For several weeks now, our Wednesday nights have taken point-by-point aim at the claim of liberal scholars that the Gospel of John is historically inaccurate. Last week we worked through John the Baptist and the calling of Peter and Andrew, and we saw that what looks like a conflict between John and Mark dissolves once you read carefully — the two witnesses are simply describing the same journey from different vantage points.
This week we moved to the calling of two more disciples, Philip and Nathanael, and then into the first recorded sign, the wedding at Cana. The question running through the whole study is the one the critics keep asking: is John embellishing, or is he recording?
The Calling of Philip and Nathanael
“The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the Law, and also the prophets, wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no deceit.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘How do you know me?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.’ Nathanael answered him, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ Jesus answered him, ‘Because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? You will see greater things than these.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’ (John 1:43–51, ESV)”
Who Is Nathanael?
The skeptic’s argument is straightforward: Nathanael appears nowhere else in Scripture. The other three Gospels never mention anyone by that name, so John must be making him up. But that conclusion does not hold up.
First, Jesus had far more followers than the twelve. When the church looked for a replacement for Judas, Peter set the standard: the new witness had to be one of “the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us” (Acts 1:21–22). And notice that they put forward two men — “Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also called Justus” (Acts 1:23). The wording implies they were selecting from a larger pool of long-time followers.
Jesus also had women disciples — Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, among them (Luke 8:1–3) — and so-called “secret” disciples, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both of them on the ruling Sanhedrin, who risked losing everything at this point but stepped forward to take a stand for Jesus (John 19:38–39). Joseph of Arimathea had been a secret disciple “to this point,” and when the time came he stepped forward to ask for the body of Jesus so he could be buried. He was a rich man, and the pastor saw his providing the tomb as fulfillment of Scripture — in Isaiah it says he made his grave with the rich (Isaiah 53:9).
And that raises an uncomfortable question about “fill-in-the-blank” discipleship. It is not all right to be a secret disciple. Joseph and Nicodemus came to a point where their faith had to be brought out front, even at the risk of their own well-being. In our culture, sooner or later, we have to speak.
Then there is the name question itself. The disciples of Jesus routinely had more than one name. Simon was called Peter. The tax collector is Levi, the son of Alphaeus, in Mark (Mark 2:14), but Matthew everywhere else. There is another James among the disciples — James, the son of Alphaeus — beside James, the son of Zebedee, which is why the two are called the sons of Zebedee. That suggests Matthew and the other James may have been brothers as well, so that you have three or four sets of brothers among Jesus’ disciples — an indicator, the pastor said, that the family has always been important to the Christian church. Thomas is “the Twin” (John 11:16) — a name that hints at another brother we never meet. People have two names, and it is no scandal at all.
So who is Nathanael? In every one of the Synoptic lists of the twelve, the name Bartholomew appears right after Philip — and in John, the two names we consistently see walking together are Philip and Nathanael. “Bartholomew” is not really a proper name; it is a title, something like “son of Tolmai,” most naturally applied to Nathanael. And John 21:2 confirms that he belonged to the inner circle even after the resurrection: “Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples.”
The pastor shared his own family illustration to make the same point: his father, whose name was William R. Shiflett, was known to the family simply as “Pee-wee,” because he was a small man. Someone hearing that name in the family would never guess it referred to him — and that is exactly the point. People have two names. John has made no mistake and is making nothing up; he is simply using the name that the other Gospels call Bartholomew.
“Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph”
The critics also charge that John has “inflated” his Christology — that later Christians piled titles like “Lamb of God” and “Son of God” onto Jesus in a way that reflects the passage of time rather than what Jesus actually claimed. But look at what John puts into Philip’s mouth in verse 45:
“We have found him of whom Moses in the Law, and also the prophets, wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”
Joseph was not Jesus’s biological father. He was his foster father. If John were trying to inflate the image of Christ, he would have left that detail out — “Jesus of Nazareth” was more than enough to identify him. Instead, John records it, because that is what Philip actually said. The disciples genuinely believed who Jesus was, but they did not yet have a full grasp of it, and John preserves their words exactly as they were used at that time. Genuine history — not a polished theological portrait.
The Wedding at Cana
“On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.’ … This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. (John 2:1–11, ESV)”
The Invitation Makes Sense
Remember: Nathanael was from Cana (John 21:2), and the other disciples Jesus was calling are from that same region. Jesus’s ministry has just begun, his mother is there, and the small group is invited to a local wedding. The natural explanation is that they are related to the couple, or closely connected to the family. The setting is exactly what you would expect.
A Story No One Would Invent
Consider the scene the critics are asked to imagine as an invention: a wedding where people are drinking freely and getting a little drunk — the master of the feast is quite aware of it — and Jesus is the one supplying the wine. A made-up story would be so easy to misunderstand, so easy to use to spin a negative image of who Christ is. As the study put it: you would not make up that kind of story unless it truly happened. (There is a side debate about whether the wine was fermented or unfermented — in that culture, wine was typically watered down, and fermentation was the way wine was preserved. The text does not settle it, and it does not need to.)
“Woman, What Does This Have to Do with Me?”
Every commentary notes how abrupt — even blunt — Jesus’s reply to his own mother is. The fifth commandment says, “Honor your father and your mother.” If John were inventing this scene, he would not have recorded his hero talking to his mother that way.
And the pattern is not isolated. At the Feast of Booths, Jesus tells his brothers, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come” — and then, after his brothers have gone up, he goes up too, not publicly, but in his own way (John 7:1–10).
The rebuke to Mary signals something important: Jesus is entering the fullness of his ministry, in which his one and only guide is his Father. He is not downplaying love for his family — he is insisting that the calling of God now takes the first place. This is the same note we hear when his mother and brothers stand outside asking to speak to him and he replies, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? … Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:46–50). It is the same priority he shows in the house of Mary and Martha, when Martha is busy with the serving and he says of Mary, “She has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38–42).
The commentator Leon Morris puts it well: “They appear to be claiming special treatment on account of their family ties, and Jesus makes it plain that in his ministry his relation to his family is different from what it had been in his days of growing up. Jesus is not downplaying loyalty to human family, but insisting on the importance of loyalty to God.”
The Best Evidence Is What’s Missing
The scholar Craig Blomberg points out something striking: verses 7 through 9 contain no description of the miracle itself. There is no incantation, no dramatic turning of the water — just “fill the jars,” and then, after they draw some out, the master of the feast tastes better wine. Blomberg’s observation: precisely what later free invention would have created is exactly what is absent. If John had fabricated the story, he would have embellished how it happened. He did not.
The Well, and the Nuance Most Readers Miss
There is one more layer that the study surfaced, from D. A. Carson’s commentary, and it is worth sitting with. We naturally read the sequence as: fill the jars with water, then draw some out *from the jars*. But the Greek of “now draw some out” — following how the servants had been getting water all along — most plausibly means to go back to the well and draw water from the well. And the water that comes up out of the well is already wine.
Carson’s fuller point is that the old and new orders are both in the picture. The six stone jars were for the Jewish rites of ceremonial purification — filling them to the brim signals that the time of ceremonial cleansing is being fulfilled. But the new order, symbolized by the wine of the messianic banquet, could not be drawn from jars so intimately connected with merely ceremonial purification. The endless supply comes from the well, and what comes up is already turned into wine. No abracadabra — it is changing as it comes up out of the well.
Where We Go From Here
The thread running through this whole study has been simple: the details that look like weaknesses — an unfamiliar name, a blunt word to Jesus’s mother, the absence of a miracle story — are exactly the kinds of things an embellisher would smooth out, and exactly the kinds of things a recorder preserves. The series continues next Wednesday.