[1760] Comp. the passages from the classics quoted by Wetstein in his Commentary.
[1761] St. John xix. 26.
[1762] St. Matt xii. 46-50.
[1763] Ecclus. xxxii. 1 2.
[1764] On the omission of certain parts of St. John's narrative by the Synoptists, and vice versâ, and on the supposed differences, I can do no better than refer the reader to the admirable remarks of Canon Westcott, Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, pp. 280 &c.
[1765] According to the best reading, and literally, This did - beginning of signs - Jesus in Cana.' Upon a careful review the Rabbinic expression Simana (taken from the Greek word here used) would seem to me more fully to render the idea than the Hebrew Oth. But the significant use of the word sign should be well marked. See Canon Westcott on the passage.
[1766] In this, the first of his miracles, it was all the more necessary that He should manifest his glory.
[1767] Thus Schenkel regards Christ's answer to Mary as a proof that He was not on good terms with His family; Paulus suggests, that Jesus had brought the wine, and that it was afterwards mixed with the water in the stone-vessels; Gfrörer, that Mary had brought it as a present, and at the feast given Jesus the appropriate hint when to have it set on. The gloss of Renan seems to me even more untenable and repulsive.
[1768] Against this view of Strauss, see Lücke, u. s. p. 477.
[1769] So Lange, in his Life of Christ,' imagining that converse with Jesus had put all in that higher ecstasy in which He gave them to drink from the fulness of Himself. Similar spiritualisation - though by each in his own manner - has been attempted by Baur, Keim, Ewald, Hilgenfeld, and others. But it seems more rational, with Schweizer and Weisse, to deny the historical accuracy of the whole, than to resort to such expedients.
[1770] Hilgenfeld, however, sees in this miracle an evidence that the Christ of the fourth Gospel proclaimed another and a higher than the God of the Old Testament - in short, evidence of the Gnostic taint of the fourth Gospel.
[1771] Meyer well reminds us that physical incomprehensibility is not identical with absolute impossibility.'
[1772] Godet has scarcely rightly marked the difference.
[1773] If I rightly understand the meaning of Dr. Abbott's remarks on the miracles in the fourth Gospel (Encycl. Britan. vol. x. p. 825 b), they imply that the change of the water into wine was an emblematic reference to the Eucharistic wine, this view being supported by a reference to 1 John v. 8. But could this be considered sufficient ground for the inference, that no historic reality attaches to the whole history? In that case it would have to be seriously maintained, that an Ephesian writer at the end of the second century had invented the fiction of the miraculous change of water into wine, for the purpose of certain Eucharistic teaching! __________________________________________________________________
CHAPTER V. THE CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE - THE SIGN,' WHICH IS NOT A SIGN.
(St. John ii. 13-25.)
It has been said that Mary understood, and yet did not understand Jesus. And of this there seems fresh evidence in the circumstance that, immediately after the marriage of Cana, she and the brethren of Jesus' went with Him, or followed Him, to Capernaum, which henceforth became His own city,' [1774] during His stay by the Lake of Galilee. The question, whether He had first returned to Nazareth, seems almost trifling. It may have been so, and it may be that His brothers had joined Him there, while His sisters,' being married, remained at Nazareth. [1775] For the departure of the family from Nazareth many reasons will, in the peculiar circumstances, suggest themselves. And yet one feels, that their following Jesus and His disciples to their new home had something to do with their understanding, and yet not understanding, of Him, which had been characteristic of Mary's silent withdrawal after the reply she had received at the feast of Cana, and her significant direction to the servants, implicitly to do what He bade them. Equally in character is the willingness of Jesus to allow His family to join Him - not ashamed of their humbleness, as a Jewish Messiah might have been, nor impatient of their ignorance: tenderly near to them, in all that concerned the humanness of His feelings; sublimely far from them, in all connected with His Work and Mission.