At Lystra a certain man sat, impotent in his feet, a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked. He was listening to Paul speaking, who, fastening eyes on him, and seeing that he had faith to be made whole, said with a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet!” He leaped up and walked.
A person born with a congenital condition preventing them from ever walking can be cured by a stranger making eye contact and telling them to stand.
Medicine
97
passages in this field
Show this passage in
The cited passage
What current science says
A person who has literally never walked faces an extraordinary set of biological barriers beyond whatever caused the original condition. Their leg muscles never developed through use, their bones have minimal density because they never experienced weight-bearing forces (per Wolff's law — bone strengthens in response to stress), and their brain's motor cortex never created the complex neural maps required for bipedal locomotion. Walking is one of the most computationally intensive things humans do — it requires coordinating over 200 muscles with real-time balance adjustments. This is why babies, with perfectly healthy bodies, still take a year to figure it out.
What the text says
This comes from Acts 14:8-10. A man 'impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked' is told to 'stand upright on thy feet' — and immediately leaps and walks for the first time in his life.
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.