Yet the New Testament itself also constitutes a fresh, mysterious text-a notebook of clues crying out for a detective to explain the “intelligible pattern” that unites them. Its authors frequently play the role of the elucidating detective who interprets connections between the Old Testament and the life of Jesus Christ, sometimes explicitly (“so that Scripture might be fulfilled”), sometimes implicitly (such as by highlighting parallels between John the Baptist and Elijah). To push Steinmetz’s analogy further, the New Testament comprises both a first and a second narrative. James or Agatha Christie.” In both genres, a coherent “second narrative” replaces the sprawling, mystifying first narrative, so that “at the end all of the small parts fall together into an intelligible pattern.” This phenomenon of enlightened re-reading is internal to the Old Testament as well, as when the “prophets offer their own second narratives to make sense of the earlier traditions they inherited.” He notes especially the “similarity between the kerygmatic retelling of the larger biblical story in the New Testament and the crisp retelling of the mystery narrative by the principal investigator in a novel by P. In an essay winsomely titled “Miss Marple Reads the Bible,” David Steinmetz discusses important similarities between detective fiction and biblical interpretation. What are we to make of Jesus’s riddling words? Jesus’s response to his mother in this famous passage is generally considered “the most perplexing verse about Mary in all of Scripture.” It appears to express “a very definite, even harsh denial of any community between him and her.” Yet even if it were credible that the perfect Jewish son could speak rudely to his mother, Mary’s instruction to the servants and the miracle that follows indicate that she did not take his reply as a “no.” Moreover, John puts the scene front and center as the archē (“beginning,” 2:11) of Jesus’s signs, echoing the opening phrase of the Bible and of his own Gospel ( en archēi, “in the beginning”) and signaling the “beginning” of a new era.
When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:1-5). On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there Jesus also was invited to the marriage, with his disciples.
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