Chapter 2: Christocentrism — What Jesus Did and Taught About Wine

Overview

Scripture, taken whole, permits wine and forbids drunkenness. But the SCAR framework does not stop at the aggregate biblical witness. The second question is the Christocentric one: what did Jesus himself teach, and what did he do?

Jesus’s teaching on wine as a substance is compact — he issued no discourse on the topic. But his actions are on the record in three of the most theologically weighted moments of the Gospels: his first sign at Cana, his self-report about his own reputation, and the meal he gave his disciples as a memorial. These three passages together answer the question of Jesus and wine as directly as the evidence permits.

1. Cana — the first sign (John 2:1-11)

The Fourth Gospel places Jesus’s first public miracle at a wedding. John frames the miracle theologically (“the beginning of miracles … manifested forth his glory” — 2:11), which means his choice of this miracle, in this setting, out of every possible inaugural sign, is significant.

The narrative:

And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there: And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage. And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come. His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him. — John 2:1-11

The quantity

Six stone waterpots, each holding “two or three firkins”. A firkin is the English translator’s rendering of the Greek metrētēs, a Greek liquid measure of roughly ten gallons (about 39 liters), close to the Hebrew bath. Six pots × two-to-three metrētai × ~10 gallons each yields between about 120 and 180 gallons of wine.

This quantity matters. A village wedding of the period would host at most some dozens of guests. The wine Jesus made was not enough for the moment; it was enough for a feast that would have lasted well past its natural end. The generosity is on a scale that no ancient host would have provided from his own cellar; Jesus’s miracle is the miracle of overflowing gift.

The quality

The master of the feast’s remark contains the interpretive key. His words are the closing frame of the whole scene, and John records them with narrative emphasis:

Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.

The master’s premise is a customary practice of Palestinian and Greco-Roman hosts: serve the good wine while palates are fresh, save the inferior wine for later, when the guests are past careful judgment. The Greek verb translated “have well drunk” is methysthōsin, from methyskō — the methē (drunkenness) word family.

Cross-referencing the family across the New Testament settles what the word means. The KJV itself renders every other occurrence of the verb family with “drunk” or “drunken”: “eat and drink with the drunken” (Matt 24:49); “to eat and drink, and to be drunken” (Luke 12:45); “these are not drunken, as ye suppose” (Acts 2:15); “one is hungry, and another is drunken” (1 Cor 11:21); “be not drunk with wine” (Eph 5:18); “they that be drunken are drunken in the night” (1 Thess 5:7); “the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication” (Rev 17:2); “drunken with the blood of the saints” (Rev 17:6). The cognate noun methysos is the KJV’s “drunkard” (1 Cor 5:11; 6:10). John 2:10 is the only place in the New Testament where the KJV translators softened the family to “well drunk” — and Revelation 17:2 uses the same verb in the same tense and voice as the master of the feast (aorist passive; subjunctive at John 2:10, indicative at Revelation 17:2), rendered there “made drunk”. The master is not saying “when guests have had a lot of grape juice”; he is saying “when guests are past sober tasting” — intoxicated to some degree. (The prohibitionist rejoinder — that methyskō here means only “drink freely” — is presented at its strongest in Chapter 4.5 and answered in Chapter 5.)

That the master’s whole logic presupposes that guests at this wedding are past sober tasting, and that his praise for the wine Jesus made runs through that logic (“thou hast kept the good wine until now”), forecloses any reading of Cana’s wine as unfermented. The remark works only if both the wine expected at this point in a feast and the wine now being tasted are the same kind of substance — fermented wine, in different qualities.

The theological weight

Jesus does not merely provide wine at Cana. He provides good wine — the master’s word is kalos, which means good, excellent, of high quality. And he provides it in extravagant quantity, into six water-purification jars, on the day of a covenant meal.

The layers of biblical resonance are dense. Wine appears in the OT prophetic vision as the sign of the messianic feast (Isa 25:6; Amos 9:13-14). The Song of Solomon compares the beloved to wine (Song 7:9). The Wisdom literature calls wine a gladdener of the heart (Ps 104:15). At Cana, Jesus’s first sign performs each of these registers at once: messianic (the good wine of the last-days feast), covenantal (bread-and-wine of Melchizedek in a new key), and pastoral (rescuing a family from social shame at a wedding). The Fourth Gospel is telling us who this Jesus is by what he chose to do first.

Jesus’s participation in the wedding — as a called guest, drinking wine with his mother and his disciples in a room where the master of the feast expects drinking to be substantial — is a plain fact of the narrative. He does not refuse the setting. He blesses it, and he supplies it further, and John says his glory was manifested in the act.

2. “A gluttonous man and a winebibber” (Matt 11:18-19; Luke 7:33-34)

Jesus’s own testimony about his reputation gives us the second decisive datum. He puts himself and John the Baptist in contrast, as two men whose disparate ministries the crowd has rejected on opposite grounds:

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children. — Matthew 11:18-19

The parallel account:

For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil. The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! But wisdom is justified of all her children. — Luke 7:33-34

The Greek word behind “winebibber” is oinopotēs — literally “wine-drinker”, used in the papyri and in the Wisdom literature (Prov 23:20 LXX) to name someone whose drinking of wine is habitual and observable. The Baptist, John, lives under a Nazirite-style discipline (Luke 1:15); his abstention is his prophetic sign, and the crowd read it as demonic. Jesus, by contrast, ate and drank in the ordinary way, and the crowd read his ordinary participation as gluttony and drunkenness.

The crucial move for our question is Jesus’s own framing. He does not deny the accusation’s factual basis. He denies its moral interpretation. He does not say, “I do not drink wine”. He says, “wisdom is justified of her children” — a proverbial phrase meaning that a life’s wisdom is vindicated by its outcomes and its true understanders, not by the crowd’s initial judgment. If Jesus had not drunk wine, the winebibber charge would have had no purchase, and the parallel with John (whose abstention was equally observable) would collapse. (The slander-reading of this verse — in its strongest form, the Deuteronomy 21:20 rebellious-son formula — is presented in Chapter 4.5 §1 and answered in Chapter 5, response 1d.)

That Jesus drank wine, ordinarily and observably, is the plain testimony of this passage. It comes from his own mouth. The passage is a self-report.

3. The Last Supper — the fruit of the vine

The Synoptic Gospels and Paul’s earliest witness in 1 Corinthians all record the same instituting act. Matthew:

And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom. — Matthew 26:27-29

Mark:

And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many. Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God. — Mark 14:23-25

Luke’s account preserves the “cup after supper” division that distinguishes the Passover’s third and fourth cups:

And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. — Luke 22:17-20

And Paul’s earlier witness:

For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. — 1 Corinthians 11:23-25

The Passover setting

The three Synoptics identify the meal as the Passover (Matt 26:17-19; Mark 14:12-16; Luke 22:7-13). The Passover meal has an ancient liturgical shape, later codified in the Mishnah but old in Jesus’s day: four cups of wine, marking the four “I will” statements of Exodus 6:6-7. The cup Jesus lifts in Luke 22:17 as “the fruit of the vine” is the customary Passover cup; the “cup after supper” in Luke 22:20 (and, by implication, in Paul at 1 Cor 11:25) is the third cup, the cup of blessing, which Paul explicitly names by that title at 1 Corinthians 10:16 (“the cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?”).

The Passover cups were of wine. The Mishnah’s later codification takes this as settled: “And even the poorest of Jews must not eat until he reclines. And they must give him no less than four cups of wine, and even if [he receives funds] from the charity plate” (m. Pesachim 10:1, Davidson). The rabbinic debate is over the ratio of wine to water in the mixed cup, and over the sequence of blessings — not over whether the substance is fermented wine at all. First-century Judaism did not know a Passover with grape juice. The critical scholarship agrees: Joachim Jeremias’s The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (English translation 1966), the standard scholarly treatment of the Last Supper’s Passover setting, takes the cups as cups of wine — red, mixed with water in the customary way — as a matter of settled Jewish practice, and builds its analysis of Jesus’s words on that foundation.

”The fruit of the vine”

Jesus does not use the ordinary word oinos at the Last Supper. He uses the Passover-liturgical phrase gennēma tēs ampelou — “fruit of the vine” — the standard Jewish blessing formula preserved in the kiddush over wine (“Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who createst the fruit of the vine”). Some two-wine theorists have argued that the phrase “fruit of the vine” is deliberately vague and could name juice as easily as wine. But the phrase is a Jewish liturgical idiom, not a chemistry description. In every rabbinic usage it names the Passover cup — and the Passover cup was wine.

The eschatological pledge

Jesus’s statement about the future adds weight to the identification of the present cup. He says he will not drink of the fruit of the vine “until that day when I drink it new [kainon] with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt 26:29). The word kainon — new not in age but in quality — presupposes a continuity between the substance he now drinks and the substance he will drink in the messianic feast. He does not say “I will drink a different substance in the kingdom”; he says “I will drink the fruit of the vine, but new, in the kingdom”. The kingdom’s cup is a wine cup, refracted through resurrection glory. Which means the present cup is a wine cup.

Every early Christian community that celebrated the Lord’s Supper for the first three centuries used wine. The pre-Nicene evidence — Didache, Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian — is unanimous, and will occupy Chapter 3. But the ground for that unanimity is the Christocentric one: Jesus himself drank the fruit of the vine at the meal he instituted, and every apostolic account of that meal preserves the practice.

4. What Jesus did not say

Jesus taught extensively on kingdom, on love, on discipleship, on money, on prayer, on the Law and its fulfillment. He warned against greed, lust, hypocrisy, and hardness of heart with vivid clarity. He did not warn — at any point recorded in the four Gospels — against wine as a substance.

The absence is significant. Jesus knew the Wisdom warnings of Proverbs, the prophetic warnings of Isaiah, and the personal cost of drunkenness. If wine as a substance were morally problematic, we would expect him to say so. He did not. His teaching on drunkenness came, when it came, through general warnings against the loss of watchfulness — for example, in the eschatological framing:

And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. — Luke 21:34

Two verses later the same discourse commands watchfulness — “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man” (Luke 21:36).

The warning is against being caught unaware — the state of mind of drunkenness, not the substance of wine. It falls in step with the whole biblical pattern.

Jesus’s silence on wine-as-substance is not neutrality; it is a pointed absence in a teacher who was seldom silent about the moral valuation of created things. When Jesus wanted to say a thing was to be refused, he said so — of divorce, of oaths, of Sabbath legalism, of Pharisaic externals. He never so classified wine.

5. Jesus’s priorities

Jesus’s own priorities, according to his teaching, sit above the substance-question. The two greatest commandments are the love of God and the love of neighbor (Matt 22:37-40). The Sermon on the Mount elevates purity of heart, forgiveness, and mercy above ritual specifics. The Beatitudes bless the peacemakers, the pure in heart, the meek. Nowhere in this priority-structure does Jesus place a food or drink question, of any kind.

This has direct implications for the wine question. Any Christian community that makes the substance of communion (fermented wine or unfermented juice) a first-order dividing line has, on Jesus’s own priority-structure, mis-scaled the question. Substance is not first-order; the love and unity of Christ’s body are. Where communion practice serves love and unity — in a Catholic parish that uses wine because of canonical continuity, or in an American Methodist congregation that uses grape juice because of pastoral concern for recovering alcoholics — the practice honors Jesus’s priorities. Where the substance itself becomes the wedge, the practice fails them.

Chapter 5 will return to this point at greater length. It matters here because Jesus’s own life provides both the affirmative datum (he drank wine at a wedding, at ordinary meals, and at the Passover cup he blessed) and the priority-structure that keeps the affirmative datum from becoming a wedge. He drank wine, and he cared vastly more about love than about substance.

6. Summary

The Christocentric evidence answers the study’s central question directly.

Did Jesus drink alcoholic wine? Yes. The Cana narrative presupposes it (the master-of-the-feast comment works only if the wine is fermented). The self-report at Matt 11:19 / Luke 7:34 states it (the “winebibber” accusation only makes sense against actual wine-drinking). The Last Supper takes it for granted (Passover cups were wine; the “fruit of the vine” is the liturgical Jewish blessing over wine).
What did Jesus teach about wine as substance? Nothing prohibitive. His teaching on this subject was, essentially, his life — he participated in the ordinary Jewish drinking culture of first-century Palestine, blessed a wedding with abundant wine, and instituted a memorial in which wine is the sign of his own blood poured out.
What did Jesus teach about drunkenness? He warned against it as against every other loss of watchfulness (Luke 21:34). His warning tracked the biblical pattern: not the substance, the state.

The Christocentric verdict aligns with the Scripture-wide verdict. Wine is not sin; drunkenness is. The next chapter turns to how the early church — the community that received this practice from the apostles and lived within a generation or two of Jesus’s own table fellowship — understood and continued it.