Jesus heals the blind by mixing dirt with his saliva and rubbing the mud on a man’s eyelids. “It’s an interesting passage,” former Catholic priest Tom Rastrelli told me, “because the writers of the gospels of Luke and Matthew, who used Mark as their source, redacted a line.” Mark had included a bit about a blind man opening his eyes and seeing what looked like trees walking around. In other words, the treatment was minimally effective. The miracle of Jesus bestowing rudimentary vision to the blind doesn’t have the same ring to it, so the line was cut.
