There is some chatter that the place that people think is where the wedding of Cana was is maybe not the place:
Since the Middle Ages, the town of Kafr Kanna, located three miles (5km) northeast of Nazareth, has claimed to be the real site of Cana.
The town is home to the ‘Wedding Church’ which claims to hold the real water pots used by Jesus in his miracles and is visited by thousands of tourists and pilgrims each year.
However, Dr James Tabor, a Bible scholar, archaeologist and distinguished fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that Kafr Kanna’s status is more likely to be due to its location than historical fact.
Dr Tabor says: ‘I think what’s happening in the Middle Ages is that pilgrims want convenience. They’re coming to Nazareth and they want to see it all.
‘To see the other place, Khirbet Qana, you have to climb this unbelievable hill so, to have pilgrims trek up that in the heat of the Middle East, it’s just not going to happen.
‘It’s so much more convenient to just go a few miles down the road and find ‘the other Cana’.’
The problem is that no excavation has actually found evidence of Jewish settlement beneath Kafr Kanna dating back to the Roman period.
This makes it quite unlikely that this town could have been the place referred to by the author of the signal source in the Gospel of John.
Dr Tabor says that the location that the archaeological evidence truly points to is the much harder-to-access site of Khirbet Qana. source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14731551/bible-true-jesus-water-wine.html
If the phrase “signal source” sounds confusing, it’s because the phrase is being used in a peculiar way:
Dr Tabor says that the Gospel of John contains a separate, older narrative called the ‘signal source’ which the later gospel writer built on. source: ibid
What makes Dr. Tabor think that Khirbet Qana is the place?
In a research paper published in the Biblical Archaeology Review, Dr McCollough revealed that the now-abandoned site was once home to a thriving Jewish settlement between 323 BC to 324 AD.
The fact that Khirbet Qana’s settlement was Jewish is confirmed by the presence of a Roman-period synagogue or study hall known as a Beth Midrash and six coins printed by the leaders of the Jewish ‘Maccabean’ revolt.
Excitingly, Dr McCollough and his team also found evidence of several bathhouses or miqva’ot.
These not only indicate the presence of Jewish culture but also align with the biblical account of Jesus’ miracle which says the water jars were for ‘ceremonial washing’.
However, what makes Khirbet Qana the most promising site for the real location of Cana of Galilee is the presence of early Christian artefacts.
Dr McCollough has found an extensive network of Christian worship sites in a cave system hidden beneath the village.
These chambers date from Byzantine times through the Crusader period, from 415 to 1217 AD, and some are decorated and lined with plaster.
One of the cave chambers even bears Christian graffiti depicting crosses, giving the names of pilgrims or even saying ‘Kyrie Iesou’ or ‘Lord Jesus’. source: ibid
To quote an old Carl Sagan turn of phrase: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Since the wedding of Cana is the defining start of the ministry of Messiah, would it make more sense for the area to have Roman stuff on it, or to have a lack of Roman stuff on it? What’s the potential incentive to “move” the site? Tourism and money come to mind. Whoever it was that was in the Khirbet Qana region had plenty of money. Would they have run out of wine? Still, there are some other interesting points in the article:
Most excitingly of all, the archaeologists discovered an altar in one of the caves made of an upturned sarcophagus lid.
Above it was a shelf containing two large stone vessels which were believed by early Christians to be the very vessels Jesus used to turn water into wine.
Dr McCollough writes: ‘There was space for another four. Six stone jars would have held the water that Jesus turned into wine.
‘All this suggests that Khirbet Cana was regarded as New Testament Cana from a very early time.’ source: ibid
The jury should definitely still be out on this one.