Chapter 3: Antiquity — Wine in the Pre-Nicene Church

Overview

The SCAR framework asks, third, how the earliest Christians — those closest in time and cultural setting to Jesus and the apostles — understood and practiced what the New Testament describes. For the wine question, the pre-Nicene evidence (the church before the Council of Nicaea in AD 325) is unusually rich. Wine appears at every stage: in the eucharistic cup, in the ordinary Christian love-feast, in pastoral discussion of what to drink and when, and in polemic against the fringe movements that departed from apostolic practice.

The evidence is unanimous on the substance question. Every pre-Nicene voice that names the eucharistic cup names it as wine. Every pre-Nicene voice that discusses ordinary Christian drinking permits wine in moderation and condemns drunkenness. Not one pre-Nicene voice the church received as authoritative reads Scripture’s wine passages as commending an unfermented substance and condemning a fermented one. When one third-century group did adopt water-only communion, the church’s leading North African bishop wrote against them at length, and the argument he made rests on the plain fact that the cup at the Last Supper was wine.

This chapter walks through the evidence. The pattern is threefold: the lexical field (what the words meant); the eucharistic cup (what the church put on the table); and pastoral moderation (how ordinary Christians drank).

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1. The lexical field

Before turning to what the fathers said, it helps to hold the language they inherited from the LXX and the New Testament.

The Septuagint translators, working in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC, developed a stable Greek vocabulary for the Hebrew wine field. Yayin they rendered as oinos — the ordinary Greek word for wine — with near uniformity. Tirosh they rendered most often as oinos as well, sometimes as methysma (intoxicant); the LXX translators did not draw a “grape juice / wine” boundary that the Hebrew itself does not draw. Shekar they transliterated as sikera, borrowing the Semitic word rather than translating it. The technical Greek gleukos — “new wine” or “must” — carried the sense of the pressed grape at the beginning of fermentation, still sweet, but capable of intoxicating; Aristotle uses gleukos this way in the Meteorologica.

By the time the New Testament writers use these words, the equivalence is fixed. Oinos is the default word: the wine at Cana (John 2:9-10), the wine of the Good Samaritan’s medicine (Luke 10:34), the wine Paul commends to Timothy (1 Tim 5:23), the wine of the eucharistic institution (implied at Matt 26:29 par. and by methyei, “is drunken”, at 1 Cor 11:21). Gleukos appears once, at Acts 2:13, in the accusation that the apostles at Pentecost were drunk. The Nazirite formula from Luke 1:15 — “he shall drink neither wine nor strong drink” — uses oinos and sikera together, faithfully rendering Numbers 6:3.

Beyond the substance-words, a related family names drunkenness as a distinct condition: methē is the noun for intoxication, methyō the verb for being drunk, and oinophlugia the oinos-compound naming wine-excess. A separate oinos-compound, oinopotēs — “wine-drinker”, with a pejorative shading — is the term applied to Jesus at Matt 11:19. Paul’s imperative at Ephesians 5:18 sits on this hinge: μὴ μεθύσκεσθε οἴνῳ, “be not drunk with wine”. The construction is not “wine is bad”; it is “do not be drunk with wine”. The moral operator is methē, not oinos.

This vocabulary field is the language the pre-Nicene fathers inherit. They inherit it, and they read it plainly. When they talk about the eucharistic cup, they use oinos. When they urge Christians to drink moderately, they still use oinos. When they warn against drunkenness, they use methē or oinophlugia. The substance is one thing; the state is another.

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2. The eucharistic cup

The earliest evidence for the shape of the Christian eucharistic meal comes from the Didache, a Syrian church manual generally dated to the late first or early second century.

Didache 9-10 (c. AD 50-110; trans. Lightfoot)

But as touching the eucharistic thanksgiving give ye thanks thus. First, as regards the cup: We give Thee thanks, O our Father, for the holy vine of Thy son David, which Thou madest known unto us through Thy Son Jesus; Thine is the glory for ever and ever. Then as regards the broken bread: We give Thee thanks, O our Father, for the life and knowledge which Thou didst make known unto us through Thy Son Jesus; Thine is the glory for ever and ever. — Didache 9:1-5 (Lightfoot)

The Didache thanks God for the cup before the bread — an ancient shape preserved in Luke 22:17-19. The thanksgiving is for “the holy vine of thy son David”, the Jewish table-blessing over wine (“Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, who createst the fruit of the vine”) in Christian dress. The word vine — Greek ampelos — is the substance-word for the source of wine, not juice. The Didache does not specify the cup’s contents beyond this, because it does not need to: the default drink of a first-century Mediterranean table was wine mixed with water.

Ignatius of Antioch (c. AD 107; trans. Lightfoot)

Ignatius, writing to seven churches on his way to martyrdom in Rome, weaves eucharistic imagery through his letters. Two passages are notable:

I desire the bread of God, which is the flesh of Christ who was of the seed of David; and for a draught I desire His blood, which is love incorruptible. — Ignatius, Ad Romanos 7:3 (Lightfoot)

Be ye careful therefore to observe one eucharist (for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup unto union in His blood; there is one altar, as there is one bishop, together with the presbytery and the deacons my fellow-servants), that whatsoever ye do, ye may do it after God. — Ignatius, Ad Philadelphians 4 (Lightfoot)

Ignatius knows exactly one Christian cup — “one cup unto union in His blood” — and he uses the natural first-century Mediterranean assumption: at a religious meal, the cup contains wine. His polemic in these letters runs against Docetist teachers who deny that the Eucharist is Christ’s real flesh and blood; the polemic against a water-only cup does not appear because no one in Ignatius’s ambit was yet advocating one.

Justin Martyr, First Apology (c. AD 155)

Justin’s apology to the emperor Antoninus Pius contains the earliest full description of a Christian Sunday service. His account is decisive:

There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; and he taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks at considerable length for our being counted worthy to receive these things at His hands. And when he has concluded the prayers and thanksgivings, all the people present express their assent by saying Amen. This word Amen answers in the Hebrew language to γένοιτο [so be it]. And when the president has given thanks, and all the people have expressed their assent, those who are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water over which the thanksgiving was pronounced, and to those who are absent they carry away a portion. — Justin Martyr, First Apology 65 (Dods, ANF 1)

Justin says twice in one chapter that the Christian cup is “wine mixed with water”. The Greek word for the mixed cup is krama (kekramenon, “having been mixed”), the standard Greco-Roman practice — wine diluted with water at ratios varying from 1:1 to 1:5 depending on region and occasion.

Justin’s next chapter reinforces the point negatively. Distinguishing the Christian sacrament from the Mithraic mysteries — a pagan rite widely practiced in the second-century Roman army — Justin remarks:

For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn. — Justin, 1 Apol. 66 (Dods, ANF 1)

The polemic works only because the Christian cup is not water. Justin regards the water-only Mithraic cup as a demonic parody of the true Christian cup; the whole force of the comparison depends on Christian communion being wine. And a chapter later, describing the Sunday service:

Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. — Justin, 1 Apol. 67 (Dods, ANF 1)

“Bread and wine and water”: three things brought to the table — the bread, and the wine and water to be mixed in the cup. Two decades removed from any surviving apostle, this is what the mid-second-century church puts on the table.

Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies (c. AD 180)

Irenaeus’s polemic against Gnostic teachers is theological, not liturgical, but he anchors his christology in the eucharistic practice everyone in the church takes for granted:

When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the Word of God, and the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made, from which things the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which flesh is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of Him? — Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. V.2.3 (Roberts-Rambaut, ANF 1)

“The mingled cup” — Irenaeus’s Latin is mixtus calix (“Quando ergo et mixtus calix et factus panis percipit verbum Dei…”, AH V.2.3) — is again the standard mixed wine cup. Irenaeus argues that the created substance in the cup, the wine that “receives the Word of God”, becomes the sign and vehicle of Christ’s blood; his Gnostic opponents are inconsistent to accept the eucharistic language while denying the goodness of created matter. Irenaeus’s argument only works if the cup’s substance is a genuine creature — a real wine drawn from real grapes.

Cyprian, Epistle 62/63 (c. AD 253) — the decisive text

The single most important pre-Nicene text on our question is Cyprian of Carthage’s letter to his fellow-bishop Caecilius, written from an African council in the mid-third century. Some North African bishops — the group later called the Aquarii, “water-drinkers” — had adopted the practice of using water alone in the eucharistic cup. Cyprian writes to correct them. His letter is the earliest sustained argument that the eucharistic substance must be wine, and it is the earliest example of the church rejecting a competing practice on the ground that it departs from Christ’s own institution.

Cyprian’s thesis is direct:

Know then that I have been admonished that, in offering the cup, the tradition of the Lord must be observed, and that nothing must be done by us but what the Lord first did on our behalf, as that the cup which is offered in remembrance of Him should be offered mingled with wine. For when Christ says, “I am the true vine,” the blood of Christ is assuredly not water, but wine; neither can His blood by which we are redeemed and quickened appear to be in the cup, when in the cup there is no wine whereby the blood of Christ is shown forth, which is declared by the sacrament and testimony of all the Scriptures. — Cyprian, Ep. 62.2 (Wallis, ANF 5)

He grounds the argument in the Last Supper narrative:

For, taking the cup on the eve of His passion, He blessed it, and gave it to His disciples, saying, “Drink all of this; for this is my blood of the New Testament, which shall be shed for many, for the remission of sins. I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day in which I shall drink new wine with you in the kingdom of my Father.” In which portion we find that the cup which the Lord offered was mixed, and that that was wine which He called His blood. — Cyprian, Ep. 62.9 (Wallis, ANF 5)

And then Cyprian delivers the anchor argument. Quoting Psalm 22/23:5 in its LXX form — τὸ ποτήριόν σου μεθύσκον ὡς κράτιστον, “your inebriating cup, how excellent it is” — he argues:

Now the cup which inebriates is assuredly mingled with wine, for water cannot inebriate anybody. And the cup of the Lord in such wise inebriates, as Noe also was intoxicated drinking wine, in Genesis. But because the intoxication of the Lord’s cup and blood is not such as is the intoxication of the world’s wine, since the Holy Spirit said in the Psalm, “Your inebriating cup,” He added, “how excellent it is,” because doubtless the Lord’s cup so inebriates them that drink, that it makes them sober; that it restores their minds to spiritual wisdom; that each one recovers from that flavour of the world to the understanding of God. — Cyprian, Ep. 62.11 (Wallis, ANF 5)

“Water cannot inebriate anybody” — this is a pre-Nicene bishop in the year AD 253 stating plainly that the eucharistic cup is capable of intoxicating in the ordinary sense of the word. Whether or not the cup actually did intoxicate at typical dilution is a separate question; Cyprian’s argument is that the substance is the kind of substance that could intoxicate — that is, wine. The spiritual “intoxication” the cup produces (spiritual sobriety, remembrance of divine mercy) hangs on the physical fact that the cup is wine.

Cyprian’s letter is also our earliest witness to a Cana reading directly opposite to the later two-wine theory:

But how perverse and how contrary it is, that although the Lord at the marriage made wine of water, we should make water of wine, when even the sacrament of that thing ought to admonish and instruct us rather to offer wine in the sacrifices of the Lord. — Cyprian, Ep. 62.12 (Wallis, ANF 5)

For Cyprian, the Cana miracle proves that the sacred trajectory runs from water to wine — not the reverse. That reading was universal in the pre-Nicene church.

The pattern

The evidence is uniform across two centuries and multiple regions: Syria (Didache, Ignatius), Rome (Justin), Gaul (Irenaeus), and North Africa (Cyprian). The eucharistic cup is wine — ordinarily mixed with water in the Greco-Roman fashion — and every deviation from that practice, when it appears, is met with polemic. The one recorded departure, the aquarii of third-century North Africa, is corrected by their own metropolitan on the ground that Christ instituted the cup with wine, and departing from wine is departing from Christ.

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3. Christian drinking beyond the eucharist — Clement of Alexandria

The most extended pre-Nicene discussion of ordinary Christian drinking is the second chapter of the second book of Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus (The Instructor), written around AD 198-202. Clement’s chapter is titled On Drinking and runs several thousand words. He is neither a prohibitionist nor a permissivist. He is a pastor of an urban Alexandrian church working out how his flock should drink — how much, when, with what — in a Mediterranean culture in which wine at the table was normal.

Clement opens with Paul’s counsel to Timothy:

“Use a little wine,” says the apostle to Timothy, who drank water, “for your stomach’s sake” — most properly applying its aid as a strengthening tonic suitable to a sickly body enfeebled with watery humours; and specifying “a little,” lest the remedy should, on account of its quantity, unobserved, create the necessity of other treatment. — Clement, Paed. II.2 (Wilson, ANF 2)

The apostolic pastoral pattern — moderation, purpose, watchful limit — is Clement’s own frame. He proceeds to sketch a broad theology: water is the “natural, temperate, and necessary beverage” for the thirsty; wine is the useful supplement that God has provided; the eucharistic cup is the mixture of the two:

Accordingly, as wine is blended with water, so is the Spirit with man. And the one, the mixture of wine and water, nourishes to faith; while the other, the Spirit, conducts to immortality. And the mixture of both — of the water and of the Word — is called Eucharist, renowned and glorious grace; and they who by faith partake of it are sanctified both in body and soul. — Clement, Paed. II.2 (Wilson, ANF 2)

Clement’s pastoral instructions divide by age. He is strict with the young:

I therefore admire those who have adopted an austere life, and who are fond of water, the medicine of temperance, and flee as far as possible from wine, shunning it as they would the danger of fire. It is proper, therefore, that boys and girls should keep as much as possible away from this medicine. For it is not right to pour into the burning season of life the hottest of all liquids — wine — adding, as it were, fire to fire. — Clement, Paed. II.2 (Wilson, ANF 2)

Permissive with the elderly:

Those who are already advanced in life may partake more cheerfully of the draught, to warm by the harmless medicine of the vine the chill of age, which the decay of time has produced. For old men’s passions are not, for the most part, stirred to such agitation as to drive them to the shipwreck of drunkenness. For being moored by reason and time, as by anchors, they stand with greater ease the storm of passions which rushes down from intemperance. — Clement, Paed. II.2 (Wilson, ANF 2)

And ordinary in his general framing:

It has therefore been well said, “A joy of the soul and heart was wine created from the beginning, when drunk in moderate sufficiency.” And it is best to mix the wine with as much water as possible, and not to have recourse to it as to water, and so get enervated to drunkenness, and not pour it in as water from love of wine. For both are works of God; and so the mixture of both, of water and of wine, conduces together to health, because life consists of what is necessary and of what is useful. — Clement, Paed. II.2 (Wilson, ANF 2), quoting Sirach 31:27

Clement’s teaching is worth pausing on. Three points stand out.

First: he distinguishes wine as a substance from drunkenness as a state, exactly the way Scripture does. His entire treatise on drinking is a treatise on how to enjoy wine without becoming drunk — a project intelligible only if the substance itself is licit.

Second: he honors ascetic abstention as a personal vocation (“I therefore admire those who have adopted an austere life”), never as a universal rule. His counsel to boys and girls is functionally near-abstention; his counsel to the aged is permissive; his counsel to mature men is moderate. The right answer depends on the person, the season, and the occasion — not on a categorical judgment about the substance.

Third: his line “for both are works of God” — of water and of wine — is the pre-Nicene deposit against the encratite and Marcionite prohibitionism that appeared on the fringes of the second-century church. Wine is a creature of God; God’s creatures are good; sanctification is by use with thanksgiving, not by avoidance. This is a theological line Paul draws at 1 Timothy 4:4-5 (“every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving”), and Clement carries it into his own pastoral instruction.

Tertullian on the love-feast

Clement’s Alexandrian moderation has a Latin analog in Tertullian’s Apologeticus, written in Carthage around AD 197. Chapter 39 is Tertullian’s defense of the Christian agape meal against pagan slanders that Christian dinners were secret orgies:

The participants, before reclining, taste first of prayer to God. As much is eaten as satisfies the cravings of hunger; as much is drunk as befits the chaste. They say it is enough, as those who remember that even during the night they have to worship God; they talk as those who know that the Lord is one of their auditors. After manual ablution, and the bringing in of lights, each is asked to stand forth and sing, as he can, a hymn to God, either one from the holy Scriptures or one of his own composing — a proof of the measure of our drinking. As the feast commenced with prayer, so with prayer it is closed. — Tertullian, Apologeticus 39 (Thelwall, ANF 3)

Tertullian’s defense is not a defense of abstention. It is a defense of moderation: Christians drink at their communal meal, but they drink in such measure that after the meal each one can stand up and sing a hymn to God without slurring. His parting phrase — “a proof of the measure of our drinking” — is elegant: the measure is set by the ability to sing a hymn afterwards. The presupposition of the argument is that Christian love-feasts include wine, real wine capable in excess of impairing singers, but the community’s practice keeps drinking within honorable bounds.

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4. Chrysostom on gleukos — the lexical anchor for Acts 2:13

John Chrysostom is post-Nicene (he wrote his Homilies on Acts around the year AD 400), and so falls just outside our pre-325 window. But his treatment of Acts 2:13 is the clearest patristic argument on the lexical question that governs the whole two-wine theory, and it faithfully preserves the older understanding.

Acts 2:13 reports that at Pentecost, when the disciples were speaking in various languages, “others mocking said, These men are full of new wine”. The Greek word is gleukos. The two-wine theory, in its modern form, translates gleukos as “grape juice” — the argument being that gleukos names a distinct substance that does not intoxicate. Chrysostom, reading the passage with the vocabulary of ordinary fourth-century Greek, cuts through the reading:

Others mocking said, “These men are full of new wine [γλεύκους μεμεστωμένοι εἰσίν].” O the excessive folly! O the excessive malignity! Why it was not even the season for that; for it was Pentecost. — Chrysostom, Homily 4 on Acts of the Apostles (Walker/Sheppard/Browne, NPNF¹ 11)

What Chrysostom’s own words supply is a seasonality observation — at Pentecost the vintage is months away, so the mockery is doubly foolish — together with his remark on Peter’s demeanor: “That they are not drunken, he shows immediately by his very voice, that they are not beside themselves, as the soothsayers” (same homily, verified against the New Advent text). Chrysostom plainly reads the scene as a drunkenness accusation answered by evident sobriety; but the lexical argument itself — that the accusation is coherent only if gleukos intoxicates — rests on the text of Acts, not on Chrysostom. Peter’s response (“these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day”, Acts 2:15) does not correct the vocabulary; it corrects the hour. Nobody rebuts a grape-juice charge with a time-of-day argument.

One caution should be pre-empted. A prohibitionist could enlist Chrysostom’s seasonality remark for the other side: if gleukos names seasonal fresh must, and (per Bacchiocchi’s preservation pillar) sweet unfermented juice was available year-round, then the mockers’ “gleukos” might be preserved sweet wine and no intoxicant. But this reading destroys the mockery it is meant to explain: “these men are full of preserved sweet juice” accuses the apostles of nothing, and leaves Peter answering, absurdly, that it is too early in the morning to have drunk juice. The seasonality observation makes the taunt more contemptuous; it does not make it sober.

The lexical case Chrysostom preserves — that gleukos was known in the ancient Greek world to intoxicate, and that Peter’s rebuttal on Acts 2:15 presupposes it — is preserved intact from the first century through the fourth. It is the case Aristotle names (that gleukos is the pressed juice at the beginning of fermentation, still sweet, capable of intoxicating), the case the LXX translators presuppose (they render tirosh as gleukos in some places without any implication that tirosh is non-intoxicating), and the case Chrysostom re-articulates.

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5. Ascetic voices — a real strand, never universalized

The pre-Nicene church knows several strands of ascetic wine-abstention. All of them are patterned as personal vocation, not universal Christian rule.

Origen, in the third century, was famously ascetic. His Homilies on Numbers treat the Nazirite vow (Num 6) allegorically as pointing to spiritual sobriety and the discipline of the will; he never argues that the Nazirite’s substance-abstention is normative for all Christians. Origen’s own practice, as reported by later biographers, was severe; he practiced fasting and abstinence more strictly than most of his contemporaries, but his teaching acknowledged that this was his own calling, not a rule for others.

Later, in the fourth century (just past our window), Basil the Great preaches Homily against Drunkards — a classic patristic denunciation of drunkenness, not of wine. His stated theology follows exactly the substance-versus-abuse distinction that runs through the whole tradition: wine is a work of God, drunkenness is a work of the devil. Basil is post-Nicene, but his teaching is the mature form of a pre-Nicene consensus.

The one movement that pushed abstention as a universal Christian rule — the Encratites, an early second-century strand associated with Tatian — was condemned by the mainstream church as heretical. Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. I.28) counts Tatian’s Encratite followers among the deviant Gnostic sects, and one of their marks is the rejection of wine as a matter of doctrine. Tatian’s Encratism made the two-wine move avant la lettre: it did not distinguish fermented from unfermented; it simply rejected wine categorically as unclean. The church rejected the rejection. The Encratite move was on the far side of the boundary that the church did not cross.

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6. Summary — what antiquity shows

The pre-Nicene evidence is remarkably consistent. Six conclusions are secure.

First: the eucharistic cup was wine, ordinarily mixed with water in the standard Greco-Roman fashion. This is the unanimous testimony of every second- and third-century source that specifies the cup: Didache, Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian. Alternative practices, when they appear (the Aquarii), are corrected by the church’s own bishops on the ground that they depart from Christ’s institution.

Second: the church read the Cana miracle as producing genuine wine. Cyprian says so explicitly in Ep. 62.12. This is the reading the pre-Nicene fathers had; it is the reading of every ancient Christian body — Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Ethiopian — that has preserved a continuous liturgical tradition from the pre-Nicene period into the present.

Third: the fathers distinguished wine-as-substance from drunkenness-as-state exactly as Scripture does. Clement’s pastoral treatise on drinking is a treatise on how to enjoy wine without becoming drunk; the entire project presupposes the substance is licit. Tertullian’s defense of the agape meal defends moderate drinking, not abstention.

Fourth: ascetic wine-abstention was recognized as a valid personal vocation. Clement admires those “who have adopted an austere life”. Origen practiced it. The Nazirite pattern from Scripture was allegorized as spiritual sobriety. But it was never universalized. Wine, for the church, was a creature of God to be received with thanksgiving.

Fifth: the one movement that made the categorical move — the Encratite rejection of wine — was condemned as heretical. The Encratites lie on the far side of the line the church did not cross.

Sixth: the lexical claim later made by the two-wine theory — that gleukos means “grape juice” and cannot intoxicate — was contradicted by every ancient Greek reader who addressed the question. Chrysostom’s treatment of Acts 2:13 preserves the ancient understanding: gleukos was known to intoxicate. If it did not, the mockery of Acts 2:13 would be empty.

The pre-Nicene church, in its earliest generations, drank wine at the eucharist, drank wine at ordinary meals, condemned drunkenness, honored personal ascetic abstention, and read Scripture the way this study has read it in Chapters 1 and 2 — as permitting wine and forbidding excess.

The next chapter turns to the modern history — how, in the American Protestant nineteenth century, a very different reading of the same biblical vocabulary emerged, and what became of it.