THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN - Chapter 2 - Verse 1

Verse 1.

And the third day

. On the third day after his conversation with Nathanael.

Cana\@. This was a small town about 15 miles north-west of Tiberias and 6 miles north-east of Nazareth. It is now called Kefr Kenna, is under the government of a Turkish officer, and contains perhaps three hundred inhabitants, chiefly Catholics. The natives still pretend to show the place where the water was turned into wine, and even one of the large stone water-pots.

"A Greek church," says Professor Hackett

(Illustrations of Scripture, p. 322),

"stands at the entrance of the town, deriving its

special sanctity, as I understood, from its

being supposed to occupy the site of the house in which

the marriage was celebrated to which Jesus and his

friends were invited. A priest to whom we were referred

as the custodian soon arrived, in obedience to our call,

and unlocked the doors of the church. It is a low stone

building, wretchedly neglected and out of repair."

"The houses," says Dr. Thomson (The Land and the Book,

vol. 2. p. 126),

"were built of limestone, cut and laid up after the fashion

still common in this region, and some of them may have been

inhabited within the last fifty years. There are many

ancient cisterns about it, and fragments of water-jars

in abundance, and both reminded us of the beginning

of miracles. Some of my companions gathered bits of

these water-jars as mementoes—witnesses they could

hardly be, for those of the narrative were of stone,

while these were baked earth."

"The place is now quite deserted. Dr. Thomson (ibid.) says:

"There is not now a habitable house in the humble village

where our blessed Lord sanctioned, by his presence and

miraculous assistance, the all-important and world-wide

institution of marriage."

It was called Cana of Galilee to distinguish it from another Cana in the tribe of Ephraim, Jos 16:9. This was the native place of Nathanael, Joh 21:2.

The mother of Jesus. Mary. It is not improbable that she was a relative of the family where the marriage took place.

{a} "Cana of Galilee" Jos 19:28; Joh 4:46