'The blind and the lame' : An adapted category in early Christian communal self-understanding

[Excerpt] Kylie Crabbe In his commentary on Matthew’s gospel, Ulrich Luz suggests that in Mt. 21. 1–17, ‘the blind and the lame’ who approach Jesus in the temple represent the ‘true people of God’, in contrast to both the money changers who Jesus has just run out of the temple and the chief priests who stand by critically. He intimates that early Christian readers would identify with these (ultimately healed) characters and recognize them as the new community of which they were themselves a part. In response to Luz’s proposal, this essay considers key New Testament texts which refer to ‘the blind and the lame’ in light of the portraits of these groups in the Hebrew Bible, and various ways in which these are taken up in the Septuagint and sectarian literature from Qumran, to explore whether and how these terms might inform early Christian corporate identity.