Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Catholic
History and Religion
Jesus Rebuked His Mother (Jn 2:4)? (Robert Gagnon)

Jesus Rebuked His Mother (Jn 2:4)? (Robert Gagnon)

Last updated on: September 19, 2024 at 10:48 am by Dave Armstrong

0 Comments

Jesus Rebuked His Mother (Jn 2:4)? (Robert Gagnon) 2024-09-19T10:48:30-04:00 Dave Armstrong

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“What have you to do with me?”

Photo credit: The Marriage at Cana (1596 or 1597), by Maerten de Vos (1532-1603) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon (see his Facebook page; public posts) is a Visiting Scholar in Biblical Studies at Wesley Biblical Seminary; formerly Professor of Biblical Studies at Houston Christian University and Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He obtained a Master of Theological Studies (MTS): Biblical Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and a (Ph.D.) in New Testament Studies, magna cum laude, from Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Gagnon grew up Catholic, and he wrote on 8-17-24:

I didn’t find Christ in Catholicism . . . I lost the forest (the big picture of Christ) for a lot of unnecessary trees that were not scripturally grounded. Part of this . . . was due to some non-scriptural and even (in some cases) anti-scriptural doctrines that undermine the role and significance of Christ. I would love to come back to a purified Catholicism more in keeping with a biblical witness. The excessive adulation of Mary, which at times seems to me to come close to elevating her to the godhead (like a replacement consort for Yahweh in lieu of Asherah), is one such obstacle.

After I had made five in-depth responses to him, Dr. Gagnon replied (just for the record) in a thread on another Facebook page, on 9-17-24, underneath my links to all five: “like your other one, it is an amateurish piece.” This is his silly and arrogant way of dismissing my critiques in one fell swoop. I had informed him that I had over twenty “officially published books” [22, to be exact] and yet he replied that he didn’t know “whether” they were “self-published or with a vanity press or a reputable press.”

His words will be in blue. I use RSV for biblical citations.

*****

I’m responding to Dr. Gagnon’s public Facebook post (dated 9-4-24) regarding John 2:4:

John 2:1-4 On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; [2] Jesus also was invited to the marriage, with his disciples. [3] When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” [4] And Jesus said to her, “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”

He wrote:

If one’s hermeneutics and authority are that one can arrive at a meaning of any given biblical text only if one finds a meaning compatible with one’s church’s dogma, then that scholar may well arrive at a meaning for any given text. But I submit that it would be an inferior hermeneutic to one that places the emphasis on arriving at meanings consistent with the biblical author’s historical and literary context, the author’s overarching redaction or theology, and careful lexical and phrase analysis, irrespective of whether the meaning corresponds to one’s particular church tradition.

Of course people can have different opinions. It is a free country. But that doesn’t make all arguments equal. If one claims that another’s position is deficient, one has to make better arguments. There is no getting around it. . . .

Since one area of exegetical disagreement between us has been whether Jesus’ response to Mary in John 2:4 (“What to me and to you, woman?”) should be viewed as a rebuke (I say yes, . . .), it might be helpful to use that text as an example.

One can claim that Jesus’ response to his mother was not a rebuke. To do so, however, would require one to adopt a meaning to the phrase “What to me and to you?” that cannot be substantiated either in OT parallels or in the use of the same phrase by demons twice in the Gospel of Mark, also adversarial formulas. It is better to go with the phrase analysis that pays careful attention to the use of the phrase elsewhere in the Scriptures of Jesus (the OT) and in other early Christian texts. . . .

One could respond: My tradition requires me to read this differently because my tradition emphasizes Mary’s exalted status. Well, okay. That’s a different opinion. But I submit that it is not a defensible one that helps us to understand the meaning given by the Fourth Evangelist. It helps us only to eliminate the meaning of the author in favor of our own dogma, but that only tells me what my dogma wants to hear, not what the NT witness of John is actually putting forward to his own readers.

It is a “damage control” reading, nothing more. And that is not helpful when doing NT exegesis. . . .

I don’t need a Magisterium to approve such a reading of the text. If “What to me and to you?” is typically an adversarial formula elsewhere, both in OT and NT . . .

My criticism is not limited to Catholics. It applies also to the Orthodox churches and Protestant churches as well, all of which are inclined to superimpose their own “damage control” on texts that don’t fit well with their communion’s dogma.

***

“Please Hit ‘Subscribe’”! If you have received benefit from this or any of my other 4,800+ articles, please follow my blog by signing up (with your email address) on the sidebar to the right (you may have to scroll down a bit), above where there is an icon bar, “Sign Me Up!”: to receive notice when I post a new blog article. This is the equivalent of subscribing to a YouTube channel. My blog was rated #1 for Christian sites by leading AI tool, ChatGPT: endorsed by influential Protestant blogger Adrian Warnock. Please also consider following me on Twitter / X and purchasing one or more of my 55 books. All of this helps me get more exposure, and (however little!) more income for my full-time apologetics work. Thanks so much and happy reading!

***

I know the “feeling” well! I see this sort of thing all the time in the Protestant analyses of passages in the Bible that don’t fit in with their existing theology. Catholics by no means have a monopoly on that shortcoming. Just sayin’ . . .

Catholics are able to stick to the text, not cite Catholic dogmas, and engage in comparative exegesis, like anyone else (I myself have done it thousands of times in my apologetics). Dom Bernard Orchard, in his Catholic Commentary On Holy Scripture (1953) writes:

Concerning the second: the Master’s question which literally reads: ‘What to me and to thee?’ has to be understood from biblical and not modern usage. Therefore it does not mean: ‘What concern is it of ours?’ or ‘There is no need for you to tell me’. In all the biblical passages where it occurs, Jg 11:12; 2 Kg 16:10 [2 Sam 16:10], [2 Sam] 19:22; 4 Kg 3:13 [2 Kings 3:13]; 2 Par [Chron] 35:21; Mt 8:29; Mk 1:24, the phrase signifies, according to circumstances, a great or lesser divergence of viewpoint between the two parties concerned. In 2 Kg [Sam] 16:10 it means total dissent; in Jg 11:12 it voices a complaint against an invader. In our passage, also, divergence must be admitted. In a sense our Lord’s answer is a refusal, but not an absolute refusal, rather, a refusal ad mentem [literally, “according to the mind of”], as a Roman Congregation would say, and the Blessed Virgin understood her Son’s mind from the tone of his voice. His first public miracle belonged to the divine programme of his Messianic mission into which flesh and blood could not enter. His answer is therefore an assertion of independence of his Mother, similar to the word he spoke in the temple about his Father’s business. The Blessed Virgin’s subsequent action shows that the tone of our Lord’s protest on this occasion was neither a curt nor an unqualified refusal.

Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, in their Ignatius Catholic Study Bible (Ignatius Press: 2010) — which sits two feet away from my keyboard — go into a bit more exegetical depth:

The . . . Hebrew idiom . . . typically presupposes some perceived tension between two parties having contrary perspectives (Judg 11:12; 1 Kings 17:18; Mk 5:7), though not always (2 Chron 35:21). When the idiom is used in response to a person’s request, either stated or implied, the speaker sometimes capitulates to the expressed will of the other (2 Kings 3:13) and sometimes not (2 Sam 16:10). Here the former pattern is evident: Jesus complies with Mary’s request (Jn 2:7-8), and Mary herself appears perfectly confident that Jesus will respond favorably to her petition (2:5). In effect, Jesus would not have initiated the miracle at Cana, but neither does he refuse his Mother’s prompting.

***

2 Chronicles 35:20-21 After all this, when Josi’ah had prepared the temple, Neco king of Egypt went up to fight at Car’chemish on the Euphra’tes and Josi’ah went out against him. [21] But he sent envoys to him, saying, “What have we to do with each other, king of Judah? I am not coming against you this day, but against the house with which I am at war; . . ..”

2 Kings 3:13-14 And Eli’sha said to the king of Israel, “What have I to do with you? Go to the prophets of your father and the prophets of your mother.” But the king of Israel said to him, “No; it is the LORD who has called these three kings to give them into the hand of Moab.” [14] And Eli’sha said, “As the LORD of hosts lives, whom I serve, were it not that I have regard for Jehosh’aphat the king of Judah, I would neither look at you, nor see you.

Dr. Gagnon opined that a non-rebuke meaning of “what have you to do with me?” “cannot be substantiated . . . in OT parallels. . . . It is better to go with the phrase analysis that pays careful attention to the use of the phrase elsewhere in the Scriptures of Jesus (the OT)”. But to the contrary, 2 Chronicles 35:20-21 shows us that it can occur in a situation where there isn’t even a disagreement, and 2 Kings 3:13-14 is another instance where the speaker capitulates to the other, as with Jesus and Mary at Cana.

In my opinion, it’s very much like young Jesus in the temple and His mother’s misunderstanding. This was no sin on her part, any more than that was. They were both situations where she couldn’t be expected to totally understand where Jesus was coming from: qua God incarnate. Here, apparently, Jesus hadn’t planned from all eternity to change the water into wine, and He made note of that (“My hour has not yet come”), but since there was nothing wrong with it, seeing that the time a thing is done is not usually of its essence, He assented to His mother’s wish. How would Mary have known the time that Jesus intended to do His first miracle (i.e., if He hadn’t told her)? If it’s reasonable to suppose that she wouldn’t have known, then is it not reasonable to think that she did nothing wrong, let alone anything worthy of a rebuke?

What Dr. Gagnon and those who take his position have to explain, is a problem that is, I think, rather obvious: if it was supposedly such a “rebuke” that Jesus gave His mother, then why in the world did He turn around and do the miracle that He had just rebuked her for requesting? What sense does that make? It seems to me that if in fact it were a rebuke (other than perhaps the mildest of “reprimands”), He would have said, “it’s not my Father’s will” or “it’s not yet time to perform such a sign” or some such. But He does it. So what sense does it make to rebuke someone for requesting miracle x, but then do x nonetheless? None that I can see . . .

We Catholics are too often accused of eisegeting this text and smuggling our Mariology into it, forcing us to supposedly rationalize and special plead. But we could just as well reply — if we must go down that road — that some Protestants might in fact be guilty of the opposite impulse. In their rush to find some sin in Mary and to “want” to see a rebuke towards her from Jesus, they neglect to see that He did what she asked! How, then, could it have even been a fundamental disagreement between them? Doesn’t that work against an interpretation that He was rebuking her? I think it does, from common sense and the nature of the incident. I don’t think that simply because I’m a Catholic. I do because I sincerely think that is the most plausible interpretation of the text.

But if we’re gonna play the “game” of always accusing theological opponents of smuggling prior notions into biblical texts, there is more than enough of that to go around, on both sides.

Dr. Gagnon writes, “If one claims that another’s position is deficient, one has to make better arguments.” I totally agree! And he notes that we need “to understand the meaning given by the Fourth Evangelist.” Again, I agree, and that’s exactly what I am seeking to do. I sincerely believe what I am writing here and consider it more plausible exegesis than Dr. Gagnon’s take. He can accuse me of bias, which he is prone to doing with Catholics. By the same token, I could turn the tables and claim the same about him. But where does that get anyone, in the final analysis? We simply need to talk about the text back-and-forth and seek the truth of what it was intended to mean.

***

See Dr. Gagnon’s “replies” on my Facebook page and my counter-replies, including my response to his long “counter-response” on his page, that mostly ignored my own words above; hence I told him I would ignore his altogether (excepting one section that was too outlandish to pass over), because it’s not true dialogue, as I conceive that practice and concept to be. Then he bloviated (with boorish predictability yet again): “I covered all your main arguments. You have no case. My response is completely civil. You won’t respond because you can’t respond.”

***

Practical Matters: I run the most comprehensive “one-stop” Catholic apologetics site: rated #1 for Christian sites by leading AI tool, ChatGPT — endorsed by popular Protestant blogger Adrian Warnock. Perhaps some of my 4,800+ free online articles or fifty-five books have helped you (by God’s grace) to decide to become Catholic or to return to the Church, or better understand some doctrines and why we believe them.

Or you may believe my work is worthy to support for the purpose of apologetics and evangelism in general. If so, please seriously consider a much-needed financial contribution. I’m always in need of more funds: especially monthly support. “The laborer is worthy of his wages” (1 Tim 5:18, NKJV). 1 December 2021 was my 20th anniversary as a full-time Catholic apologist, and February 2022 marked the 25th anniversary of my blog.

PayPal donations are the easiest: just send to my email address: [email protected]. Here’s also a second page to get to PayPal. You’ll see the term “Catholic Used Book Service”, which is my old side-business. To learn about the different methods of contributing (including Zelle), see my page: About Catholic Apologist Dave Armstrong / Donation Information. Thanks a million from the bottom of my heart!

***

Photo credit: The Marriage at Cana (1596 or 1597), by Maerten de Vos (1532-1603) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

Summary: Did Jesus rebuke His mother at Cana (“What have you to do with me?”) in John 2:4? Dr. Robert Gagnon says yes. I say no, and provide several exegetical & other reasons why.

Anti-Catholicism

Blessed Virgin Mary

Catholic Mariology

Jesus rebuked His mother?

Robert Gagnon

sinlessness of Mary

wedding at Cana

Previous Post

September 16, 2024

Robert Gagnon: Fathers Accepted Sola Scriptura (?)

Next Post

September 19, 2024 Jesus Disparaged Mary ("Woman")? (vs. Robert Gagnon)

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"And lastly, I belong to no denomination and am free to serve God as He ..."

Mariah

Is Venerating Men & Angels Worship? ..."

"And obeisance doesn't mean "worship". It means "respect", "obey", or "submission". Very weird that you ..."

Mariah

Is Venerating Men & Angels Worship? ..."

"Many of these scriptures you have noted have been taken out of context. With Daniel, ..."

Mariah

Is Venerating Men & Angels Worship? ..."

""Protestants often point out that Jesus is now triumphant in heaven and object to Catholics ..."

Anthony

Three More Anti-Catholic Lies About Catholicism ..."

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category & Last Things About Me Anti-Catholicism Atheism & Agnosticism Baptism and Sacramentalism Bible and Tradition Blessed Virgin Mary Books by Dave Armstrong C. S. Lewis Calvinism & General Protestantism Catholic Apologetics Catholic Apologists Catholic conversion Catholic converts Christmas Church (Ecclesiology) Church History Conversion and Converts Development of Doctrine Eastern Orthodoxy Ecumenism & Christian Unity Eucharist & Liturgy Fathers of the Church French Translations G. K. Chesterton Hell Hell & Satan Hell & Satan & Last Things Heresies & Comparative Religion Holistic Health Inquisition & Crusades & Scandals James White Jews & Judaism & Old Testament John Calvin John Henry Newman Liberal / Modernist Theology Life Issues Literary Resume Lutheranism Mariology Martin Luther Music Orthodoxy Papacy & Infallibility Personal Page Philosophy & Science Political & Ethical & Moral Issues Protestant Persecution & Intolerance Protestantism Purgatory Purgatory & Penance Romantic & Imaginative Theology Saints & Purgatory & Penance Salvation Salvation & Justification Satan & Last Things Sexuality and Gender Issues Spanish Translations Traditionalism vs. Radical Catholic Reactionaries Traducciones al español / tradução para português Trinitarianism & Christology Uncategorized Videos

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 April 2010 March 2010 December 2009 October 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 March 2009 February 2009 October 2008 September 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 May 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 October 2005 June 2005 April 2005 February 2005 July 2004 May 2004 April 2004

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz