He looked up, and said, “I see men; for I see them like trees walking.” Then again he laid his hands on his eyes. He looked intently, and was restored, and saw everyone clearly.
A failed attempt to cure blindness with saliva can succeed on the second try using the exact same method.
Medicine
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The cited passage
What current science says
If a treatment fails, repeating the identical procedure doesn't magically make it work — that's not how biology operates. In real medicine, a failed treatment means you reassess: maybe the diagnosis was wrong, the dosage was off, or a different approach is needed. Also, the partial-vision stage described — seeing blurry shapes that look like trees — is actually a real phenomenon in patients recovering from long-term blindness (called visual agnosia), which makes this passage accidentally interesting. But the cure method is still just spit and hand-touching, which remains medically useless on every attempt.
What the text says
This comes from Mark 8:24-25. After the first spit-based healing attempt, the man could only see people who looked 'as trees, walking.' The healer tried again — same hands-on-eyes technique — and this time it worked fully. Even the miracle needed a patch update.
Three honest ways to read this passage
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As history
The text records how its authors understood the world with the knowledge they had. Read this way, a difference from modern science is a window into the ancient mind, not a failure.
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As accommodation
The text speaks to its first audience in their own terms, to make a point that isn't mainly about physics or biology. Read this way, the scientific detail is the vehicle, not the cargo.
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As contradiction
The text makes a claim about the physical world that modern findings dispute. Read this way, the difference is a genuine factual disagreement worth naming.
GEBible doesn't pick one of these for you. Each entry shows the passage, what it says, and what current science says — nothing more.