of Nikodemos, the evangelist gives us a picture of the Pryshaya which is more complex than meets the eye. Opposition to Yeshua is hardening; it is not universal or unchallenged, even in the heart of the Jewish religious establishment.
i. for the Jews had already agreed that if any one should confess him to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue/for already the Jews had come to an agreement so that if anyone affirmed him Anointed, he should become disfellowshipped | ἤδη γὰρ συνετέθειντο οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι ἵνα ἐάν τις αὐτὸν ὁμολογήσῃ χριστόν, ἀποσυνάγωγος γένηται [ēdē gar sünetetheinto hoi Ioudaioi hina ean tis auton homologēsē christon, aposünagōgos genētai]: This may be an allusion to חֵרֶם [chêrem], a term often rendered “excommunication.” The analogy with Christian practice is not complete, obviously; like excommunication, חֵרֶם was a rare punishment, and traditionally a last resort after other attempts to convince the excommunicand5 to change course. Its exact development is not easy to trace, though I gather it did exist in some form by the late Second Temple period. (The word חֵרֶם is far older; early in the Hebrew Bible, e.g. in the book of Joshua, it refers to “devotion to destruction,” the procedure commanded against certain cities of the Canaanites, analogous both conceptually and in technique to the קָרְבַּן עוֹלָה [qâr’ban 3oulâm] or burnt offering.) חֵרֶם has been vanishingly rare since the Haskalah (ca. 1770-1881), a.k.a. the “Jewish Enlightenment”: many of its provisions were rendered obsolete when, over the course of the Haskalah, most Jewish communities throughout Europe were legally emancipated and integrated into the states they formed parts of.
A 1781 pronouncement of cherem against early
leaders of the Hasidic movement (a charismatic,
mystical variety of Orthodox Judaism) written by
R. Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (“the Vilna Gaon“).
John 9:22 is one of the verses rallied in support, or at least interpreted in light, of the “Johannine community” hypothesis, which was briefly discussed in note e of this post. I’m not altogether sure how to read this as relating to that hypothesis.
- If the notion here is that the “Johannine community” took their own actual experience and projected it backward onto the time of Christ, when in fact his time wasn’t like that at all, I’m inclined to be skeptical. The strain between the “Nazarenes” and mainstream Judaism is one of the few things that appears in almost every book of the New Testament. It even appears early in non-Christian literature describing Christianity, if that is indeed the right interpretation of Suetonius’ notoriously ambiguous statement in his chapter on Emperor Claudius: Jūdæōs impulsōre Chrestō assiduē tumultuāntis Rōmā expulit—”the Jews who were constantly making disturbances for the agitator Chrestus, he expelled from Rome.”6 There is a long-standing theory about this sentence that Chrestus was an error for Χριστός [Christos], and that his “agitation” of the Jews of Rome during Claudius’ reign was as much as Suetonius heard and understood of the controversy over the new faith.
- Conversely, if this line from John is just describing a fair-enough interpretation of the facts, why bother with the “Johannine community” theory to “explain” it? The idea just doesn’t seem like it’s doing anything.
My doubts about the usefulness of this interpretive model aside, I don’t mean that there’s anything implausible about the notion that exchanges and debates like this one did reflect the experiences of the author. If, as I opine, the traditional ascription of the Fourth Gospel is essentially correct, St. John and his companions (whoever they may have been: we know that the Mother of God was commended to his care, and may presume that if and when they left the Holy Land they were accompanied by others)7 would very likely have been subject—like the other Apostles and most Jewish Christians—to חֵרֶם or whatever its nearest equivalent was at the time.
j. as for this man, we do not know where he comes from/but we do not know where this man is from | τοῦτον δὲ οὐκ οἴδαμεν πόθεν ἐστίν [touton de ouk oidamen pothen estin]: Ironically, in their attempt to dismiss and discredit Yeshua, the Pryshaya who say this implicitly grant him one of the ostensible qualifications for being the Messiah voiced by the crowds in chapter 7 (the same crowds whom they accused of being accursed for not knowing the Torah).
k. Never since the world began/Throughout the age | ἐκ τοῦ αἰῶνος [ek tou aiōnos]: Neither of these renderings is word-for-word, though mine is less idiomatic. The word αἰών can mean “world,” though it usually means it in the temporal sense (as when we speak of “the ancient world”); as for ἐκ, it cannot mean “throughout”—it means “of, from,” and the idiom here is that the speaker is measuring from the beginning of the αἰών up to now, hence the liberty I’ve taken with my translation.
Ikon (12th c.) of Our Lady of Vladimir.
l. You were born in utter sin/You were wholly begotten in sins | Ἐν ἁμαρτίαις σὺ ἐγεννήθης ὅλος [en hamartiais sü egennēthēs holos]: Though this remark is doubtless an exaggeration from their perspective (as there is no doctrine of original sin in Judaism), the Pryshaya here—or at any rate those that go along with this “verdict”—simultaneously raise and preëmptively answer the question posed by the Twelve back in v. 2; and we have it on Yeshua’s authority that both of the answers to that question that naturally came to mind were wrong.
Footnotes
1We were in Scotland because I am a Navy brat. I was born in Misawa, Japan (a small city in Aomori Prefecture, which forms the northern tip of Honshu); a few months later my father was relocated to Edzell, a little town in eastern Scotland (roughly halfway between Aberdeen and St. Andrews, though a few miles further inland than either). We moved from there back to the States—well, “back” for everyone else in the family!—when I was only three, so I don’t remember anything about this church. However, my mother used to have a recording of a sermon on Luke 13:1-17, given by the pastor, one Rev. Philip Malloch. The recording was on a cassette tape (a sort of primitive iPod that they used to make when I was a boy, back in the late Edwardian era), and I listened to it several times in my adolescence; Rev. Malloch was a very gifted preacher, and had a charming Scots brogue that would have been fun to listen to in its own right.
2I don’t recollect when exactly it struck me that John 9:2 formed a strange parallel to late twentieth and early twenty-first century Christian debates over the causes of homosexuality (whether it’s basically inborn or basically environmental). For the record, the answer to “nature or nurture” in this case is: Yes—because on the one hand, epigenetic factors appear to be a major influence on sexual orientation, while at the same time, people do show a certain amount of sexual orientation fluidity; but also, it’s kind of a dumb question? because everybody wants to pretend it has a moral relevance that it simply doesn’t. Being born with something obviously doesn’t make it good—this very text is an example of that—so it’s plainly silly to behave as if homosexuality would be proven morally innocent ipso facto if it were proven that orientation is primarily inborn, whether that proof were about genetics or not. (That said, this is the position that scientific research to date seems to support most, the position that best accords with the voiced experience of most LGBT people, and the intuitive position to take when you realize that it isn’t as if heterosexuals chose their orientation either). On the other hand, a trait can be caused largely or entirely by environmental factors and yet still not be changeable, whether by psychotherapy or other means. Hence, the direction the ex-gay movement—which bafflingly still exists, but we can’t stop for that now. Anyway. The direction the ex-gay movement wants to take any and all evidence favoring a “nurture” explanation (i.e., using it to support conversion therapy) is not justified by that evidence. We’re coming up on sixty years’ worth of evidence that ex-gay therapy is a snake-oil industry and always has been, and that is relevant and important to the topic of good pastoral practice vis-à-vis homosexuality; however, it’s far afield of the Gospel text we’re here for.
3A Maestà (“majesty”) denotes a particular variety of painting, an extension of portraits of the Mother of God as the “Seat of Wisdom” (an ancient title used for her, associated with depictions of her enthroned and with the Holy Child in her lap) which implies accompaniment by a collection of saints, angels, or both. Duccio’s Maestà included twenty angels and nineteen saints; tragically, after remaining in use for over four hundred years in the Cathedral of Siena, it was sawn apart in 1771 to be distributed between different altars, and in the process some panels were damaged or lost. The scroll in the hand of Hosea reads Ex Egipto uocaui filiū meum, Medieval Latin for “Out of Egypt I called my son,” a line from Hosea 11:1 interpreted in the Gospel of Matthew as a cryptic prophecy of the Holy Family’s return from the flight to Egypt. (The Classical form would be Ex Ægypto vocavi filivm mevm. This exhibits a few common differences between Medieval and Classical Latin, under the influences of changes in pronunciation and the conventions of Late Latin shorthand and Carolingian minuscule: æ and œ were often simplified to e, or confused with each other; y might be exchanged for i—or occasionally the reverse, as in Yspania for Hispania; and final –m was frequently represented with a bar over the preceding letter. The u/v discrepancy is stylistic, not significant.)
4Tradition apparently gives him the name Celidonius. He is sometimes credited with founding a Christian congregation at Nemausus on the southern coast of Gaul (modern Nîmes, France).
5The -nd ending on this word comes from the Latin future passive participial ending -ndus, -nda, -ndum (masculine, feminine, and neuter forms—their plurals are -ndī, -ndæ, -nda). This participle indicated the goal or future recipient of an action; its meaning is well exemplified in the word agenda, which comes from agere “to do,” so this neuter plural was borrowed as the name for a list of “things to be done.” Thus, one who “is to be excommunicated” would be an excommunicandus or an excommunicanda in Latin: English, since it borrows so many words from Latin, can simply chop off the -us/-a ending and call it a day. (It’s more common to speak of one who has been excommunicated—an excommunicatus or excommunicata. These both come out in English as “an excommunicate,” with the a pronounced like the a in “literate”; however, the difference between the noun an excommunicate and the verb to excommunicate is surprisingly difficult to convey in writing, though easy to pick up on audially.)
6Part of the ambiguity here is that it isn’t clear whether this means Claudius expelled the Jews in general from Rome and that Suetonius is giving assiduē tumultuāntis as the reason for this expulsion, or if Suetonius is saying that Claudius expelled specifically those Jews who were assiduē tumultuāntis and left the rest alone. Acts 18:2 suggests the former interpretation.
7In early accounts of the Assumption, there seems to be some doubt about whether the Theotokos was assumed from Jerusalem (or somewhere else in the Holy Land—obviously she had also lived in Natz’rath and had at least resided a little while in K’far-Nachum, and there is a Carmelite tradition that she dwelt for a time on Mount Carmel), or whether she departed with St. John bar-Zebedee and lived in Ephesus for a while first. As for any companions they may have had, as far as I know we can only speculate on who they were. John records a plot against the life of St. Lazarus after Christ resurrects him, so if SS. Mary and John left the vicinity of Jerusalem, it’s possible they took him with them, or even that they and the whole Lazarus household left together—I can’t help noticing that SS. Martha and Mary of Bethany, as well as their brother, only appear in the Gospels of Luke and John, the two that also include substantial material about the Mother of God; perhaps the families unofficially fused?
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