The Gospel of John narrates that Jesus, his mother and his disciples attended a wedding at Cana in Galilee, where the wine ran out during the celebration. Jesus's mother, unnamed in John's account but identified by later tradition as Mary, brings the shortage to Jesus's attention; after an initial response suggesting his time had not yet come, Jesus instructs the servants to fill six stone jars with water, which, when drawn out and tasted, has become wine, and notably better wine than what had been served earlier in the feast.
John's Gospel explicitly frames the episode as the first of Jesus's signs, stating that through it he revealed his glory, and that his disciples believed in him as a result, language John uses repeatedly across his Gospel to describe miraculous events that carry deeper theological significance beyond their immediate, visible effect.
The episode does not appear in Matthew, Mark or Luke, and is found only in John, whose Gospel, written later than the other three according to most scholarly dating, includes a distinct selection of episodes, many of them, including this one, absent from the earlier Synoptic tradition entirely.
The stone jars in the account are described as used for Jewish ceremonial washing, each holding a substantial volume, a detail commentators read as underscoring the scale of the miracle and, for some, as symbolically contrasting the old order of ritual purification with the abundance John presents as arriving through Jesus. Cana itself, a small Galilean village whose exact ancient location is debated among archaeologists working from later Byzantine period identifications, has no other significant role in the wider Gospel tradition beyond this single episode and one further, brief mention later in John's narrative.