115 “Day and Night” and the Sabbath Controversy of John 9 (2) a simplified response on Jesus’ part, in which he denies that prenatal sin has caused the man’s blindness but does not offer an alternative the blind man was born in sin, and (3) the term φανερωθῇ (“manifest, be visible”) in v. 3 belongs to the “light/darkness” complex elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel. I regard the cumulative force of these arguments to be so- mewhat strong, which is why I would have preferred Derrett to deal with the arguments as I made them. While his recognition that οὐ/μή ... ἀλλά can represent the form of a “relative negative” (as found elsewhere in the New Testament), we are not free to assume that the combination of these particles in the context of Jn 9,3-5 represents that construction. At best, it is a possibility that must be judged on its own merits, especially when the question at issue is whether they appear within the same sentence in our passage. Other elements of Derrett’s argument have somewhat less going for them: his assertion that “traces” can be found in the gospels “of a belief amongst contemporaries of Jesus that persons could be reborn as other identifiable people” would help to establish the correlation with the Buddhist idea, but it is not at all supported by the passages he cites. Instead of conveying the idea that an earlier personage had been reborn, the passages in question (Mt 14,2; 16,14; Mk 6,14-16; 8,27; Lk 9,7-8.19) relate (often explicitly) the belief that John the Baptist or “one of the prophets” (e.g., “Jeremiah”) has risen from the dead, or that Jesus was the long-awaited Elijah redivivus (a belief not necessarily construed as a reincarnation of the historical Elijah)6. have already been identified in that sentence as τὰ ἔργα τοῦ θεοῦ. Against (1), I admit that modern sensibilities differ considerably from those of the ancient world on this score, but I still find the implied theodicy exceptional for New Testament in general. Against (2), I noted in my earlier article the great difference between blinding a man from birth and allowing Lazarus to die in order that (if that is the sense of ἵνα) he might be raised again for God’s glory. (Jesus’ allowing Lazarus to remain dead for four days is undoubtedly related to the widespread Jewish belief that the soul of a dead man did not depart from the body’s vicinity until after three days. See D. Winston, “The Iranian Component in the Bible, Apocrypha, and Qumran: A Review of the Evidence”, HR 5 [1965-66] 183-216, esp. 195-96.) But it also is not clear from the wording of 11,4 that God caused Lazarus to fall ill and die—the ἵνα clause could just as easily read as a result clause. Against (3): διὰ τοῦτο is hardly necessary, or even expected. Against (4), I would point out that the purpose of saying τὰ ἔργα τοῦ πέμψαντός με was simply to identify Jesus’ mission in terms of God’s sending, and to anticipate the logical inference that Jesus could not do these works if he were not sent by God. The sense in which an Elijah redivivus was understood to be Elijah is open to a range 6 of possibilities, many of which do not require an idea of reincarnation. (And reincarnation would make little sense in the case of Elijah, for how would one account for the whereabouts of Elijah’s mature body, which had ascended in the chariot?) Klaus Berger puts forth an understanding similar to that of Derrett (Identity and Experience in the New Testament [Minneapolis 2003] 29-32), but his NT examples all have to do with the reappearance of Elijah, and his example from Philo (De vita Abr. 113) is of a heavenly “prophet” or angel