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Matthew 20:30 has Jesus healing two blind men as he leaves Jericho. Mark 10:46 has him healing one named blind man — Bartimaeus son of Timaeus — also leaving Jericho. Luke 18:35 has him healing one unnamed blind man, but *as he was coming nigh unto* Jericho, not leaving. Three Synoptic accounts, three different counts and directions.
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And as they departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed him. And, behold, two blind men sitting by the way side, when they heard that Jesus passed by, cried out, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou son of David. Matthew 20:30
Cited passages
Behold, two blind men sitting by the road, when they heard that Jesus was passing by, cried out, “Lord, have mercy on us, you son of David!”
And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me. Mark 10:46 And it came to pass, that as he was come nigh unto Jericho, a certain blind man sat by the way side begging. Luke 18:35
Cited passages
They came to Jericho. As he went out from Jericho, with his disciples and a great multitude, the son of Timaeus, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the road.
As he came near Jericho, a certain blind man sat by the road, begging.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The three Synoptic versions of the Jericho healing diverge on two axes — the number of beneficiaries and the direction of Jesus' travel — and the divergences cluster too tightly around shared vocabulary to be coincidental. Matthew 20:30 reports two unnamed blind men (δύο τυφλοί) crying out as Jesus *departs* (ἐκπορευομένων) from Jericho. Mark 10:46 reports a single, named beggar — βαρτιμαῖος, glossed for a Greek audience as ὁ υἱὸς Τιμαίου, 'son of Timaeus' — also as Jesus is *going out* (ἐκπορευομένου) of the city. Luke 18:35 has one anonymous man healed as Jesus *draws near* (ἐγγίζειν) to Jericho. Three accounts, three counts, two directions.
The controlling datum is Markan priority, the near-consensus position that Mark was the earliest written Gospel and that Matthew and Luke independently used him as a source. On that model the three pericopes are one tradition redacted three ways, and the editorial fingerprints are visible. Matthew's pluralization is not isolated. He doubles characters elsewhere: two Gadarene demoniacs (Matt 8:28) against Mark's single man (Mark 5:2); two blind men at Matt 9:27, a pericope many regard as a Matthean doublet of this very Jericho story; and two animals at the triumphal entry (Matt 21:7) against Mark's one (Mark 11:7). Davies and Allison treat this as a settled Matthean stylistic habit rather than independent eyewitness data — a recurring tendency to render Markan singulars as pairs, possibly to satisfy the Deuteronomic two-witness rule of Deut 19:15. The simplest account of Matthew's 'two' is therefore redactional, not historical.
Luke's reversal of direction is the harder editorial move to explain, and Fitzmyer offers the standard solution: Luke needed Jericho itself as narrative real estate for the Zacchaeus episode (Luke 19:1-10), which occurs *in* the city, so the roadside healing was shifted to the approach to clear the stage. This is a plausible compositional motive and shows that the directional discrepancy is not a copying error but a structural choice.
The classical harmonization descends from Augustine's *De Consensu Evangelistarum* II.65, which posited two distinct healings — one on the way in (Luke), one on the way out (Mark/Matthew) — with Matthew's pair explained either as a conflation of both encounters or as Bartimaeus plus an unnamed companion whom Mark and Luke declined to mention. Archer and Blomberg defend versions of this. Steel-manned, the argument is not absurd: an itinerant healer who attracted crowds would plausibly have encountered blind beggars more than once, and Jericho sat on a major pilgrim route where the sick congregated at the gates. The case has internal logic.
It nonetheless founders on parsimony. The harmonization must invent healings the texts never narrate and treat the verbal overlap — the same Davidic appeal ('Son of David, have mercy'), the same crowd rebuke, the same restoration of sight, the same setting — as the chance recurrence of a near-identical script. To preserve inerrancy the reading multiplies miracles, postulating two or three almost indistinguishable incidents converging on one town with the same dialogue. Marcus and Fitzmyer both read the material instead as a single underlying tradition diversely redacted, which explains the shared diction *and* the differences with one mechanism rather than three coincidences. The 'companion' variant is weaker still: it explains Matthew's two but not why Mark and Luke would suppress a second healed man in a story whose whole point is the restoration of sight. The directional contradiction is also untouched by the companion theory, since it concerns Luke's placement, not the count.
Where the critical reading lands: a single tradition redacted three ways — genuine contradiction in count and direction, not plausibly harmonized.
Sources for this reading