Wednesday, December 22, 2004

CANA IN GALILEE, the site where Jesus is reported in John 2 to have turned water into wine, is being excavated. Maybe. There seems to be some dispute over the exact identification of the town, and two rival sites are being excavated. Stone jar fragments have been found at both (cf. John 2:6).

We're off to buy some lumber for those shelves. More later, maybe.

UPDATE: David Meadows over at Rogue Classicism notes the silliness of the A.P. article. This occurred to me too, but I didn't have time to pursue it because we were about to go out the door. The article (second link above) has this bit:
Israeli archaeologist Yardena Alexander says the Arab town was built near the ancient village.

The jar pieces date to the Roman period, when Jesus traveled in the Galilee.

"All indications from the archaeological excavations suggest that the site of the wedding was [modern-day] Cana, the site that we have been investigating," said Alexander as she cleaned the site of mud from winter rains.

American archaeologists excavating a rival site several miles to the north also have found pieces of stone jars from the time of Jesus and say they have found biblical Cana.

Another expert, archaeologist Shimon Gibson, cast doubt on the find at modern Cana, since such vessels are not rare and it would be impossible to link a particular set of vessels to the miracle.

"Just the existence of stone vessels is not enough to prove that this is a biblical site," and more excavations are needed, he said.

My bold-font emphasis. The emphasized phrase is weird. It seems to imply that someone was claiming not only that the excavation is of the right town at the right time (which is possible, if yet to be proven), but that it had found the actual room of the wedding and the actual jars that Jesus used (which is silly). I'm quite sure the archaeologists said no such thing. The only guesses I can hazard are either that the reporter misunderstood and incorrectly paraphrased whatever Gibson said or that the reporter misunderstood what the excavators said and asked Gibson if he thought that the jars were the ones from the wedding at Cana story.

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