Water and Wine in the Gospel of Barnabas

DRAFT ONLY

WATER AND WINE

Inter-textual Encounters in
the Medieval Gospel of Barnabas

These are old draft notes made towards a study concerning the "Wedding at Cana" episode in the Fourth Gospel as it is presented in the apocryphal medieval Gospel of Barnabas. The GB places this episode in Judea (rather than Galilee) and on the Feast of Tabernacles (rather than the Passover). I argue that such placements are probably correct.

Dr R. Blackhirst

The Gospel of Barnabas displays some remarkable inter-textual encounters with the canonical gospels that continue to intrigue and mystify those who can look beyond the work's overwhelming peculiarities. It is not just general reflections but many of the details in the work as well that have caught the eyes of scholars. Not only does it recreate a striking semblance of ancient Ebionite themes and present an uncanny reflection of the historical forces that tore apart ancient Judea, but some of the work's rearrangements of the story of Jesus conform to the known textual history of the gospels in quite unaccountable ways. Whatever its date, provenance, authorship and origins, this strangest of gospels often shows a remarkable acquaintance with the editorial processes and textual background that formed the canonical texts, or it seems to. Against those who say that every detail of the text can be accounted for by the ignoble intentions of a medieval fabricator, there are others who see quite surprising textual configurations that accompany the general appearance of ancient roots. There has still been little detailed analysis of the text in all its dimensions but what studies have been made have yielded surprising results.


Some features of the text directly echo ancient manuscript traditions. The most spectacular example is noted by David Sox. This gospel restores the Johanine episode of the Adulterous Woman to what is widely believed to be its rightful place in the Gospel of Luke. This is a very famous and universally admitted case of textual misplacement. In the received canon the story of the Adulterous Woman is placed in the Fourth Gospel. In early manuscripts, however, it is a free-floating text that seems to have become dislodged from its correct context and has been incorporated into the Fourth Gospel at a late date and even though it is ill-fitting. The best manuscript evidence, supported by studies of vocabulary and style, tell us that it was originally part of the Gospel of Luke and was placed in Luke at the juncture 17:39. It is clearly a Lukan, not a Johanine, text and it clearly suits its supposed location in Luke. This is often one of the very first exercises confronted by undergraduate students of the gospels: it is a text-book case of a gospel pericope becoming separated from its mother text and taken into another text as an orphan. It happened at an early date, before the text of either the Gospel of Luke or the Fourth Gospel was fixed. Yet in the Gospel of Barnabas this story is removed from its place in John's gospel and restored to precisely the point in the narrative corresponding to Luke 17:39.


Chapter 200. ... And it came to pass that, when the men of Jerusalem heard that Jesus of Nazareth was coming, the men went forth with their children eager to see Jesus, bearing in their hands branches of palm and olive, singing: 'Blessed be he that comes to us in the name of God; hosanna son of David!'...


Chapter 201. Jesus having entered into the Temple, the scribes and Pharisees brought to him a woman taken in adultery. They said among themselves: 'If he save her, it is contrary to the Law of Moses, and so we have him as guilty, and if he condemn her it is contrary to his own doctrine, for he preaches mercy.' Wherefore they came to Jesus and said: 'Master, we have found this woman in adultery. Moses commanded that [such] should be stoned: what then say you?'


The phrase "'Blessed be he that comes to us in the name of God; hosanna son of David!' is found at Luke 17:38. The medieval Barnabas inserts the story of the adulterous woman at exactly this point. It is just possible, but would be unprecedented, that a very astute medieval reader might have determined for himself that the story belongs in Luke's rather than in John's gospel. Or did it just seem like an appropriate place to put it? Sox dismisses it as "probably just an accident" in the author's general reordering of gospel material, but it remains impressive nonetheless.

MIDRASH

A more extensive example, also from the Fourth Gospel, is the work's treatment of the Wedding at Cana where Jesus turns water into wine, the first miracle and sign of Jesus' ministry in the Johannine gospel's narrative scheme. Such miracle stories, and most supernatural elements in the gospels, are understood by contemporary scholarship as midrashic developments from the Hebrew Scriptures or midrash-style applications to elements of a still fluid early Jesus Tradition. Scholarship in this direction has also been stimulated by the discovery and eventual disclosure of the Dead Sea Scroll corpus as well as by the revival of a vigorous Jewish intellectualism after the Holocaust and by a climate of increased Christian/Jewish co-operation in the same period. Running counter to the general trend of Christian apologetics, this scholarship has made an effort to see the Christian gospel stories in the context of the conventions of Jewish literature by which they are revealed to be, quite obviously, examples of exegetial allegory or "misdrash". Ecclestiatic scholars such as the Episcopalean Bishop Spong have scandalized their co-religionists and become notorious by suggesting that such hallowed tales as the virgin birth of Jesus ought not be taken literally but ought to be seen as midrash-like literary developments based not in historical fact but in ancient Jewish modes of scriptural exegesis. The miracle of turning water into wine is viewed similarly. It must be considered as a literary construction with its genesis in midrashic exegetal conventions. When studied with this in view the version offered in the Gospel of Barnabas participates intelligently and quite extensively with what we can see of the ancient textual developments, especially from marks left in John's own text.


In the Gospel of Barnabas the story comes wedged between two episodes from the synoptic gospels, part of the writer's attempt to harmonize the canonical accounts. Johannine stories intrude at carefully selected points throughout the work. This is the first intrusion. Immediately after the story of the call of the twelve disciples, using the Gospel of Mark as his guide, the medieval Barnabas adds the Miracle of Water into Wine. Following it, the text returns to the Synoptics, but Matthew, not Mark, and gives us a version of the Sermon on the Mount. The scheme is:


Chapter 14. The Twelve Apostles - synoptic/Mark

Chapter 15. The Miracle of Turning Water into Wine - John

Chapter 16. Sermon on the Mount - synoptic/Mathhew


As the author moves from gospel to gospel the Johannine story is framed by the two synoptic episodes but it remains the first miracle in Jesus' ministry, as in the Fourth Gospel. The major changes made in the Barnabas text are that the wedding where Jesus performs the miracle is in Judea near Jerusalem not in Galilee as in John, and furthermore it occurs within the context of the Feast of Tabernacles or "Feast of Booths" (Sukkuth). In chapter 14 Jesus has "returned to the region of Jerusalem" and in chapter 15 "the Feast of Tabernacles was near..." Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an obligatory feature of Tabernacles, so the two notices go together.


There are strong reasons to think that both of these changes have substance and that together they restore the tale to something like a very early rendition from which the canonical text deviates. Against the familiarity of the canonical text the changes might strike the reader as odd and incoherent, but against the background of the Johanine text to which Biblical scholarship, and especially so-called radical scholarship attends, they are very insightful moves. In this instance the method of the author can be traced against the canonical version. The changes he has made are not haphazard but follow discernible textual connections which are somewhat complex but nevertheless concrete and plain to see. If the fortuitous location of the Adulterous Woman pericope in the work is "probably just an accident" this example provides evidence of design and of real insight. It draws attention to textual issues in the Fourth Gospel that are certainly meaningful and it offers a remarkably intelligent and penetrating perspective on the nature of the textual traditions underpinning John's text, again from a distinctly "Jewish-Christian" point of view. The author seems to have a very good understanding of the processes of cutting and pasting that have occured in sections of John's gospel and engages with those processes in depth; the work participates in the same theological and Christological disputes as the text of John but its presentation is Ebionitic, Jewish-Christian, and counter to the Gentile agenda of the orthodox text.


It is certainly arguable that the Miracle of Water into Wine is a midrashic account of Tabernacles themes. The Barnabas writer may be perfectly correct to place this miracle in the House of Judah on Tabernacles thereby restoring the Davidic associations that have been obscured in John's construction. The nature of the miracle and the background to the story, its midrashic character, is suddenly illuminated by restoring this context. As Christian exegesis admits, the "wedding" in the Johanine story is a rather folksy rendering of the "Messianic banquet". Exegetes usually fail to make the connection the medieval Barnabas is making, though, namely that this Messianic Banquet/marriage feast belongs properly to the Feast of Tabernacles and its symbolism. The wedding symbolism is Davidic/Solomonic. Tabernacles is explicitly associated with the founding of the Temple and with the Divine Presence as Bride. In the liturgy of the Festival, the reader of the Pentateuch is esteemed as the "Bridegroom of the Law." Accordingly, the Jewish marriage feast extended over the same length of time as this festival. Moreover, Tabernacles is, in seasonal terms, specifically the feast of the vintage - a wine festival - while its "Living Water" symbolism has been thoroughly explored in orthodox commentaries. The liturgy of the eighth day of the Feast concerns prayers for rain, rites commemorating the Mosaic water miracle and readings from Old Testament passages prophesying "lifegiving water for Zion."

In short, the eighth day and the Feast in general are concerned with water symbolism and water miracles. In the Water Into Wine miracle the wine runs out towards the end of the festivities. The miracle therefore corresponds to the symbolism of the last day of the Festival. Readers should note the parallels between John's description of the eighth day as the "last and greatest" day of the festival (John 7:37) and the comments about leaving the best wine to last (John 2:10). The underlying story seems clear. It is a midrash tale developed from the symbolism of the Messianic Banquet that had the wedding on the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem, or near Jerusalem, or at least in Judea and not in the village of Cana in Galilee as the canonical version now has it. It is, in fact, a story illustrating all of the above-mentioned symbolism of that festival. The original story shows Jesus as the Davidic Messiah (and bridegroom?) in Jerusalem revealing his identity, transforming the old into the new, at the Messianic banquet. In the canonical account the story has been stripped of these associations.

THE WEDDING IN JUDEA NEAR TABERNACLES

It is possible that an astute Jewish reader of the Gospel of John from any era could recognize the miracle of Water Into Wine as befitting Tabernacles and restore it to that context, but as it is woven into the Gospel of Barnabas it opens very sophisticated encounters with the canonical text that strongly suggest a deeper tradition. The medieval Barnabas account presents an altogether credible restoration of this feature of the textual traditions underpinning John. Conversely, it is John's gospel that shows signs of dissembling, revision and mutilation. Tabernacles is where the miracle belongs and the canonical text has moved it. The Barnabas gospel then restores it to its proper place and so again the work's apparently strange reorganising of gospel material turns out to contain insights far exceeding what one expects in such a medieval and disreputable work. It cannot be by accident in this case. The restoration of the miracle to Tabernacles is too revealing of an authentic insight that is the product of a tradition of encounter with the canonical treatment of the story.


The Barnabas version makes only a few textual changes to the canonical text, but these changes have wide ramifications if we pursue them further in the Gospel of John. Compared to many other canonical episodes reworked in the medieval Barnabas this case does not deviate significantly from the canonical text in its general shape. In the case of some canonical episodes the work offers truly bizarre rewritings while in others the treatment of the canonical story is almost childish. In some few cases the work has no quarrel with the canonical texts and merely paraphrases them or recounts them as they are in the canon with some medieval explanatory interpolations and exaggerations. In the case of the Miracle of Water and Wine, the medieval Barnabas has no quarrel with the Fourth Gospel about the general nature of the miracle, the reworked version in fact following John's version quite closely in most aspects. There are interesting minor variations from the canonical text but no major deviations concerning what happened to whom and why at the wedding. Jesus is still abrupt with his mother, as in John, and events unfold more or less as in the canonical story. Mainly the work has a quarrel with the canonical text over geographical location and season. Here is the full passage:


When the feast of tabernacles was near, a certain rich man invited Jesus with his disciples and his mother to a marriage. Jesus therefore went, and as they were feasting the wine ran short. His mother accosted Jesus, saying: 'They have no wine.' Jesus answered: 'What is that to me, mother mine?' His mother commanded the servants that whatever Jesus should command them they should obey. There were there six vessels for water according to the custom of Israel to purify themselves for prayer. Jesus said: 'Fill. these vessels with water.' The servants did so. Jesus said to them: 'In the name of God, give to drink to them that are feasting.' The servants thereupon bare to the master of the ceremonies, who rebuked the attendants saying: 'O worthless servants, why have you kept the better wine till now?' For he knew nothing of all that Jesus had done.


The servants answered: 'O Sir, there is here a holy man of God, for he has made of water, wine.' The master of the ceremonies thought that the servants were drunken; but they that were sitting near to Jesus, having seen the whole matter, rose from the table and paid him reverence, saying: 'Truly you are an holy one of God, a true prophet sent to us from God!' Then his disciples believed on him, and many returned to their heart, saying: 'Praised be God, who has mercy upon Israel, and visits the house of Judah with love, and blessed be his holy name.'


As the reader can see it is not very different to the canonical version; it is simply a medieval rendition of the same, with some of the differences clearly explanatory interpolation and paraphrasing. The final section, though, is an expansion on or replacement for John 2:11:


This was the first of the signs given by Jesus: it was given at Cana in Galilee. He let his glory be seen and his disciples believed in him.


In the canonical text, we note, this first miracle and sign is emphatically at "Cana in Gallilee" rather than at some unnamed location during a Jerusalem leg of Jesus' journeys as the medieval Barnabas has it. The medieval author presents a roughly canonical version with an expanded ending but has given the whole a different geographical location with a festive context. The two texts are concerned about the contending claims of Galilee and Jerusalem. While the canonical text insists that the miracle occured in "Cana in Galilee" the Gospel of Barnabas, in the corresponding expansion, insists on the mention of both Israel and Judah:

'Praised be God, who has mercy upon Israel, and visits the house of Judah with love...


Barnabas resists the canonical text. And moves the location to Jerusalem in defiance of the canonical text. It is important for the medieval author to show that Jesus performed this miracle in "the house of Judah" and not in Galillee. Conversely, it is important to the author of the Fourth Gospel to show that this first sign occurred in Galilee, not elsewhere.

SOME TEXTUAL ENCOUNTERS WITH JOHN'S GOSPEL

The beginning "When the feast of Tabernacles was near..." reveals the work to be participating in a debate found in other parts of John's gospel. While it's insertion into the Miracle of Water and Wine is in violation of the John's text and John's version does not begin thus - the wedding is not associated in any way with Tabernacles in John - this beginning is from John's gospel, although in another section. We are carried to John 7:2-10:


But when the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles was near, Jesus’ brothers said to him, “You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” For even his own brothers did not believe in him. Therefore Jesus told them, “The right time for me has not yet come; for you any time is right. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil. You go to the Feast. I am not yet going up to this Feast, because for me the right time has not yet come.” Having said this, he stayed in Galilee. However, after his brothers had left for the Feast, he went also, not publicly, but in secret.

John 7:2-10


The Gospel of Barnabas signals a link between the two episodes, importing the beginning of John 7:2-10 to the Miracle of Water and Wine. It therefore invites us to read the miracle along with and in light of this section beginning in John 7.

It is a simple cut and paste but immediately revealing. An attentive reading of John 7 illuminates the nature of the debate. The issue in this passage (John 7:2-10) is where Jesus should perform his miracles, Galilee or Jerusalem? In the canonical text Jesus' "brothers" urge him to go to Jerusalem and do there (for his "disciples") what he had been doing in Galilee (for his family?) Jesus does go to Jerusalem, but not with his brothers: he remains secret. There are tensions in this passage between Galilee/Jerusalem, brothers/disciples, private/public. These are the tensions with which the Gospel of Barnabas engages and does so in ways that are far more insightful than the naiveity of the rendering would lead the reader to suspect.


In terms of the parties described in the Fourth Gospel the sympathies of the medieval Barnabas are with Jesus' brothers. In John they urge Jesus: "You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do." In the Gospel of Barnabas - when Tabernacles is near - we find Jesus doing exactly this: he is in Judea showing his miraculous powers to his disciples. There is no reluctance concerning the Feast of Tabernacles in the Barnabas Jesus. He is in Jerusalem at festive time, not home in Galilee. He performs a miracle at a public event - a wedding - and it is his "disciples" who are with him. In the Gospel of Barnabas the occasion of the Feast of Tabernacles means, quite naturally, that Jesus is in the region of Jerusalem where, at the outset of his ministry, he openly displays his miracles at a public event. In these sections of John's gospel, in contrast, the House of Judah is a house of strife. John 7:1, just before the link, announces the theme with:


Jesus stayed in Galilee: he could not stay in Judea because the Jews were out to kill him.


The Fourth Gospel wants to show Jesus as a Galilean, first and foremost, and Judea (and its "Jews") as a place of danger, hostility and opposition. The wedding is in Cana because Cana is in Galilee, and it is to the Galileans, according to John, that Jesus presents the first Sign, the water changed into wine. "He let his glory be seen..." (John 2:12) The Gospel of Barnabas disagrees. The wedding, it says, was in Judea at Tabernacles. Responding exactly to the urgings of Jesus' "brothers" in the Fourth Gospel, the Barnabas Jesus demonstrates the "Living Water" that flows through Johannine symbolism to his disciples in the "House of Judah". The issue is, where did Jesus first declare himself in public? Where was his first sign? The canonical text is anxious to place this event in Galilee, in a small village wedding among kin and neighbors and to show Jesus to be reluctant to show himself in Jerusalem at the great public assembly of Tabernacles. Contra-John, the Gospel of Barnabas depicts a Jewish Jesus who declares himself to the House of Judah at the time of the nation's feast.


The connections and the nature of the polemic in which they are involved becomes clear simply by going to those places in John's text where the Gospel of Barnabas leads us. Reading on from the locus signaled by the Barnabas version, in John 7:37 we turn to the last (eighth) day of the Tabernacle feast. Here Jesus says: "If any man is thirsty, let him come to me..." and speaks of the promise of the "Living Water" consistent with the symbolism of Tabernacles. This "Living Water" is surely linked to the Miracle of Water and Wine as the whole tradition of Christian scriptural exegesis, ancient and modern, attests. In all Christian understandings the Johannine Wedding at Cana is essentially a water miracle that demonstrates this Living Water doctrine in action. The theme of the Living Water links these two sections of John's gospel. This follows from normal Christian understandings. If the Living Water discourse to which the cut and paste in the medieval Barnabas points is appropriate to the Feast of Tabernacles, so too is the transformation of water into wine at the wedding which illustrates the same symbolism. Then, at John 7:40, in response to these "Living Water" teachings, reaching the heart of the whole matter, we find that some say Jesus is the Christ, but others say:


"Would the Christ be from Galilee? Does not the scripture say that the Christ must be descended from David and come from the town of Bethlehem?"


Here is the pivotal issue. From whence does the Messiah come? This is the issue at stake in all of these textual tensions between Galilee and Jerusalem and the issue driving many other textual tensions throughout Christian literature. It is responsible for an array of textual tangles. In the synoptic tradition, most obviously, this same tension is involved in the story that while Jesus was born in Bethlehem he was actually a Galilean; placing his birth at the time of a census revolves this problem. The sympathies of the Barnabas text vis a vis the canonical texts on these matters are plain: it prefers the claims of Jerusalem. The link "when the Feast of Tabernacles was near..." takes us to a deeply polemical section of John. "The debate... as C. H. Dood remarked, "proceeds largely upon the plane of Jewish Messianic ideas" but there is "scarcely another [section of John] where the controversial note is so sharp and so sustained..." (p. 346) The writer of the Fourth Gospel has, we know, collected his materials from diverse sources. He wants to retain this particular story and use it as the first of the great Signs of Jesus' messiahship, but for polemical reasons he objects to its Judaic Davidic/Temple/Jerusalem associations. He accomplishes his revision by removing it from its Tabernacle context. It had perhaps once accompanied the "Living Water" materials now in John 7, its specific context being the "last and greatest day" of Tabernacles (John 7:37). The over-writing in John's gospel is plain to see and also reveals the atmosphere of contention in which it was done.


Polemical engagement with John also extends to textual overlaps that paste the pericopes in their new locations in the medieval work. Immediately prior to the Wedding at Cana in John's sequence is the Calling of Nathaniel episode. The Gospel of Barnabas has instead the Call of the Disciples from Mark's gospel. It first appears that the Johannine episode has been stuck awkwardly into the Barnabas narrative; it is self-contained and flanked, as we said, by two synoptic episodes and so breaks the flow of an otherwise synoptic narrative. But in fact the plan of the Gospel of John has been overlaid with the synoptic scheme in a move to harmonize the two and so a lot more thought has got into the arrangement than it at first seems. If we are under the impression the author has stuck the wedding story into his narrative where he has at a whim we are mistaken. It is part of a larger coherent arrangement. The full scheme embraces the second part of chapter 14 through to the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of chapter 19. It is a coherent construction of gospel material grouped around the Feast of Tabernacles and its themes, with the Miracle of Water and Wine integral, if not central to it. It is counter-Johannine:


John


Call of Nathaniel
Water into Wine
Cleansing the Temple


Barnabas


Call of the Twelve
Water into Wine
Sermon on the Mount


Moreover, the over-lapping tab, Call of Nathaniel (a disciple only mentioned in John's Gospel), is bound to the above-mentioned configuration in that he comes from Cana (John 21:2). And it is Nathaniel who says "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" (John 1:46) when told that they had found "the one Moses wrote about in the Law" in that place. It is an important point for the author of John. We can see how his Gospel is again insisting on Jesus' Galilean origins against the geographical assumptions of the Davidic Messiahship. John insists Jesus is a Messiah from Galilee despite what people assume about the Messianic office.

THE RESTORATION OF JUDAIC THEMES & CONTEXTS

We are remote from any Islamic influences here. In fact the restoration of the Davidic context of the Miracle of Water and Wine might be construed as counter to the whole agenda of this "Islamic gospel" which is everywhere else at pains to distance Jesus from any claim to Messiahood. But the Gospel of Barnabas preserves traditions that this miracle occured at Tabernacles and that the Call of the Disciples and the Sermon on the Mount belong in the same grouping, all of them being midrash-like developments of Tabernacles themes. In the Gospel of John we can see the textual marks left when this material was stripped of such associations. Jewish readers in particular are likely to be alive to the significance and plausibility of this. They have long complained that the Gospel of John, and the whole Christian tradition, has its festivals mixed up. A line of modern Jewish critical analysis, best known through the works of Hyam Maccoby, explain how the Christian depiction of Jesus going to Jerusalem for Passover, with a triumphant entry of the Davidic king, singing of Hosanna and waving of palm fronds, is a depiction of the symbols of Tabernacles, not Passover. Jews can hardly recognize the Christian Passover; in the Christian tradition the sacrificial symbolism of Passover, with Christ as the Paschal Lamb, has been interchanged or collapsed with or overwritten upon their Feast of Tabernacles. It is notable that the conspicuously misplaced Cleansing of the Temple, coming immediately after the Wedding at Cana in John's gospel begins: "Just before the Jewish Passover Jesus went up to Jerusalem..." participating in these interchanges and providing the immediate canonical echo for the "When the feast of tabernacles was near" in the Barnabas text. There is quite fascinating and subtle interplay between these two works.


It is therefore not just the general shape and colouring of the medieval Barnabas that defies the generally proposterous character of the extant work to recall vivid aspects of ancient sectarian history, nor the chance relocation of a passage or two to ancient positions in the narrative, but whole configurations of text that at first seem haphazard and shallow but which suggest, on closer analysis, deep and long and penetrating roots. The life of Jesus presented in the work is so astray from the canonical models and the canonical passages have been so thoroughly shuffled that it is not surprising to find some meaningful rearrangements among them, but the evidence of the text goes much further. In some sections the rearrangements counter the canonical arrangements with profoundly astute restorations that suggest an acquaintance with ancient textual traditions.


This is why some scholars from Toland onwards have been prepared to suspend disbelief and give the work the benefit of the doubt before consigning it to the shedder or filing it away under "Miscellaneous". Aside from what fascination the whole production offers as a literary mystery, there are many places in the text that will make a reader who knows ancient sources and the critical history of the canonical texts wonder if there are not intimate reflections of a rich and worthy tradition behind the evident sham that survives. Some of the most strange textual configurations in the Gospel of Barnabas reveal very intelligent underpinnings. Almost everywhere a haze of amateurishness obscures flashes of a distant authentic glow. In the case of the Adulterous Woman we are arrested by the unlikely precision of the placement of the episode in the Barnabas narrative. In the case of the Miracle of Water and Wine the Barnabas text engages in a more complex and deep-seated polemic with the canonical model, exposing the tangles in the canonical texts and restoring a more contextually correct - and Judaic - version of the story, at the same time as exposing the seams of textual incisions still to be observed in John from the processes by which the miracle was shorn of its contextual - and Judaic - associations and put to a contrary purpose. Not only does the work manage to conjure the general appearance of being an Ebionitic gospel, it engages in Ebionitic textual disputes with canonical texts and does so at a deep and complex level.


But once again different scholars working under different paradigms will see different things. It is remarkable that mainstream Christian textual scholarship does not make the connections the Gospel of Barnabas makes, even though it admits all the parts of the equation. It admits that the Living Water discourse of Jesus in John's Gospel is given at Tabernacles because "living water" is important to the symbolism of the festival. It admits that the miracle of turning water into wine is part of this same symbolism and an expression of the Living Water theme. It admits that the wedding of the story is essentially the Messianic Banquet. But it usually fails to acknowledge that both the wedding and the Messianic Banquet are also Tabernacles themes and so fails to put the evidence together and draw the obvious conclusion. Most scholarly paradigms stumble on the assumption that the Jesus Tradition has developed from the primitive and rustic to the sophisticated and theological. In this instance it is widely assumed that John's story records an historical occasion when a rustic, historical Jesus attended a village wedding and that this primitive base has been overlaid with accumulations of theological development. This is the strategem of the so-called "demythologizers" in modern Biblical Studies. The encounter we have just seen between the Gospel of Barnabas and the Gospel of John offers a different scenerio but one that is difficult to see if one labours under the "demythologizing" paradigm. The significance of the textual arrangements in the medieval Barnabas is only likely to be obvious in minds not shaped by such assumptions. It suggests that there was first a midrashic story concerning the Messianic Wedding Banquet illustrating the symbolism of the feast of Tabernacles. The Johanine textual tradition has then taken this story, stripped it of its Tabernacles symbolism, and recast it as a simple village wedding in Cana in Galilee. It began as a sophisticated, theological story. It became rustic and primitive. It is not a simple story that has been mythologized, it is a mythic story that has been historicized and made to seem concrete and based in a common and therefore historical event.


Christian exegesis also points out that the figure underlying the Fourth Gospel's rustic rendition of the Messianic Banquet is the mysterious priest/king Melchizadek. Its foundations are recorded by Philo Judeaus of Alexandria where "Melchizadek shall bring forth wine instead of water and give our souls a pure draught..." From other paradigms, it is not that this Melchidaekean mythology has been overlaid upon an historical event, as mainstream paradigms suppose, but more likely that a mythic, eschatological story concerning Melchizadek presiding at the great banquet of the feast of nations has devolved into a quasi-historical form. If considered from this perspective the Gospel of Barnabas is uniquely stimulating and exposes something of the very early foundations of the story. Moreover, it could be added, it illuminates the Tabernacles (Festival of Booths) themes in the Sermon on the Mount as well, opening another promising line of inquiry. Jewish scholars, like Schlomo Pines, are more likely to see and appreciate and be intruiged by this dimension of the work than Christian or even secular scholars trained in a universe of residual Christian assumptions. As fresh viewpoints emerge in contemporary Biblical Studies and the paradigms that prevailed in the post-war milue pass away or are dislodged from a position of unassilability, these textual features of the medieval Barnabas can be seen and studied in new and highly constructive ways. They can help us rediscover the Jewish-Christian dimension of the gospel tradition.


The importance of the Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkuth, in ancient Ebionite ideology has emerged as a common thread through many new studies. In the Maccabean Revolt, which sets the pattern for subsequent Jewish nationalist militancy in the Holy Land, the Feast of Tabernacles is reconformed as the Feast of the Rededication of the Temple or, in other words, the feast of Jewish national soveriegnty. The Maccabean Tabernacles feast, Hannukah, persisted somewhat incongrously in Rabbinic Judaism, but throughout the Second Temple period, up until the collapse of the Bar Chohkbar revolt, Tabernacles was a rallying point for Jewish nationalists. Coins minted by Bar Chokhbar show the symbols of Tabernacles imprinted over the face of the Roman Emperor making the significance of these symbols to the Jewish rebellion abundantly clear. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Tabernacles was the occasion of endless strife, riots and nationalist agitation according to the historical accounts given by Josephus. It is likely that James the Righteous was stoned to death at Sukkuth in the year 62 CE, an event that, according to Christian sources, boiled over into the full-scale revolt of the Jewish War. Aside from its Messianic and Davidic associations, its vintage and water symbolism, Tabernacles was concerned with the installation of the Law of Moses - the tablets of Moses in the Ark of the Covenant - in the Holy of Holies, a declaration of the logocratic sovereignty of Yahweh and his priesthood. The reading from the prophets in the liturgy of Tabernacles is revealing:


Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The Lord will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.

Zech. 14:16-19



Arguably, this is the text underlying the gospel of John's portrayal of Jesus' brothers goading him to attend the festival: it is the canonical Jesus - at least as far as his "brothers" are concerned because they do not know he goes in secret - who does not "go up to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles", while the Gospel of Barnabas has him at Tabernacles preserving the context of the Miracle of Water and Wine as the feast of the "King of Jerusalem" Melchizadek. Whatever the case, the relevance of this feast to the Jewish zealot's struggle against Roman domination needs no further elaboration. In Zechariah's eschatological invitation to all the "nations" to come up to Jerusalem for the feast the nations will serve under the soveriegnty of the God of the Jews - His Law and His Temple -, not the Jews serve the human gods of Rome.


Tabernacles also forms the symbolic background of another important feature of Judean resistance of foreign domination from the Maccabean revolt through to Bar Kochbar, namely the practise of retiring into the wilderness and being hardened on God-given foods to escape a polluted Temple and corrupt priesthood. The Feast commemorating the dedication of the Temple does so by reliving the pre-Temple life of the Israelites. The surviving Dead Sea Scrolls are a spectacular remnant of this cultic reverence for retreating into the wilderness regions for spiritual purification. In contemporary Judaism Jews still construct rustic "booths" as abodes during Sukkuth. What we are calling Ebionite Christianity retains much of this emphasis on the Feast of Tabernacles and key aspects of its symbolism, consistent with its general zeal for the Law. In the texts and traditions of Gentile Christianity, in contrast, the important associations of this festival tend to be obscured and its pro-Law zealous meanings overwritten. Thus, in Gentile Christian texts, the Triumphant Entry happens on Passover, not Tabernacles, and the Miracle of the Water and Wine is shorn of the associations it had for "Jewish Christians" and removed from any Tabernacles context.