Sinner, Revised and Edited: On Benny Lynch

“Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know. All I know is this: Once I was blind and now I can see.” These lines from the New English Bible accompany the closing credits of Raging Bull and are intended to remind us of the infinite potential for human salvation. They provide a powerful, but in the case of LaMotta, a false statement on the ability of the human spirit to rehabilitate itself. It could be argued that Martin Scorsese should have borrowed instead the famous quote from nineteenth-cen…