tuphlos

This is the plain, everyday sense: a person who cannot see. In the Gospels it almost always names someone whom Jesus meets and heals, so the word tends to carry hope rather than despair. Giving sight to the blind was one of the signs that the promised age of rescue had arrived, and the Gospels return to it again and again.

The word does not describe a passing weak eyesight but the settled condition of having no sight at all, sometimes from birth. In a world without medicine for it, that meant a life of begging at the roadside, which is exactly where many of these people are found when Jesus reaches them.

Here the word leaves the body behind and describes the mind and heart. Someone can have perfect eyesight and still be blind in this sense: they look straight at God's truth and miss it. The Gospels and the letters use the picture to expose a deeper failure than any physical one, because the people meant by it usually do not know it is true of them and are sure they see clearly.

Two shades run through this use. One is the blind guide, the teacher who confidently leads others while himself lost in the dark, so that both end up in the ditch. The other is a more general inner darkness, a heart that cannot take in what God is doing or saying. John's account of the man born blind plays the two senses against each other on purpose: the man who was physically blind comes to see who Jesus is, while the religious leaders who can see remain blind to him.

What makes this so pointed is the false confidence built into it. Jesus tells people that if they admitted their blindness there would be no guilt; the trouble is that they insist they see. The same trap appears in Revelation, where a comfortable church is told it is blind and does not realize it.