The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore when your eye is good, your whole body is also full of light; but when it is evil, your body also is full of darkness.
The human eye itself can become morally evil, causing a person's entire body to fill with darkness.
Show this passage in
The cited passage
What current science says
The eye is a biological camera: a lens focuses light onto the retina, where photoreceptor cells convert photons into electrical signals sent via the optic nerve to the brain's visual cortex. Eyes have no capacity for moral judgment — they don't evaluate what they see, they just detect light. 'Darkness' inside the body isn't a substance that fills you; the absence of light inside your body is simply because your skin is opaque. Your internal organs operate in darkness all the time. Morality is a product of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, not a property of your eyeballs.
What the text says
This comes from Luke 11:34. The text states 'when thine eye is evil, thy whole body also is full of darkness' — attributing moral agency to an optical organ and claiming it can fill the body with a literal dark substance.
Three honest ways to read this passage
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.