8:22–26 Immediately following the discussion of 8:14–21 with its reference to the disciples’ deaf ears and blind eyes (8:18), there is this healing of a blind man. This is almost universally recognized by commentators as a story that also serves as a dramatization of the spiritual difficulty of the disciples. It is the unparalleled phenomenon of a healing occurring in two stages that particularly connects this story, not only with the preceding passage, but also with the following ones (8:27–38), in which the disciples show the need for a similar two-stage lifting of their spiritual dullness.

This story is surely to be connected with the account of the healing of the deaf man in 7:31–37, both because the two stories have several similarities in wording and because each story seems to allu…