Chapter 4: Reality — Wine and the Modern Church

Overview

The SCAR framework’s fourth question is the reality question: how has the interpretation been practiced? Can it be lived? Where has it succeeded, and where has it strained?

For the wine question, the modern history is unusual. From the Cana miracle until roughly 1870, virtually every Christian communion — Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, Anabaptist — used fermented wine at the Lord’s Supper. Then, over the space of a single generation in nineteenth-century America, a large section of American Protestantism switched to unfermented grape juice, and along with the substance-switch adopted a lexical reading of Scripture that had never been articulated before: the two-wine theory. Both the switch and the theory were born inside the American temperance movement. Both remain in force in much of American evangelicalism today.

This chapter tells that story with the honesty the SCAR framework requires. The two-wine theory is presented at its strongest, using its own primary sources. Thomas Welch’s invention of pasteurized grape juice, and the Methodist Discipline that received it, are traced in their own logic. The current state of Christian communion practice — Catholic through Restorationist — is charted plainly. And the modern academic response, which has been substantial and largely convergent, is surveyed.

The chapter’s tone is neutral. The two-wine theory was born of legitimate pastoral concern; it deserves an honest hearing before the study responds to it. The final synthesis (Chapter 5) will locate where the evidence points, but the reality here is what it is: a divided modern church, with the division running along a fault-line the pre-modern church did not know.

---

1. Origins of the two-wine theory

The two-wine theory holds that biblical vocabulary for wine — Hebrew yayin, tirosh, shekar; Greek oinos, gleukos — is generic and covers both intoxicating and non-intoxicating grape products. Where Scripture commends wine, on this reading, the substance in view is the unfermented juice; where Scripture condemns wine, the substance in view is the fermented product. The theory is a nineteenth-century American Protestant construction, developed inside the temperance movement, with British parallels and a late-twentieth-century Adventist consolidation.

The sequence of movement and exegesis matters. Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance (1826), the sermon series usually credited with launching the national temperance movement, contains no two-wine lexical claim — Beecher argued from the ruin of drunkards, not from Hebrew. The movement came first; the exegesis followed a decade later, with Nott’s lectures of 1838-9. The two-wine theory is thus not the discovery that generated a movement but the theology a movement already in motion went looking for.

1.1 Moses Stuart (1848) — the philological imprimatur

Moses Stuart (1780-1852), professor at Andover Theological Seminary and often called “the father of biblical science” in America, is the moment the theory acquired academic authority — the theory itself had been preached by Nott a decade earlier (§1.2). Stuart’s 1848 open letter to Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College, was published as Scriptural View of the Wine-Question, in a Letter to the Rev. Dr. Nott (Leavitt, Trow & Co., 1848). Stuart’s central lexical claim, later quoted by William Patton in his 1874 Bible Wines, became the movement’s philological charter:

Yayin, in its broadest meaning, designates grape-juice … new or old, sweet or sour, fermented or unfermented. — Moses Stuart, quoted in William Patton, Bible Wines (National Temperance Society, 1874; archive.org id biblewinesorlaw00pattgoog)

Stuart’s argument is that the Hebrew word yayin does not by itself specify fermentation. If that lexical claim can be made to stand — and Stuart, one of the most credentialed philological Hebraists of nineteenth-century America, made it with authority — then the substance denoted by yayin in any given verse becomes a matter of context. And context, for temperance-era readers, tracked divine approval: if Scripture praises the substance, it must be unfermented; if Scripture condemns it, it must be fermented.

1.2 Eliphalet Nott — Lectures on Biblical Temperance

Eliphalet Nott (1773-1866), president of Union College for sixty-two years and one of the country’s most prominent temperance advocates, delivered his ten “Lectures on Bible Temperance” at Schenectady, New York, in the winter of 1838-9. They were first printed in 1846 in Edward C. Delavan’s periodical The Enquirer, and appeared in a second edition in 1857 (archive.org id lecturesonbibli00nottgoog).

Nott’s thesis, as summarized by his editor Taylor Lewis in the introduction to the second edition, states the theory in its clearest form:

The wine that did not intoxicate … was good; a blessing was in it. The wine that did intoxicate … was bad; it was pronounced a woe and a curse. — Taylor Lewis, Introduction to Nott, Lectures on Biblical Temperance, 2nd ed., p. 7 (lecturesonbibli00nottgoog)

And more expansively:

Wine is commended in some places as a blessing. This cannot be for any intoxicating effect … but for the good it does, its known effects as healthful, pleasant, nutritive. — Taylor Lewis, Introduction to Nott, Lectures on Biblical Temperance, 2nd ed., pp. 7-8

The Table of Contents to Nott’s third lecture puts the theory’s inferential move plainly: “Contrary things affirmed of wine, therefore different kinds.” The logic is: since Scripture both commends (Ps 104:15; Judg 9:13; Isa 55:1) and condemns (Prov 20:1; 23:29-35; Hos 4:11) what English translations render “wine”, there must be two substances — because Scripture cannot contradict itself.

The alternative interpretive move — that Scripture commends moderate use and condemns drunkenness, distinguishing the act rather than the substance — was open to Nott. He rejected it. His temperance commitments required a total-abstinence reading of the biblical commendations, and the two-substance theory was the way to get one.

1.3 Lees & Burns — Temperance Bible Commentary (1868)

The British counterpart is Frederic Richard Lees (1815-1897) and Dawson Burns (1828-1909), The Temperance Bible-Commentary: Giving at One View Version, Criticism, and Exposition, in Regard to All Passages of Holy Writ Bearing on ‘Wine’ and ‘Strong Drink’ (London: S. W. Partridge, 1868). Multiple archive.org copies exist (id temperancebible01burngoog for the Oxford/Google digitization).

Lees and Burns state the case with more lexical rigor than Nott. From the Preliminary Dissertation:

There is nothing in the nature and usage of the words for Wine, etc., in the Bible, which at all teaches that the use of intoxicating drink is in harmony with the Divine will. — Lees & Burns, Temperance Bible-Commentary, Preliminary Dissertation, p. xiv (temperancebible01burngoog)

There is no word for fermented wine in the Bible, no word meaning only that; much less is there such a word associated with God’s approval. — Lees & Burns, Temperance Bible-Commentary, Preliminary Dissertation, p. xxxii

The claim is that Hebrew and Greek both lack a word that unambiguously means fermented wine, and therefore the vocabulary cannot license the substance where it appears in blessing contexts. The commentary walks verse by verse through the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, arguing in each case that the “approved” instances are unfermented and the “condemned” instances are fermented. This is the mature lexical charter of the two-wine reading.

1.4 William Patton — Bible Wines (1874)

William Patton (1798-1879), a Middlebury-graduated pastor active in New York, published Bible Wines: or, The Laws of Fermentation and Wines of the Ancients through the National Temperance Society and Publishing House in 1874 (archive.org id biblewinesorlaw00pattgoog). The book runs 139 pages and became the single most widely-circulated American statement of the two-wine theory in the nineteenth century. Its influence on popular-level temperance preaching is difficult to overstate.

Patton develops three strands beyond Nott. First, he consolidates Stuart’s generic-word argument (quoted above). Second, he makes an empirical case that the ancients possessed multiple preservation techniques by which fresh grape juice could be kept from fermenting. He cites the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave:

By boiling, the juice … loses all its aptitude for fermentation, and may afterwards be preserved for years. — Boerhaave, quoted in Patton, Bible Wines

The argument is that Romans and Greeks made defrutum and sapa (boiled-down grape syrups), and that these preserved substances were also called “wine”. If preservation was technologically possible, unfermented “wine” is a real category in the biblical world, not a temperance-era anachronism.

Third, Patton reads the Cana miracle as producing unfermented substance. Following the American commentator M. W. Jacobus, he writes:

This wine was not that fermented liquor which passes now under that name … commonly boiled and sweet, without intoxicating qualities. — Jacobus, quoted in Patton, Bible Wines, pp. 32-33 (the quotation spans the page break; verified against the archive.org OCR)

This — the claim that Cana’s “good wine” was a sweet unfermented boiled grape syrup — becomes the anchor of popular-level two-wine reading for the next 150 years.

1.5 Later development — Teachout and Bacchiocchi

The theory reappeared in academic dress in the late twentieth century. Robert P. Teachout defended a Th.D. dissertation at Dallas Theological Seminary in 1979 titled “The Use of Wine in the Old Testament”, arguing that yayin means “grape juice” in seventy-one Old Testament occurrences and “fermented wine” in seventy others. Teachout later became Professor of Old Testament at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, and carried the case to the popular level in Wine: The Biblical Imperative: Total Abstinence (Columbia, SC: Richbarry Press, 1983).

The mature academic statement is Samuele Bacchiocchi (1938-2008), Wine in the Bible: A Biblical Study on the Use of Alcoholic Beverages (Berrien Springs, MI: Biblical Perspectives, 1989). Bacchiocchi was Professor of Theology and Church History at Andrews University — the flagship Seventh-day Adventist institution — and the first non-Catholic to earn a doctorate at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. His book is the most sustained modern defense of the theory.

Bacchiocchi’s methodological contribution is a sustained argument that the ancients possessed multiple preservation techniques — boiling to a syrup (sapa, defrutum), sulfur-fumigation of the storage amphora, filtering, cool storage — so that “unfermented wine” was a real substance category in the biblical world. His book opens with three forewords — by Teachout, by George W. Reid, and by Ernest H. J. Steed; William H. Shea appears among the acknowledged manuscript readers.

1.6 The strongest form of the case

Presented at its strongest, the two-wine theory rests on four pillars:

Lexical genericity. The Hebrew and Greek terms are broader than English “wine”. Yayin covers tirosh (must, new wine) and asis (sweet juice); oinos covers the same Greek range. This much is uncontested by any lexicographer.

Contradictions require distinction. Psalm 104:15 and Proverbs 23:31-35 cannot both praise and forbid the same substance without qualification; some distinction must be operative. If the moderation-vs-abuse distinction is the only one Scripture uses, the two-wine theorists argue, why does the Wisdom literature use such strong substance-language (“look not thou upon the wine when it is red”)?

Ancient preservation technology. Boiling, filtering, and sulfur fumigation were practiced in the ancient Mediterranean. The two-wine reading rightly notes that a common counter-argument (“everyone drank fermented wine because they had no refrigeration”) is technologically naive.

Pastoral concern with a sinless Christ. For Bacchiocchi and his predecessors, the christological argument matters. A Christ who produced 120 gallons of a substance that Proverbs calls a “mocker” would be, on their reading, cooperating with a snare. Their two-wine reading of Cana is not driven by lexicography alone; it is driven by a conviction about who Jesus is.

Each pillar deserves an honest response. This study argues that lexical genericity is real but does not do the moral work the theory needs; that the contradiction is resolved by the moderation-abuse distinction rather than by two substances; that ancient preservation existed but was marginal (as the archaeological evidence in §5 shows); and that the christological concern is addressed differently — Jesus’s own participation in ordinary Jewish drinking culture, as established in Chapter 2, defuses the concern about the substance without denying the concern about excess.

1.7 Answered in its own generation (1846-1881)

The two-wine theory was not first refuted by twentieth-century scholarship. It was answered in its own generation, in its own venues, while the temperance movement stood at full strength.

The book-length reply was A. M. Wilson, The Wines of the Bible: An Examination and Refutation of the Unfermented Wine Theory (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1877) — 380 pages working through Lees & Burns and Patton claim by claim. Wilson’s own position gives the book its force. His preface, signed from his Bathgate manse in April 1877, discloses the priors he brought to the investigation and the verdict the sources drove him to:

The question as to the nature of Ancient Wines in general, and of the Wines of the Bible in particular, has been forced into special prominence by recent discussions on the Wine of the Communion. Whether the writer of the following pages has been successful in exhibiting the true nature of these Wines, or has failed in the effort, he has, at least, the satisfaction of knowing that he has done what he could. Having been a teetotaler for more than thirty years, his personal habits, associations, and sympathies have all been in favour of the unfermented theory; but the facts encountered in the present investigation, have constrained him, reluctantly, to conclude that, so far as the Wines of the Ancients are concerned, Unfermented Wine is a myth. — Wilson, The Wines of the Bible, Preface (Bathgate, April 1877; verified verbatim against archive.org winesofbibleexam0000wils)

Charles Spurgeon — himself an eventual abstainer on prudential grounds — commended the book in The Sword and the Trowel (1877).

The refereed press did more than answer — it hosted the whole debate, and the file of Bibliotheca Sacra, the country’s oldest continuously published theological journal (issued at that time from Andover, Moses Stuart’s own seminary), preserves the arc. As early as May 1846 the journal printed Eli Smith’s field report “The Wines of Mount Lebanon” — the Syria missionary whose testimony Patton would later quarry for the boiled-syrup preparations — and Smith’s report, read whole, runs the other way: on “inquiring if there exists any such thing as unfermented wine, I have uniformly been met with a stare of surprise,” and of intoxication, “All wines, they say, will intoxicate more or less.” In January 1869 — the very year Welch first pasteurized grape juice — Thomas Laurie’s “What Wine Shall We Use at the Lord’s Supper?” defended the fermented cup as “such wine as the pure juice of the grape becomes when left to the regular processes of nature.” In 1880 the journal gave the other side the floor: A. B. Rich’s two-part “Do the Scriptures Prohibit the Use of Alcoholic Beverages?” (April and July) argued the full temperance case — “God prohibits. Man is bound to echo his prohibition.” In January 1881 Horace Bumstead’s “The Biblical Sanction for Wine” answered at length, with a memorable reductio: Scripture both blesses rain and sends it in wrath — “Are there two kinds of rain spoken of in these passages, and does the Bible contradict itself if it refers to the same article, water, in the same fluid state, in all of them?” And in October 1881 the same volume printed Daniel Merriman’s “A Sober View of Abstinence,” which relocated the abstention case to exactly the ground this study’s own synthesis honors: abstinence as prudence — “simply a hygienic measure of good sense” — with no lexical claim about the biblical substance. (All of these verified against the journal’s own archive.) Alongside the Bibliotheca Sacra file, Dunlop Moore’s critique in The Presbyterian Review (1881) pressed the lexical case against the theory in the flagship journal of American Presbyterianism; Bacchiocchi’s own footnotes engage Moore as an opponent a century later.

This contemporaneous record matters for the argument of §5 below. The academic verdict against the two-wine theory is not a twentieth-century bias applied backwards; the refereed literature heard the temperance case in its own pages (Rich, 1880) and rejected the lexical claim within a few years of Patton’s Bible Wines, at the very height of temperance sentiment — and in at least one case (Wilson) from inside the abstaining camp itself.

And once the twentieth-century academy took up the question directly, the same verdict issued from a very different setting. Irving Woodworth Raymond’s 1927 Columbia University dissertation The Teaching of the Early Church on the Use of Wine and Strong Drink (Columbia University Press) was written expressly against Prohibition-era polemics — Raymond opens by naming “the National Prohibition Amendment and the accompanying Volstead Act” as the setting that made his study necessary — and it names the two-wine method precisely:

Total abstinence advocates have advanced such an argument and have written volumes in support of their position.¹ This argument is obviously a case of special pleading and errs not only in the assumption of mistaken principles but also in the logic of particular cases. Their argument runs that since the Bible is the word of God and since the use of wine and strong drink is evil, the Bible must therefore condemn the use of wine and strong drink, for it is manifestly impossible for the Word of God to approve an evil. — Raymond, The Teaching of the Early Church on the Use of Wine and Strong Drink (Columbia UP, 1927), 21

Raymond’s footnote to “volumes” catches the scale: “The 3,000 volumes and pamphlets in New York Public Library and 800 in Boston Public Library are adequate evidence of the great interest in this question” (21 n. 5). His diagnosis of the failure mode is exact: total-abstinence writers, “when the texts of the Bible not only mention the use of wine but also refer to it with marked approval, they resort to faulty exegesis to escape their predicament. They affirm that wherever wine is praised for its good effects, the term used in the text (tirosh usually) refers to unfermented wine, and that wherever wine is condemned for its evil consequences the term refers to an intoxicating beverage” (22). Raymond then reads the pattern for what it is: predetermined-conclusion exegesis. “The meanings of the more important words used to designate wine are so many and varied that no proof of this character can be built except on the basis of insisting on the adoption of that particular meaning which confirms a predetermined conclusion. This type of argument can be employed equally on both sides of the question and therefore lacks cogency” (22). His specific dismantling of W. Ritchie’s Scripture Testimony against Intoxicating Wine (New York, 1874) — the Ritchie tirosh-as-grapes case Patton drew from — turns on Hosea 4:11 and on Jewish tithe law: tirosh was subject to taxation “from the moment when scum first appears,” which arises only when the juice has fermented (20). The lexical case that treats tirosh as categorically unfermented, on Raymond’s account, “errs in both logical reasoning and careful exegesis” (20).

The rejection of the two-wine theory as method is thus not a recent evangelical rejoinder but a 1927 Columbia-scholarly verdict rendered at the height of Prohibition, by a Ph.D. under W. W. Rockwell of Union Theological Seminary, in a dissertation whose entire subsequent 130 pages retrace the early church’s use of wine on the basis of primary sources. The refereed academic literature has not moved from that verdict since.

---

2. Thomas Welch and grape juice communion

2.1 The demand — 1864 Methodist resolution

The invention of pasteurized grape juice did not create the demand for grape-juice communion — it met one. In 1864, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church — the largest American Protestant denomination at the time — resolved:

In all cases the pure juice of the grape be used in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. — Methodist Episcopal Church, General Conference resolution, 1864

The resolution was reaffirmed in 1872. The Wesleyan Methodist Connection — an anti-slavery splinter founded in 1843 — had already required unfermented wine from its founding. But the technology to produce commercially viable, shelf-stable, drinkable non-fermenting grape juice did not yet exist — ancient and contemporary methods could boil juice down to syrup or slow fermentation for a season, but not deliver a stable table beverage. Home refrigeration was decades away; grape juice stored at room temperature naturally fermented within days. The resolution named an aspiration the technology could not yet deliver.

The 1864 resolution was also a departure from the denomination’s founder, not a continuity with him. John Wesley’s sermon “The Use of Money” (Sermon 50) condemns in the strongest terms the selling of “all that liquid fire, commonly called drams or spirituous liquors” — distilled spirits, whose sellers he calls poisoners — while allowing a narrow medicinal exception; wine is not in view. Wesley himself drank wine, and eighteenth-century Methodism’s discipline targeted drunkenness and the spirits trade, not the fermented cup. The Methodist grape-juice mandate, like the Wesleyan Holiness abstention teaching that descends from it, is a nineteenth-century American development that Wesley’s own writing does not anticipate — a parallel, inside Methodism, to the larger story this chapter tells about the wider church.

2.2 Vineland, New Jersey, 1869

Thomas Bramwell Welch (1825-1903) was born in Glastonbury, Somerset; came to the United States as a child; joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, then the abolitionist Wesleyan Methodists; preached briefly; damaged his voice; became a physician, then a dentist. He moved to Vineland, New Jersey, in 1865, where he served as communion steward at the Vineland Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1869, drawing on Louis Pasteur’s newly published pasteurization technique (Pasteur’s Études sur le vin appeared in 1866), Welch applied heat pasteurization to freshly pressed grape juice. The heat killed the wild yeast and halted fermentation. Welch bottled the product and marketed it — first to his own church, then to others — as “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine”. This is the verified original product name; the modern brand name “Welch’s Grape Juice” did not appear until his son’s commercial launch decades later.

Family lore has it that Welch developed the product after a Sunday guest — described as having “a weakness for alcohol” — became drunk on the church’s communion wine and behaved badly at the Welch home. Whether or not that specific incident is historical, the temperance-and-communion collision it dramatizes is precisely what Welch’s product was designed to resolve.

2.3 The slow start and Charles Welch’s rebranding

The product did not sell. Churches were reluctant to break with two millennia of tradition, and the product’s price was substantial. Welch’s son Charles Welch, also a dentist, returned to Vineland in 1875 and slowly built the business. The commercial launch of what became Welch’s Grape Juice Company is dated 1893; Charles rebranded away from “Unfermented Wine” — the communion-oriented naming — to a general beverage name in order to reach beyond the communion table. Thomas Welch himself reportedly “never received a penny in return for his investment”. He died in Vineland in 1903.

2.4 The 1876 WCTU inflection

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in 1874. Its second president was Frances Willard, herself Methodist. By 1876, WCTU members were refusing to receive communion in churches that used fermented wine — a mass movement of Methodist women against their own denomination’s practice, and a movement that fused with Welch’s product to make grape-juice communion inevitable. The WCTU by 1900 counted 150,000 members and served as one of the great institutional carriers of American temperance activism into every major Protestant denomination.

2.5 The 1880 Methodist Episcopal Discipline

The 1880 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church approved two changes to the Book of Discipline:

The first was an optional provision — churches were “to see that the Stewards provide unfermented wine for use in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper”.

The second was, in effect, mandatory:

Let none but the pure, unfermented juice of the grape be used in administering the Lord’s Supper, whenever practicable. — Methodist Episcopal Church, Book of Discipline, 1880

The essence of that mandate remained in the Book of Discipline through 1916 and was carried into United Methodist Church formularies through the Book of Resolutions to the year 2000. It is still the current UMC standard.

2.6 The spread and the split

Once the largest American Protestant denomination had committed, distribution was the mechanism. Welch’s product was widely available; the WCTU pressure was interdenominational; Sunday-school and temperance literature framed grape-juice communion as the reformed norm. Adoption spread through American Protestantism along a clear pattern.

The bodies that switched to grape juice — Methodists (Northern and Southern) by roughly 1880, Baptists by the early twentieth century, Restorationists (Disciples, Christian Church, Church of Christ), Holiness and Pentecostal bodies (Nazarene, Assemblies of God, Church of God), Mennonites and most Anabaptist bodies by the early twentieth century, and (unevenly) Presbyterians — shared a common ecclesiology: they held a broadly memorial or symbolic view of communion. In such a theology, the substance in the cup is a sign whose exact composition is a matter of pastoral prudence; if pastoral prudence points to grape juice, the substance can change.

The bodies that did not switch — Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans (LCMS and WELS), Anglicans, Continental Reformed — shared a different ecclesiology: they held a broadly sacramental view in which the eucharistic substance participates constitutively in the sacrament. In such a theology, the substance is not negotiable; canonical or confessional standards fix it as wine.

The dividing line between grape-juice-adopters and wine-retainers, in other words, tracked not fidelity to Scripture but doctrine of the sacrament. Where a tradition already held that the substance mattered ex opere operato, the temperance movement failed to move it. Where a tradition held that the substance was a sign whose function was signification, the temperance movement succeeded, and easily.

The academic monograph on this episode is Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait, The Poisoned Chalice: Eucharistic Grape Juice and Common-Sense Realism in Victorian Methodism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011). Woodruff Tait’s thesis complements — and usefully complicates — the ecclesiological account just given. On her reading, the Methodists who put grape juice on the table were not merely a tradition whose memorialist doctrine permitted the element to change; they were heirs of a specific epistemology that shaped the whole nineteenth-century evangelical mind:

All the myriad associated lifestyle issues of the Victorian moral code, temperance chief among them, represented a theological vision that placed a premium on the ability to perceive reality accurately. This vision was deeply rooted in Baconian common-sense realism, which pervaded the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century America. In this climate, every physical act had a moral implication, and every moral belief resulted in a correct physical act. — Woodruff Tait, The Poisoned Chalice, 24

The doctrine of the sacrament explains why the change was possible; this epistemology explains why it felt obligatory. Once the era’s science had pronounced alcohol a poison, and once Scottish common-sense realism had taught that the natural world’s data and Scripture’s data were of a piece, then a substance the science had classed as poison could not stand on the same table as the body and blood of Christ. Woodruff Tait reconstructs the way the two authorities integrated in the Methodist mind at the pivotal General Conference:

When the 1880 MEC General Conference placed in the Discipline the claim that “both science and human experience unite with the Holy Scriptures in condemning all alcoholic beverages,” this conviction rested on their faith in truths about alcohol’s composition and effects revealed by science — defined on the Baconian model. Since the natural world in this model participated equally with Scripture in providing data for theological reasoning, grape juice advocates took into theological account the […] — Woodruff Tait, The Poisoned Chalice, 42

Woodruff Tait’s larger claim is that the nineteenth-century grape-juice argument was coherent on its own premises — a judgment of historical fairness this study means to match: the two-wine theorists were not fools; they were consistent men working from premises (about science, about Scripture’s vocabulary) that have not survived. Tait’s own late-in-the-book gloss on that inheritance’s fate names the twentieth-century Methodist reformer who obscured the argument: “This move, while it had theological merits, shielded late-twentieth-century reformers from the coherent philosophical motivation of their ancestors for the use of grape juice (and to some extent, individual cups)” (The Poisoned Chalice, 147).

---

3. Prohibition and its long shadow

The 18th Amendment took effect on 17 January 1920; the Volstead Act (National Prohibition Act, October 1919) was its enforcement mechanism. Prohibition ended with the 21st Amendment, ratified 5 December 1933.

The Volstead Act contained an explicit religious-use carve-out. Rabbis, priests, and ministers could apply for federal permits to obtain wine for sacramental use, with the permits routed through the head of each religious body. This exemption kept the Catholic mass legally continuous through Prohibition. It also saved a segment of the California wine industry — most famously the San Antonio Winery in Los Angeles, which pivoted to sacramental wine and became a major sacramental supplier for the West Coast Catholic dioceses; and, on the northern edge of the industry, Beaulieu Vineyards of Napa, whose founder Georges de Latour had cultivated the Archdiocese of San Francisco from 1904 onwards and whose sacramental-wine business, in Daniel Okrent’s synthesis of the Prohibition record, “became the key to a fortune” (Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition [Scribner, 2010], 182). A 1925 study cited in the Prohibition literature found that sacramental-wine demand had increased by 800,000 gallons in the preceding two years, far in excess of any plausible growth in genuine religious observance; the exemption was widely exploited — on the Jewish side, the leading Orthodox rabbi in Omaha, Zvi Grodzinski, complained to his colleagues that other local rabbis were “conducting a free-for-all and selling their sacramental wine to Jews and Gentiles alike” (Okrent, 188).

Prohibition did not force the American Protestant switch to grape juice — the switch had already happened. What Prohibition did was three things.

First, it locked in the grape-juice practice as the default American Protestant norm. Even after 1933, Methodist and Baptist congregations that had spent thirteen years distributing grape juice at communion had no reason to switch back.

Second, it boosted Welch’s. The company was already established (1893); Prohibition coincided with the peak of its market position; the association of communion with grape juice became firmly embedded.

The Jewish community ran the same debate in mirror image, from the same rabbinic sources this study’s Appendix C examines. On 24 January 1922, Louis Ginzberg — Talmud professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and chair of the Committee on Interpretation of Jewish Law of the United Synagogue — issued a seventy-one-page responsum arguing that unfermented grape juice was halakhically acceptable for kiddush and other rituals, sparing the community both the abuses of the sacramental-wine permit system and the chillul Hashem (desecration of the Name) of association with bootlegging. The Rabbinical Assembly sanctioned unfermented wine for religious purposes on his ruling. And, exactly as in the Christian case, the traditionalists answered: Orthodox critics objected that Ginzberg had set aside the Magen Avraham’s explicit preference for wine, and that with lawful sacramental wine still available there was no emergency to justify the substitution. The whole structure of the Christian grape-juice controversy — pragmatic substitution defended from the sources, tradition answering that the substance is not negotiable without necessity — played out in American Judaism inside a single decade. The convergence went further than doctrine. Okrent’s Prohibition history observes the pattern directly: Reform rabbis in the same years “offered learned disquisitions arguing that Talmudic law allowed the ceremonial use of unfermented grape juice instead of wine ‘in the case of necessity’. It was as if they had picked up the tune the WCTU’s Department of Unfermented Wine had been trying to insinuate into Christian liturgy” (Okrent, Last Call, 190). The two-wine method, on Okrent’s account, was moving across traditions.

Third, and most broadly, it marginalized wine in American evangelical culture. Communion was only one instance of a wider shift in which evangelical Protestantism moved from the older Reformed consensus (“moderate use is fine, drunkenness is sin”) to the temperance consensus (“total abstinence is the Christian standard”). The Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, and Anglican bodies were untouched by this cultural shift because their sacramental theology already anchored wine.

---

4. Modern denominational practice

The present shape of Christian communion practice, as of the mid-2020s, is roughly as follows.

Tradition	Formal position	Current practice
Roman Catholic	Wine required for valid matter (Canon 924)	Fermented grape wine, mixed with water; mustum (barely-fermenting juice) permitted since 2003 for clergy unable to consume alcohol; celiac accommodation is by low-gluten hosts
Eastern Orthodox	Wine required	Fermented red grape wine, mixed with water; distinctive regional traditions (Greek Mavrodaphne, Russian Kagor)
Anglican Communion (Church of England, US Episcopal)	Wine required; 1888 Lambeth explicitly rejected grape juice	Fermented wine standard; pastoral accommodation for individuals
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS)	Wine theologically required	Fermented wine standard; discreet individual grape-juice accommodation
Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS)	Wine required for the sacrament to be validly celebrated	Wine only
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)	Wine normative; flexibility permitted	Wine typical; grape juice or dealcoholized wine offered as pastoral accommodation
Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)	Book of Church Order uses “wine”; matter left to Sessions	Widely varies; most congregations offer both
Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC)	No declared position	Majority use grape juice; some fermented wine
Presbyterian Church (USA)	Left to Sessions	Grape juice standard in most congregations
United Methodist Church	Grape juice standard since 1864/1880	Grape juice; wine “not required” but rarely used
Southern Baptist Convention	Grape juice standard	Grape juice
Churches of Christ / Christian Church / Disciples	Grape juice standard	Grape juice; “fruit of the vine” language read literally
Assemblies of God	”Fruit of the vine” specified	Grape juice
Church of God (Cleveland, TN)	Grape juice	Grape juice
Mennonite Church USA/Canada	Grape juice standard since ~1900	Grape juice
Old Order Amish	Wine used	Wine at semi-annual communion
New Order Amish	Grape juice used	Grape juice

The clean split runs along doctrine of the sacraments. Where the tradition holds a sacramental view of communion — real presence, ex opere operato, or a robustly efficacious sign — the question of the eucharistic substance was never negotiable, and the temperance movement failed to move the practice. Where the tradition holds a memorial or symbolic view — the Zwinglian family that runs through most American evangelicalism — the element became a matter of pastoral concern, and the shift to grape juice was frictionless.

The Presbyterians occupy the interesting middle position. Westminster-heritage sacramental realism should, in principle, have anchored wine; nineteenth-century American Presbyterian polity, by leaving the matter to local Sessions, effectively accommodated the temperance drift.

The Amish split is instructive: the Old Order preserves wine because they preserve everything older, including nineteenth-century-and-earlier eucharistic practice; the New Order, formed in the 1960s, adopted grape juice under the same broad American evangelical influence.

Beyond the communion table, formal abstention positions remain on the books. The Southern Baptist Convention’s 2006 Greensboro resolution “On Alcohol Use in America” expressed “total opposition to the manufacturing, advertising, distributing, and consuming of alcoholic beverages” and urged that no one “be elected to serve as a trustee or member of any entity or committee of the Southern Baptist Convention that is a user of alcoholic beverages.” It was the most debated resolution of that convention, and it remains the SBC’s latest formal word on the subject — a live datum that the temperance consensus, whatever its academic standing, is still confessionally operative in America’s largest Protestant denomination.

---

5. The academic response

The twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic consensus, running through biblical lexicography, Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, and biomolecular archaeology, is that biblical “wine” — in nearly every reference — is fermented. The two-wine theory has not survived academic scrutiny outside a narrow circle of Adventist and independent-fundamental-Baptist writers.

5.1 Patrick McGovern and the biomolecular case

Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press, 2003; 2nd ed. 2019), is the standard scientific reference. McGovern is Scientific Director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and his lab has done the residue analysis that fixes the origins of viniculture.

Key findings from McGovern’s work:

• Godin Tepe, western Iran, ca. 3400-3000 BC — earliest chemically confirmed instance of grape wine in the Near East.
• Hajji Firuz, northern Iran, ca. 5400-5000 BC — pushed the wine horizon back another two millennia; jar residues test positive for grape wine with tree-resin antimicrobial additive.
• Jiahu, China, ca. 7000 BC — earliest fermented beverage anywhere in the world (rice, honey, and grape or hawthorn fruit).

McGovern’s central claim, for our purposes, is that viniculture in the Ancient Near East is seven thousand years older than the biblical era, and that fermentation is what made grape juice worth preserving. In the ancient world, unfermented grape juice was a marginal category; it went to raisins, syrup, or vinegar within a few days if not fermented. The two-wine theory’s claim that “wine” in Scripture routinely means “unfermented juice” is technologically implausible for the biblical period.

5.2 Magen Broshi and the consumption estimate

Magen Broshi, “Wine in Ancient Palestine — Introductory Notes”, Israel Museum Journal 3 (Spring 1984): 21-40, is the standard scholarly reference on Palestinian wine economy. Broshi, Curator of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, estimated that an adult in ancient Palestine consumed roughly one liter of wine per day on average, varying by class and season. Palestine was a major wine exporter; viticulture drove significant sectors of the economy. Herodian-era wine jars imported from Italy have been recovered at Masada, bearing the Latin vinum on their sherds. These numbers make it impossible to read “wine” in the biblical period as chiefly an unfermented product.

The monograph-length treatment of the Israelite side of this economy is Carey Ellen Walsh, The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel (Harvard Semitic Monographs 60; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), a revision of her 1996 Harvard Th.D. dissertation covering the whole arc from planting to pressing to drinking. Walsh’s chemistry-based synthesis makes the point directly:

Once the fermentation process was complete, the desired product was, of course, wine. Unfermented grape juice was most likely rare in ancient Israel, because the yeasts of the skins would have begun to work on the juice soon after the grape skins were broken. In the Hebrew Bible, four terms denote “grape wine”: יין [yayin], תירוש [tirosh], עסיס [ʿasis], and חמר [chamar]. A fifth term, שכר [shekar], probably also denotes a wine, though one made from dates. — Walsh, The Fruit of the Vine, 207

Walsh’s argument is physical, not merely lexical. Fermentation begins on its own the moment the skins are broken; the natural yeasts on the fruit’s surface begin metabolizing the sugars within hours; ancient winemakers had no way to arrest the process at scale. She adds a further constraint: since “white-skinned grapes are not attested until the Hellenistic period,” and wine gets its color from grape-skin extract during fermentation, “preclassical wine production from grapes almost certainly must have been red wine” (Walsh, 122). The physical process of ancient wine-making was, by chemical necessity, red-wine fermentation; unfermented juice was an extreme edge case rather than a normal product, and — on the biblical vocabulary of the ancient Israelites — an unnamed one.

5.3 Gordon Wenham on Genesis 9

Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987), represents the mainstream evangelical academic position:

So striking is the contrast between Noah the saint who survived the flood and Noah the inebriated vintner that many commentators argue that the two traditions are completely incompatible and must be of independent origin. — Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (WBC 1), p. 198

Wenham’s summary judgment: neither drinking nor wine, but drunkenness is condemned. This is the position the present study argues for exegetically.

5.4 Kenneth Gentry — the direct response

Kenneth L. Gentry Jr., God Gave Wine: What the Bible Says about Alcohol (1st ed. 2000; 2nd ed. 2007), is the most sustained scholarly evangelical critique of the two-wine theory. Gentry’s central charges are four.

Circular reasoning. Two-wine theorists identify which biblical “wine” is fermented and which is not by whether Scripture approves or condemns it — but they use this identification to prove the biblical distinction. The theory begs its own question.

One term, one substance. The Hebrew yayin and Greek oinos denote a single referent — fermented grape wine. Semantic range does not equal semantic ambiguity.

Talmudic testimony. The Mishnah and Talmud consistently treat yayin as fermented; halakhic categories for grape juice (mitz anavim) exist and are distinct from yayin. First-century Jewish practice knew both categories and named them differently. The Passover cups the Mishnah requires (m. Pesachim 10) are yayin, not mitz.

The temptation is real for a reason. The same wine Scripture warns can lead to drunkenness is the wine Scripture praises as God’s gift (Ps 104:15; Judg 9:13; Isa 55:1). The pastoral logic of Scripture is use, do not abuse, not use only substances that cannot be abused.

Gentry’s most consequential move is the last: the two-wine theory attempts to solve a pastoral problem — how to keep Christians from drunkenness — by rewriting the lexicon. His argument is that this is the wrong tool for the problem.

5.5 Dictionary reference articles

The mainstream evangelical reference articles converge on the same position.

Michael J. Wilkins, “Wine”, in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP, 1st ed. 1992; 2nd ed. 2013), argues that oinos in the Gospels is fermented wine; that Jesus’s Cana miracle produces genuine wine (the steward’s remark makes no sense of unfermented juice); and that the oinopotēs accusation at Matthew 11:19 requires actual wine-drinking to land as an accusation.

Gary L. Meadors, “Wine”, in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (IVP, 1993), distinguishes moderate use (which Paul takes as a matter of Christian liberty — Rom 14; 1 Tim 5:23) from drunkenness (which Paul consistently condemns — Eph 5:18; Gal 5:21). Paul’s counsel to Timothy to “use a little wine for your stomach” (1 Tim 5:23) is decisive against a total-abstinence reading.

5.6 The convergent picture

The academic consensus, spanning McGovern’s biomolecular archaeology, Broshi’s economic archaeology, Wenham’s Old Testament commentary, Wilkins and Meadors on the New Testament, and Gentry’s systematic response, is that:

• Fermented wine was the overwhelming default in the biblical world.
• The Hebrew and Greek lexicon denotes fermented wine primarily.
• Boiled and preserved unfermented grape products existed but were a marginal category and were not what the biblical writers meant when they wrote yayin or oinos.
• Biblical ethics on wine follows a use/abuse distinction, not a substance/substance distinction.
• The two-wine theory is a genuine intellectual construction with real pastoral motives, but its lexical and archaeological foundations are insecure.

---

6. Where the theory still stands, and where it has been abandoned

The two-wine theory continues to be defended, though less vigorously than in its nineteenth-century heyday. Seventh-day Adventist scholarship, anchored by Bacchiocchi’s book and by Ellen G. White’s earlier health-reform writings, continues to treat the position as live. Independent Fundamental Baptist and some King-James-Only circles reprint Patton and continue the popular case. A significant subset of Restorationist and Church of Christ teachers uses “fruit of the vine” as functional shorthand for grape juice, though the argument often rests on tradition and practical concern rather than on strict lexical two-wine argument. Wesleyan Holiness heirs — Nazarene, Free Methodist, some Pilgrim Holiness bodies — carry the position by inheritance from the 1880 Methodist Episcopal Discipline.

The theory has been essentially abandoned in mainline evangelical academic biblical scholarship. Since roughly 1980, no evangelical Old Testament or New Testament scholar publishing in refereed academic journals has defended it. The record’s nearest exception is a book notice: John A. Witmer’s review of Bacchiocchi in Bibliotheca Sacra 147 (July 1990): 376-77 judged that “Bacchiocchi presents a compelling case that the biblical position is abstinence” — a favorable review in the same journal whose own 1846-1881 file had heard that case and answered it (§1.7); a reviewer’s sympathy is not a refereed defense of the lexical theory, and none followed in the journal’s pages, but a fair account names the notice. The case continues at book length in the popular and pastoral literature — Peter Lumpkins, Alcohol Today: Abstinence in an Age of Indulgence (Hannibal, 2009), warmly reviewed in the Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry by Bart Barber, later president of the Southern Baptist Convention (2022-2024); David R. Brumbelow, Ancient Wine and the Bible: The Case for Abstinence (2011), from a Southern Baptist pastor, the most recent sustained statement; and Peter Masters of London’s Metropolitan Tabernacle, arguing the prudential form in Should Christians Drink? The Case for Total Abstinence (1992) — but these are pastoral defenses, not refereed lexical ones, and a fair account should name them as the works a present-day abstentionist reader is most likely to own. The sacramental traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran (LCMS/WELS), Anglican — never held it, so nothing has been abandoned there. In the confessional Presbyterian bodies (PCA, OPC, ARP) the two-wine reading is essentially absent from published theology; where grape juice is used in practice, it is defended on pastoral rather than lexical grounds. The last two decades have seen a notable shift toward moderate use in evangelical circles that once practiced total abstinence, with corresponding scholarly output (Douglas Wilson, Kenneth Gentry, and others) defending wine as gift.

---

7. The pastoral concern that remains

Even if the exegetical case against the two-wine theory is decisive — and this study, when it comes to the synthesis in Chapter 5, will argue that it is — the pastoral concern that gave rise to the theory is legitimate. Alcoholism is real. Children are present at communion. Recovery from addiction is a genuine ministry priority. Communities with high addiction burdens have a real interest in what appears on the communion table.

The mature response of the sacramental traditions has been to take the pastoral concern seriously while preserving the biblical and historical practice. The Catholic mustum provision, allowing barely-fermenting juice since 2003 for clergy unable to consume alcohol (celiac needs are met separately, by low-gluten hosts), is one instance; the Lutheran and Anglican patterns of discreet individual accommodation another; the ELCA’s whole-assembly flexibility a third. All of them keep wine as the norm while responding to particular pastoral needs.

The two-wine theory tried to solve a pastoral problem by rewriting the lexicon. That was the wrong tool for the problem. The right tools, this study will argue in the synthesis, are (a) pastoral accommodation for individuals with cause, (b) moderation-not-abstinence formation of the whole community, and (c) recovery of the biblical theology of feast, in which wine is a sign of the eschatological joy of God’s kingdom (Isa 25:6; Matt 26:29).

The next chapter — Chapter 4.5 — interrupts the study’s forward motion to present the prohibitionist case at its fullest. Before the synthesis in Chapter 5 can honestly respond, the reader deserves to have heard the strongest form of the reading this study argues against. Twelve arguments the IFB, Wesleyan Holiness, and Seventh-day Adventist traditions have advanced from Scripture and from pastoral testimony are surveyed there — the christological objection to Cana, the two-wine lexical case, the appearance-of-evil reading, the kings-and-priests extension, the officer-qualification argument, the pastoral testimony of Wilkerson, Van Impe, MacArthur, and Piper, and more. The synthesis follows in Chapter 5.

Scripture, Christocentrism, and Antiquity have all pointed the same direction: wine permitted, drunkenness forbidden, abstention honored as vocation. Reality shows a divided modern church, with the division running along a fault-line the earlier church did not know. Chapter 4.5 gives the other side its strongest form. Chapter 5 responds.