Against Scholarship; Or, The Case For Lay Hermeneutics

Matthew 9:27-31:

And as Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” When he entered the house, the blind men came to him, and Jesus said to them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They said to him, “Yes, Lord.” Then he touched their eyes, saying, “According to your faith be it done to you.” And their eyes were opened. And Jesus sternly warned them, “See that no one knows about it.”  But they went away and spread his fame through all that district.

Rikk Watts points out that we have no intertestamental literature that connects the “Son of David” to healing. Furthermore, there are no OT texts that explicitly make that connection either. The Pharisees do not understand Jesus, but these two blind men do. More than that, the two blind men have a more imaginative and synthetic hermeneutic which allows them to see connections in the OT that the Pharisees cannot. Their imagination is the condition for their healing. Who knew that at that moment what they had been imagining about the Messiah would have taken away their blindness. Though they were blind, they could see infinitely more than the Scribes or Pharisees could ever read.

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