Just Ask a Jew, Vol. 1: The Wedding at Cana
As a Christmas/Hanukkah present of sorts, I'm going to dust off this blog to demonstrate how and why reading the New Testament through a Jewish lens is important. If you've read your Christian Bible, you've heard of the wedding at Cana. Maybe your pastor or priest called it the marriage at Cana, or the wedding/marriage feast at Cana, but whatever it was called, you know the story. It's all there in the second chapter of the Gospel of John: Jesus, his mother, and his disciples are invited to a wedding; his mother notices they're out of wine; Jesus delivers a sign of his divinity by turning water into wine at her request. Biblical scholars and archaeologists debate everything from where Cana was* to what the beverage was**. But there's another phenomenon which, in my experience to date, no theologian is immune to. This is best described by Johannes Lehmann (as translated by Michael Heron) in his 1971 book The Jesus Report: The Rabbi J. Revealed by the Dead Sea Sc