John 9:2

2. Who did sin? We have here a bit of speculative theology. The disciples assume the prevalent doctrine as true, that special calamities are the result of special sinfulness. If they had assumed that the race is liable to miseries because the race is depraved, there would have been no error. It is also true that many sins entail particular sufferings upon posterity, physical, moral, and political. Nevertheless, special sufferings are not absolute proof of special guilt.

This man, or his parents But how could the apostles conceive that this man had sinned before his birth? Some commentators have held that they imagined that the man’s soul may have sinned in a previous body. That would imply the doctrine of metempsychosis or transmigration, by which the same soul is supposed to inhabit different bodies; and so the soul may have sinned in a former body and be punished in this. There is no clear proof that this doctrine was prevalent among these Jews. Others hold that they believed that the child in the womb, before its birth, could be guilty of wicked impulses and motions. Others, that the disciples asked a confused question without distinctly perceiving the implications it contained. But, note, this may have been the very difficulty they desired the Lord ultimately to explain; namely, how this man’s birth-blindness could have been the result of his own sin. On the popular supposition that suffering was the result of a sin, they desire to know of whose sin this man’s suffering is the consequence. Was it his parents’ sin or his own? And if Jesus had replied his own the next question would have been, If his own, how?