Re: Signs of Scientism

Seems to me this confuses what might be discovered now and what might
have been available to someone at the time. But there were no bottled
wines two millennia ago. Scripture talks of wineskins, and archeologists
have discovered amphorae used to ship wine. Both are too porous to
preserve liquid for a great length of time. Consequently all we can
possibly have is the record in John 2. So if anyone offers you a bottle
of wine from that made at Cana, have him arrested for fraud.

What about at the time? One could interview the MC, who would probably
only know that they were running short of wine and then had plenty of
better quality. But he'd likely be very confused that the wine was in the
water containers rather than in skins, with no skins around to account
for the ~300 liters of wine--at least six skins' worth. One could
interview the servants who filled the containers with water and took out
wine. One could check around town to find out how many wineskins members
of the family had purchased, each perhaps holding 55 liters (that's
litres for our British friends like Michael), and how many had been
consumed at various times during the festivities.

As for the resurrection, when Paul wrote his noted chapter, there were
those who had been in Jerusalem at the time and could have refuted him.
There was the effect on the followers of Jesus, scared and hiding to
fearlessly proclaiming--even willing to die rather than recanting. They
sure persuaded a lot of people. This is not proof, but clearly evidence.
Dave

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 13:52:09 -0600 "Tjalle T Vandergraaf"
<ttveiv@mts.net> writes:
As to the wine at Cana, if wine were found this year, believers would
claim that this was evidence of the power of Christ. Non-believers and
sceptics would argue that somebody had fiddled with the evidence. (what
protocols were used to preserve the sample and what is the effect of
aging on wine?) If the wine had been sealed in bottles with an
authorized signature, there would be a line up of tasters and, if it
still tasted like good wine, there would be demands for C-14 and O
isotope ratio testing. Remember the fuss over the Shroud of Turin.
Received on Thu Jan 19 16:58:43 2006