When was the blind man (or men) healed?

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: Widely regarded as 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.

This is a textbook Synoptic-Problem case in which the simplest explanation is editorial, not historical. On the two-source hypothesis, Mark is the earliest of the three accounts. Mark 10:46-52 narrates a single named beggar, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, healed "as he went out of Jericho." Matthew 20:29-34 keeps Mark's post-Jericho setting ("as they departed from Jericho") but reports two blind men and drops the Aramaic name. Luke 18:35-43 keeps Mark's single anonymous beggar but moves the scene to before the city: "as he was come nigh unto Jericho." So the three accounts diverge on both the number healed (one vs. two) and the geography (entering vs. leaving).

The two leading harmonizations are ingenious but ad hoc. Gleason Archer proposes three blind men in two separate encounters — one as Jesus approached (Luke), two as he left (Matthew/Mark) — with each evangelist reporting a partial slice. The difficulty is that all three narrate what reads as the same single episode, with the same cry ("thou son of David, have mercy"), the same roadside setting, and the same healing, and none signals a separate occasion. Craig Blomberg's alternative invokes archaeology: Herodian Jericho lay roughly a mile from the old Jewish/Tell es-Sultan site, so Jesus could be "leaving" one Jericho while "approaching" the other, with the healing in between. This is geographically real — there were indeed two adjacent Jerichos — but the gospels show no awareness of a two-city distinction, and the move still leaves the number discrepancy (one vs. two) untouched.

The redactional account is far more economical and explains both divergences at once. First, the number: Matthew demonstrably has a habit of doubling Markan figures. He turns Mark's single Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:2) into two (Matthew 8:28), and in the very next pericope after this one he reads Zechariah 9:9 to produce two animals at the triumphal entry (Matthew 21:2-7) where Mark has one colt (Mark 11:2). The doubling of one blind man into two fits this established Matthean tendency. Second, the geography: Luke relocates the healing because of what he places immediately after it. Luke 19:1-10 narrates Zacchaeus *inside* Jericho; for that scene to follow, Jesus must still be entering the city when the blind man is healed, so Luke shifts the cure to the approach. Luz's Hermeneia commentary documents the Matthean doubling pattern, and Marcus's Anchor Yale commentary establishes Markan priority and Mark's place as the source both later evangelists redacted.

The harmonizations require either an unlikely three-beggar coincidence or a twin-Jericho shell game that still cannot account for the doubled number. The redactional explanation accounts for every difference — number and direction — from known compositional habits of Matthew and Luke working on a shared Markan source.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction at the narrative level, best explained as Synoptic redaction of a single Markan story.