Where does ‘I once was blind, but now I see’ come from?

The man who knew one thing

John 9 tells of a beggar in Jerusalem, blind from birth. Jesus spits on the ground, makes mud, spreads it on the man’s eyes and sends him to wash in the pool of Siloam, “which means ‘Sent’” (John 9:7). He comes back seeing. It is a Sabbath, so the healing turns into an inquiry. Neighbors argue about whether he is the same man, the Pharisees split over it, his parents refuse to be drawn in, and the man is called back a second time and told to admit that his healer is a sinner. He will not say more than he knows.

He therefore answered, “I don’t know if he is a sinner. One thing I do know: that though I was blind, now I see.”

Then he loses patience: “You don’t also want to become his disciples, do you?” (John 9:27). They throw him out. Jesus finds him, and the chapter closes by turning sight into a picture: he came “that those who don’t see may see; and that those who see may become blind” (John 9:39).

Who sinned?

The story opens with a question of its age: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). Many assumed suffering was punishment, the view the book of Job had already argued against. Jesus answers that neither sinned (John 9:3). Just before, he has called himself “the light of the world” (John 9:5), not long after the Feast of Booths, when lamps lit the whole city. The pool where the man washed was found in 2004, when sewer workers at the south end of the City of David struck its stone steps.

John Newton’s line

English speakers knew the verse in the King James wording, “whereas I was blind, now I see,” and one man made it the motto of his life. John Newton went to sea at eleven, worked on slave ships and was himself held as a servant by a slave trader in West Africa. In a storm on the voyage home in 1748 he turned to God. Even so, he went on to captain slave ships until illness ended his sailing in 1754. Ten years later he was ordained in the Church of England and became curate of Olney, a lace-making village in Buckinghamshire, where he and the poet William Cowper wrote hymns for the weekly prayer meeting.

Lost and found, blind and seeing

Late in 1772 Newton wrote verses for New Year’s Day. In Olney Hymns (1779) they carry the heading “1 Chronicles 17:16–17, Faith’s Review and Expectation,” after David’s amazed prayer: “Who am I, Yahweh God, and what is my house, that you have brought me this far?” The first stanza joins two Gospel stories, the prodigal son who “was lost and is found” (Luke 15:24) and the beggar of John 9: “Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) / That saved a wretch like me! / I once was lost, but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see.”

Look closely at the last line. Newton wrote “Was blind, but now I see.” The popular “I once was blind” folds two of his lines into one.

How the hymn traveled

In England the hymn was little sung. In America it found its tune: in 1835 William Walker set the words to a melody called “New Britain” in his shape-note book Southern Harmony, and that is the tune nearly everyone sings. The verse beginning “When we’ve been there ten thousand years” is not Newton’s; it was sung in African American churches and printed in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Newton himself broke his silence on the trade with Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade in 1788, describing the ships from the inside. He died in December 1807, months after Parliament abolished the British slave trade.