Progressive reflections on the lectionary #40

Monday 21st October 2024

Mark 10: 46-52 Ways of 'seeing' Blind Bartimaeus

There are tonnes of interesting things in this passage, the story of ‘blind’ Bartimaeus, and several mysteries to ponder. It begins with a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ visit to Jericho, the world’s oldest city, followed by a remarkable encounter between Mark’s Jesus and a blind beggar with a strange name. The story is revisited by the other synoptic evangelists - but without the repetition of that strange name which I think is important for Mark.

As we have covered previously the stories in Mark’s gospel are full of symbolism, plain readings of the stories seem sensible at one level but yield little by way of fruit. Symbolic readings, on the other hand, are rich and rewarding. As we’ve also seen, Mark doesn’t bother with extraneous details, everything is there for a reason.

So let’s begin with that name, because it seems pivotal: ‘Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus’. A curiosity in itself on a couple of levels. Firstly it is a mixture of Aramaic (Bar) ‘son of’ and Greek (Timaeus) ‘honour’.

Timaeus, though, is not just any Greek name, but that of a very famous book by Plato - the Timaeus was, in fact, the most important work of theology for educated Greeks in the first century. The Timaeus, then, was one of the very few pieces of writing in the ancient world (some would say the only one) that would have been familiar to almost all educated Greek speaking people - including, we might presume, the writer(s) of Mark.

The Timaeus is, by our standards, a strange book - quite short but with an outsize importance in terms of impact. If indeed all Western philosophy is ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’ as A.N. Whitehead claimed, then a large chunk of those footnotes would be made to Timaeus.

To give you a brief idea of what’s in there, it includes a description of the way that the universe was formed, and explains why it is beautiful and well ordered. Plato says that there is a creator (a divine Craftsman) who imitates a perfect model - imposing a mathematically structured order on chaos. Sound kind of familiar?

Among many other things in the Timaeus Plato discusses the nature of sight - for Plato the visible world was an ‘image’ of reality, not reality itself. This is a theme he returned to many times, and he labours it, somewhat, in the Timaeus. ‘Mark’, too, is somewhat obsessed by sight and the lack of it.

In the Timaeus what we can see with our eyes is not the totality of reality, it is an image of it. This is a Platonic idea which gets a decent bit of airtime in the Bible. It is a theme that occurs elsewhere, too, in stories of blind prophets, for example, who can ‘see’ more than their fully sighted counterparts. In the centuries after Jesus’ death, Neoplatonism would go on to become the predominant philosophical school - shaping the way that Christian doctrine would be seen and understood for centuries (millennia) afterwards.

As the ‘son of Timaeus’ (note that another curiosity is that although he is one of the only ‘named’ characters in this sort of story, and the only named recipient of a healing, the character isn’t given his own name, just the name of his ‘parent’, just like ‘son of David’) the character embodies the growth of Greek wisdom. As such ‘Mark’ sets the stage, then, for ‘gentiles’ to see Jesus as the Messiah.

Bartimaeus also embodies another archetype, that of the blind prophet. Again, there’s a stronger link via tradition to Greek and Roman thinking than there is to Hebrew, but the archetype does exist in Hebrew writings too, Eli and Ahijah, for instance. The aged Isaac, too, perhaps. Again there is a sense in this idea that it is not physical sight that allows the prophet to see the truth, vision is only a part of reality, and not the most important part.

So we have a strange character, somewhat Greek, somewhat Hebrew, who hails Jesus as ‘Son of David’ and is called ‘Son of Timaeus’. The way that he salutes Jesus is to give him a title which is either explicitly messianic or else, plausibly, an expression relating to his ethnic purity - in either case this expression anchors Jesus to the Davidic line (something the other two synoptic evangelists are also particularly keen to demonstrate). My preference, it may not surprise you to learn, is to see this as a messianic title - and I have a reason for this.

As well as being a cipher for Platonism and for ‘Greeks’/ gentiles, blind Bartimaeus is, in a sense, a kind of anti-Peter, or perhaps an alternate-Peter. Both characters, each with their own ‘main character energy’, hail Jesus with a messianic title, (Peter at Caesarea Philippi immediately after the strange healing of another blind man) but thereafter their paths diverge. Peter consistently fails to grasp Jesus’ message and the path that messiahship will take him down, while Bartimaeus - the seer who cannot see - has apparently got it straight away. Unlike the disciples who have been nagging Jesus for status and prominence, and unlike the wealthy young man who couldn’t leave behind his possessions, Bartimaeus has no status and no possessions. He has already lost, or given up, everything. Nor does he ask for any of these things, all he asks for is sight (as Solomon asked for wisdom).

Then there is the business of following. “Go, your faith has made you well” Jesus tells Bartimaeus, rather than “come and follow me,” and yet what does Bartimaeus do? He follows. There is a contrast, then, between those who are asked to come with Jesus, but ultimately don’t, and those who are told to ‘go’ but instead follow. Bartimaeus received no ‘call’ of the sort that the disciples did, and yet here he is, following.

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Image: “Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato…” Photo by Andy Bodemer on Unsplash