Bodies that reveal the Messiah: impairment and recognition of people with disabilities in biblical narratives

Abstract

This article, structured through a documentary analysis of Old and New Testament texts, examines the relationship between religion and disability within biblical narratives—understood as historical, political, and cultural constructs that helped shape the frameworks of recognition, belonging, and exclusion in the Western imagination. We investigate how various physical, sensory, psychological, and behavioral impairments were interpreted in these records and how such representations were historically and culturally re-elaborated. This analysis reveals that the Bible does not present a monolithic concept of disability; its narratives contain a coexistence of meanings—ranging from impurity, prohibition, sin, and exclusion to care, acceptance, participation, and recognition. This challenges the notion that impairment is invariably linked to the demonic, particularly in the New Testament, where a significant symbolic shift occurs: bodies previously defined by religious boundaries of impurity become privileged sites for the manifestation of divine action. We argue that people with impairments are not merely passive recipients of Jesus’s healings and interventions; rather, they play a pivotal narrative role in establishing and publicly recognizing his messianic identity. By positioning disability not as a peripheral element but as integral to the narrative architecture of Gospel Christology, we can understand these miracles as events that reshape the boundaries of social belonging and recognition. In dialogue with the social model, we conclude that religious grammars have not been eliminated by secularization; rather, in conjunction with other forms of knowledge, they remain one of the historical frameworks through which the West ascribes meaning to the body, difference, vulnerability, and impairments—hence the importance of their appropriation and the manner in which we carry out this process.