The Bible in the News: Water into Wine
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BAR’s 40th anniversary certainly warrants a celebration. What better way to revel than with a column about an ancient celebration that was saved by Jesus. New Testament students have always understood it as a one-time miraculous event: Jesus was at a wedding in Cana when the supply of wine ran out. Jesus saved the day by turning about 150 gallons of water into wine (as narrated in John 2).
That was then. Now, as newspapers worldwide trumpet, this is something just about anyone can do: “A start-up company based in California has developed a machine which can turn ordinary water into wine, without any intervention from Jesus, who, till date, was the only one believed to have performed that miracle. [This device is] ambitiously named Miracle Machine” (India’s Sunday Guardian).
This led me to contemplate the relationship between water (in the form of ice cubes) and wine. The positive view is expressed succinctly by wine experts John and Erica Platter (South Africa’s Sunday Times): “No good wine will be ‘damaged’ by dilution. [Some] may be improved … In a reverse Wedding at Cana maneuver, they now even add water to their wine, and ice cubes are de rigeur when the mercury bubbles.” We don’t know what the temperature was in the Galilee when Jesus and his friends (and his mother) attended the wedding; we do know that diluting wine with water occurred at the tables of some well-bred Greeks and Romans.
I beg to differ, writes a correspondent in The Toronto Star: “One of the saddest wine moments I have experienced [was watching] a full-grown man put ice cubes in a glass of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1961 … The transformation of water into wine at the wedding in Cana, as reported with some journalistic license in the New Testament, was viewed as a miracle. The reverse operation, performed by certain contemporary winemakers, is nothing short of a travesty.” With bottles of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1961 going for as much as $8,000 a magnum, I’m ready to offer a toast—full in sentiment, but no more than a quarter full in quantity—to BAR.
Sportswriters seem (some may say, not unexpectedly or inappropriately) to have a particular affinity to wine in their writings. Limiting myself only to a recent example, we look at the prowess of a soccer player (compliments of The Irish News): “Malachy O’Rourke, the last man who almost turned water into wine in 2008, admitted defeat at the end of 2010 knowing there wasn’t much else he could do to turn the county’s fortunes around.” From a man named Malachy—that’s from Biblical Malachi, isn’t it?—I would have expected more complete success.
Our final two examples take us back to antiquity and at the same time bring us up-to-date on some of what we might call the less savory aspects of contemporary life. In the first, titled “Jesus Changed the Water, but Media Just Make Whine,” a Toronto Star writer imagines how a “media person” of today “would have handled the story if he or she had been present when Jesus turned water into wine.” Among the reporter’s observations are these: “While in attendance at the nuptials of a young couple yesterday, Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter by trade, turned water into wine. Some wedding guests were astonished, but in this reporter’s opinion the wine lacked nose and was too fruity to be truly impressive. It also was from an indifferent year—perhaps 25 or 28 A.D., not vintage years for claret. If Jesus had produced a nice dry champagne, it would have been far more acceptable for the wedding toasts.”
Finally, there is the “Deluxe Miracle Jesus—Action Figure Has Glow in the Dark Hands—Comes with 5 Loaves of Bread, 2 Fish, 1 Water in Wine Jug” (as itemized in the Palm Beach Post). As for my reaction to this action figure, don’t get me started!
On the other hand, a Hershel Shanks action figure might be just what the doctor ordered. Or, more to the point, what the Biblical archaeology community continues to need—even if they didn’t know it at first. May Hershel continue as a figure of action—albeit without bread, fish or jugs—for at least another 40 years.
BAR’s 40th anniversary certainly warrants a celebration. What better way to revel than with a column about an ancient celebration that was saved by Jesus. New Testament students have always understood it as a one-time miraculous event: Jesus was at a wedding in Cana when the supply of wine ran out. Jesus saved the day by turning about 150 gallons of water into wine (as narrated in John 2). That was then. Now, as newspapers worldwide trumpet, this is something just about anyone can do: “A start-up company based in California has developed a machine which can turn ordinary […]
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