The Sarcophagus of Adelphia
Detail, The Cure of the Blind Man
With a scroll in his left hand, Jesus touches the man's eyes with the same two-finger blessing gesture we see in
the rooster panel
and in Jesus'
entry into Jerusalem.
The blind man wears an unbelted tunic and carries a cane. He is beardless, like the apostle or bystander behind him. That man seems to have a collar on his tunic, the only one in all the scenes on this sarcophagus.
The Gospels tell of various cures of blind people at Matthew 9:29, Matthew 20:34, Mark 8:23, Luke 18:35-43, and John 9. In all these passages Jesus touches his fingers to their eyes. In most of them, attention is drawn to faith as a factor in their cure. Compositionally, this blind man's position on the right side of the sarcophagus mirrors that on the left of the woman with the flow of blood, whom Jesus told, "your faith has saved you."
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Photographed at the Syracuse Archeological Museum, Sicily, by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.