Chapter 4.5: The Best of the Prohibitionist Case

Overview

The four SCAR components — Scripture, Christocentrism, Antiquity, Reality — have led the study toward a moderationist conclusion. Wine is a gift, drunkenness is sin, abstention is a vocation. Jesus drank fermented wine at Cana and the Last Supper; the pre-Nicene church used wine in every eucharistic cup; the modern academic consensus supports the substance-verdict.

But this chapter interrupts the argument’s forward motion to do something the SCAR methodology requires. Before the synthesis (Chapter 5) can honestly respond, the prohibitionist voice — the reading that Jesus did not drink alcoholic wine, and that Christians should not either — must be presented at its strongest, in the terms its own best advocates use, from the passages of Scripture it most heavily leans on. The load-bearing principle of SCAR is that every view worth taking seriously deserves its strongest form before it is engaged.

Twelve numbered arguments belong here — nine from Scripture and its lexicon, one from health-reform theology, one from modern pastoral testimony, and one from Second Temple history — with companion sub-arguments nested where they belong: the slander-reading of Matthew 11:19 inside the first; the Hosea 4:11 defense, the shekar-as-saccharine etymology, the Ephesians 5:18 “wherein” parse, the dilution argument, and the “unanimity of the winners” (ascetic-eucharist) historical argument inside the second, together with two exhibits inside the second’s own pillars — the Proverbs 20:1 “mocker” grammar and the wineskins inversion; and the universalized Romans 14:21 inside the third — each answered in its place in Chapter 5. Together they compose what is, to this study’s knowledge, the strongest single presentation of the prohibitionist case against Jesus having drunk alcoholic wine and against Christians drinking it today.

Chapter 5 responds. This chapter presents.

1. The christological objection to Cana

The strongest single prohibitionist argument does not begin with a lexical claim about Hebrew or Greek. It begins with the person of Christ.

Proverbs 23:31 states, without qualification:

Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. — Proverbs 23:31

The prohibitionist reading takes this as a direct command. To look upon the red wine — to countenance its presence, to entertain the sight of it — is condemned. If Proverbs 23:31 is such a command, then the wine at Cana becomes a christological problem. Jesus produced 120-180 gallons of the “good wine” (John 2:10) — wine that the master of the feast praised as excellent. If that wine was fermented, red, sparkling in the cup as Proverbs describes, Jesus was the supplier of the substance the Wisdom literature commands his readers not even to look upon. The Sinless Son who kept the law perfectly cannot have violated the plain sense of Proverbs 23:31.

The conclusion the prohibitionist reading draws is that the wine at Cana must not have been the substance Proverbs 23:31 describes. It was, on the reading Patton develops from Jacobus and Nott’s Lectures, “commonly boiled and sweet, without intoxicating qualities” — a preserved unfermented substance, categorically distinct from the wine Proverbs warns against. Bacchiocchi extends the argument: given ancient preservation technology (boiling to sapa or defrutum; sulfur-fumigation of amphorae; filtering), an unfermented “wine” is a real category in the biblical world, and it is the category Jesus provided.

The argument’s force is theological, not merely lexical. It runs: Christ is sinless; Proverbs 23:31 is a command; therefore the substance Christ produced at Cana was not the substance Proverbs 23:31 condemns. Reasoning from Christology backward to substance-question is a genuinely biblical move — the New Testament often reasons this way (Christ is priest according to Melchizedek; Christ is prophet like Moses; Christ is the true vine). If the reading of Proverbs 23:31 as universal command is correct, then this Christological reasoning is correct.

The prohibitionist reading of Cana also has an answer ready for the moderationist’s favorite verse in the passage — the master of the feast’s “when men have well drunk” (methysthōsin, John 2:10). Bacchiocchi makes two moves. First, the remark is generic:

The comment in question was not made in reference to that particular party, but to the general practice among those who hold feasts… This remark, as many commentators recognize, forms parts of the stock in trade of a hired banquet master, rather than an actual description of the state of intoxication at a particular party. — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

Second, the verb itself need not mean intoxication:

Another important consideration is the fact that the Greek verb methusko can mean “to drink freely” without any implication of intoxication. In his article on this verb in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Herbert Preisker observes that “methuo and methuskomai are mostly used literally in the NT for ‘to be drunk’ and ‘to get drunk.’ Methuskomai is used with no ethical or religious judgment in John 2:10 in connection with the rule that the poorer wine is served only when the guests have drunk well.” — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

He adds Parkhurst’s lexicon, which cites LXX usage (Gen 43:34; Song 5:1) for the sense “to drink freely and to cheerfulness, though not to drunkenness”, and notes that the RSV renders John 2:10 “when men have drunk freely”. On this reading, the master’s remark tells us nothing about the wine’s alcoholic content.

The strongest form of this lexical point is better than Parkhurst. The standard classical lexicon itself — Liddell-Scott-Jones — glosses the passive of methyskō as “drink freely, get drunk”, putting “drink freely” first; and LSJ attests a genuinely weakened extension of the family, “to be filled with food”, citing LXX Hosea 14:8 (methysthēsontai sitō, “filled with grain”) and the late-antique lexicographer Hesychius, who glosses μεθύει with πεπλήρωται — “is filled”. If the word family can mean simply “be filled, be satisfied”, the prohibitionist argues, then John 2:10’s banqueters may simply have drunk their fill, and the verse carries no information about fermentation at all.

The moderationist response, developed in Chapter 5, will contest the reading of Proverbs 23:31 and the “drink freely” rendering of methysthōsin — but the argument itself, on its own terms, is the strongest single prohibitionist move.

The christological objection carries a necessary companion: the slander-reading of Matthew 11:19. The moderationist treats “the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber” as Jesus’s own report of his observed practice. The prohibitionist answer, given at length in Bacchiocchi’s chapter “Was Jesus a Glutton and a Drunkard?”, makes three moves. First, the idiom: “the phrase ‘eating and drinking’ is used idiomatically to describe not so much the difference in their eating and drinking habits, as the difference in their social lifestyles” — Jesus’s ministry was social where John’s was eremitic, and “The emphasis is not on alcohol but on social lifestyle.” Second, the slander: the same crowd said John “hath a devil” — a charge every Christian reader discounts as false — and called Jesus “gluttonous” and “a friend of publicans and sinners”; the accusation cannot be promoted to reliable observation on one count while its three companions are dismissed as malice. In Bacchiocchi’s words: “Both charges were groundless, because both Jesus and John lived exemplary lives of self-denial.” He quotes Ernest Gordon approvingly: Jesus “too was slandered, called a glutton, and charged with being oinopotes, a drinker of (intoxicating) wine. There is no proof that he was either.” Third, the not-all-kinds argument: “It is not necessary to assume that because Jesus, contrary to John, ‘came drinking,’ that He drank all kinds of wine, both fermented and unfermented. If that were true for drinking, the same would be true for eating. Yet, no one is arguing that Jesus ate all kinds of food, both good and bad, clean and unclean.” The slander move has a still stronger scholarly form. The pairing “a gluttonous man, and a winebibber” (φάγος καὶ οἰνοπότης) is widely connected in the commentary literature to the rebellious-son charge of Deuteronomy 21:20 — “he is a glutton, and a drunkard” (Hebrew zolel v’sove; the LXX of Deut 21:20 itself shares no vocabulary with Matthew’s φάγος καὶ οἰνοπότης, but Proverbs 23:20-21 — “winebibbers … riotous eaters of flesh … the drunkard and the glutton”, the same sove and zolel roots — supplies οἰνοπότης in its own LXX, carrying the pairing into the Greek Bible as stock idiom) — the very statute §6 below presents, and one quoted as live law in the Temple Scroll from Qumran. On that reading the crowd is not reporting observation at all: it is invoking a stock capital-offense formula, framing Jesus as the rebellious son who deserves death. A formulaic legal slur needs far less factual substrate than an ad-hoc accusation — which, if it stands, blunts the moderationist’s “slander needs a substrate” reply before it is made. On this reading, the study’s favorite self-report proves only sociability — not the substance in the cup.

2. The lexical case for two wines

The four pillars of the two-wine theory — surveyed in Chapter 4 — provide the exegetical apparatus that supports the christological objection. Bacchiocchi’s Wine in the Bible (1989) is the mature academic statement, and each pillar can be given in his own words (all quotations verified verbatim against the archive.org edition, identifier wine-in-the-bible).

Lexical genericity. Hebrew yayin and Greek oinos are broader than English “wine”. Bacchiocchi:

Recent research, as we shall see, has challenged the “one wine” theory, by showing that the Hebrew and Greek words (yayin and oinos) which are uniformly rendered “wine” throughout the Scripture, can refer to either unfermented grape juice or to fermented wine. — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

This lexical breadth — as breadth — is uncontested by any competent Hebraist or classicist. And Bacchiocchi names his opponents’ assumption precisely: the “one wine theory,” the belief that biblical “wine” is in all instances alcoholic, “has greatly prejudiced the study of the Biblical teachings on the use of alcoholic beverages by leading many sincere Christians to believe that God approves the moderate use of fermented, intoxicating wine.”

Bacchiocchi also has a prepared defense against the moderationist’s favorite lexical counter-text, Hosea 4:11 (“whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart”). He surveys the occurrences of tirosh (his own tally differs slightly from the standard count of ~38) and finds it names the raw vintage yield — nineteen times in the harvest triplet “grain, new wine, and oil” — with Isaiah 65:8 (juice still in the cluster) and Micah 6:15 (grapes being trodden) as clear cases; on his count, “with the exception of Hosea 4:11, none of the other thirty-five texts where the word occurs allow for” a fermented sense. He then argues the context excludes intoxication at Hosea 4:11 too:

First of all because the verb yiqqah (“take away”) is never used in the sense of intoxication in the Bible… Second, had the prophet meant to give a list of the major intoxicating articles which take away the understanding, he would not have mentioned “fornication” first since that does not intoxicate literally. Moreover, why did he mention two articles of the same class, listing the weaker of the two, “new wine” (tirosh), last?… The solution to the problem must be found by recognizing that what connects together “fornication, wine and grape juice” is not physical intoxication but spiritual apostasy. — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

And he closes with a concessive fork: even if tirosh did mean newly fermented wine at Hosea 4:11, the verse would then indict wine “irrespective of the quantity used” — proving abstinence, not moderation, since the prophet “does not say ‘Too much wine and new wine take away understanding.’”

The lexical case also has a grammatical exhibit in Proverbs 20:1 — “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” The prohibitionist parsing takes the Hebrew seriously as written: yayin is the grammatical subject, and the predicate lets (“mocker,” “scoffer”) — elsewhere in Proverbs a word for a person, the scorner who cannot be corrected — is applied to the substance itself. Wine does not merely occasion mocking in the one who abuses it; wine is a mocker, an agent personified with the scoffer’s own character, exactly as strong drink is a brawler (homeh, “raging”). On this reading the verse assigns the moral property to the substance, not to the user — the strongest single grammatical datum for the substance-view in the Wisdom literature, and the categorical reading that Chapter 1 §4.1 flagged for examination here. Whoever is deceived “thereby” is then deceived by the substance’s own agency, and the only wisdom is distance.

The temperance lexicon has a parallel move for shekar, the “strong drink” of Numbers 28:7 and Deuteronomy 14:26 — the two sanctuary texts this study leans on hardest. Lees & Burns derive the word from the sweetness family: “shakar, ‘saccharine drink,’ is related to the word for sugar in all the Indo-Germanic and Semitic languages” (Temperance Bible-Commentary, Preliminary Dissertation) — so that the shekar poured out to the LORD and bought with tithe silver was, on their reading, a sweet (and possibly unfermented) beverage, not “strong drink” at all. If shekar is saccharine rather than intoxicating, the study’s “clearest single data points” dissolve.

The lexical family also mounts a grammatical attack on the verse this study calls its diagnostic hinge. Ephesians 5:18 in the KJV reads “And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess” — and the temperance reading takes the KJV’s relative at face value: the antecedent of “wherein” (Greek ἐν ᾧ) is the wine itself, so that the asōtia — the profligacy, the dissoluteness — is located in the substance, not merely in the drunken state. Since οἶνος is masculine and the relative ᾧ is morphologically masculine-or-neuter, the parse is grammatically possible; on it, Paul’s verse is a statement about what wine contains, and the verse the moderationist reads as distinguishing state from substance becomes the prohibitionist’s own proof-text that the substance carries the vice within it.

The most sophisticated companion argument in the modern literature concedes the study’s entire lexical case and still concludes for abstention: the dilution argument. Its standard statement is Robert H. Stein, “Wine-Drinking in New Testament Times” (Christianity Today, June 20, 1975: 9-11), with a version in Norman Geisler, “A Christian Perspective on Wine-Drinking” (Bibliotheca Sacra 139:553 [January 1982]: 46-55, verified against the journal text). Geisler draws the conclusion in his own words: “Though fermented wine was drunk in Bible times and though the Bible approved of wine-drinking, one needs to remember that the alcoholic content was much less than that of wine today. What is used today is not the wine of the New Testament! Therefore Christians ought not drink wine, beer, or other alcoholic beverages for they are actually ‘strong drink’ and are forbidden in Scripture. Even ancient pagans did not drink what some Christians drink today!” (p. 51). The argument: yes, biblical wine was fermented — but it was drunk mixed with water at ratios of two, three, or four parts water to one of wine (the study’s own Justin and Cyprian material attests the mixed cup as the Christian norm, and the classical sources treat unmixed wine, akratos, as barbaric). The strongest modern statements press the ratios higher still: Athenaeus’s catalog of mixing customs (Deipnosophistae 10.426-431) preserves Hesiod’s three parts water to one of wine, the sympotic proverb “drink either five or three or at least not four” (on Plutarch’s explanation of the same proverb, Quaest. conv. 3.9, the numerals name the mixture’s total parts — “five” is three water to two wine, “three” is two to one), and the law of Zaleucus among the Locrians that made unprescribed unmixed wine a capital offense — from which some abstentionist writers argue that typical ratios of 3:1 or higher pushed the common cup toward two percent alcohol, making modern undiluted wine categorically discontinuous with the biblical drink. At those ratios the beverage ran perhaps two to four percent alcohol (Stein and Geisler’s estimate; classical ratios varied widely, and residual strength remained sufficient to intoxicate, as the era’s own drunkards attest). Modern table wine at twelve to fourteen percent, undiluted, is therefore closer to what the ancients would have classed with shekar or with the “unmixed wine” of the barbarians than to anything Jesus drank. On this reading the Christian who abstains from modern wine is not contradicting Scripture; he is honoring the biblical categories, because the biblical substance in its biblical form no longer sits on the modern table. No two-wine lexicography is needed; the whole moderationist case can be granted, and abstention from modern-strength alcohol still follows.

Beyond the lexicon, the abstentionist has a historical companion argument. Cyprian’s own letter concedes that “water is offered in some places in the Lord’s cup” — some places, a distributed practice, not one congregation — and his closing pardon for predecessors who erred “by ignorance or simplicity” implies the practice had standing and duration. Bread-and-water eucharists also appear in the apocryphal Acts literature, and the phenomenon has been treated at monograph length: Adolf von Harnack argued as early as 1891 (“Brot und Wasser: die eucharistischen Elemente bei Justin”) that the water-eucharist tradition was early and widespread, and Andrew McGowan’s Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford, 1999) catalogues the ascetic-meal streams across the second and third centuries. A well-read abstentionist can therefore say: the “unanimity” of the pre-Nicene witness is the unanimity of the winners; a recurrent minority abstained, and was written out.

Contradictions require distinction. Psalm 104:15 blesses “wine that maketh glad the heart of man”. Proverbs 23:31 forbids looking upon “the wine when it is red”. Both use yayin. If Scripture cannot contradict itself, and both are commanded, then the substance named must differ between the two uses. Bacchiocchi’s one-sentence summary of where this reasoning lands:

The conclusion of this whole study on the Biblical teaching regarding the use of alcoholic beverages can be summarized in one sentence: Scripture is consistent in teaching moderation in the use of wholesome, unfermented beverages and abstinence from the use of intoxicating fermented beverages. — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

Ancient preservation technology. The Mediterranean world knew multiple preservation techniques, and Bacchiocchi presses the point further than most of his predecessors — he argues preservation of unfermented juice was actually the easier problem:

Contrary to popular opinion, the problems the ancients encountered in preserving fermented wine were as great as, if not actually greater than, those faced in preserving unfermented grape juice. To prevent fermented wine from becoming acid, moldy, or foul-smelling, vintners used a host of preservatives such as salt, sea-water, liquid or solid pitch, boiled-down must, marble dust, lime, sulphur fumes and crushed iris. In comparison to preserving fermented wine, preserving grape juice unfermented was a relatively simpler process. It was accomplished by boiling down the juice to a syrup, or by separating the fermentable pulp from the juice of the grape by means of filtration, or by placing the grape juice in sealed jars which were immersed in a pool of cold water, or by fumigating the wine jars with sulphur before sealing them. — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

Unfermented “wine” was a real biblical-era category, on this argument — not a temperance-era anachronism.

Sinless Christ concern. The lexical and technological apparatus supports the christological argument. Bacchiocchi’s own statement of the Cana conclusion adds a lexical refinement this study’s Chapter 2 must reckon with:

Scriptural and moral consistency requires that “the good wine” produced by Christ was fresh, unfermented grape juice. This is supported by the very adjective used to describe it, namely kalos, which denotes that which is morally excellent, instead of agathos, which means simply good. — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

A fifth move — the wineskins inversion. Bacchiocchi also turns the wineskins parable (Matt 9:17 par.), which moderationist readings treat as presupposing active fermentation, into evidence for his own side:

The “new wine” Jesus commended through the parable of the new wineskins (Luke 5:37-38; Mark 2:22) was unfermented must, either boiled or filtered, because not even new wineskins could withstand the pressure of the gas produced by fermenting new wine. — Bacchiocchi, Wine in the Bible (1989)

The claim is empirical: fermentation gas pressure would burst any skin, new or old; therefore the parable’s new wine must be must that will never ferment, stored in new skins for cleanliness rather than elasticity. If the empirical claim holds, the moderationist reading of the parable (Chapter 1 §6) fails.

Together the pillars form a coherent exegetical system. The system stands or falls on the christological argument at its center. If Proverbs 23:31 is a universal command, the pillars support the reading that Cana produced unfermented wine and that all subsequent Christian practice should honor the same distinction.

3. Habakkuk 2:15 — the anti-serving argument

Beyond Cana, the prohibitionist tradition presses another biblical text into service against the modern Christian who serves wine to guests:

Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness! — Habakkuk 2:15

The verse’s own grammar targets a specific act — the host who serves drink for the purpose of humiliating a neighbor. But the prohibitionist extension reads the verse’s force more broadly. The one who gives his neighbor drink knowing that some neighbors, some times, will drink to drunkenness, participates in the outcome he could have prevented. The pastoral principle is: because I cannot know which of my guests may be an alcoholic in recovery, or a young person whose relationship with alcohol is not yet formed, or a struggler who will be tempted beyond what he can bear, the safest and most loving act is to withhold the substance entirely. Habakkuk’s woe is invoked as a warning against causing what could have been avoided.

This is a serious pastoral argument. It takes the pastoral care of one’s neighbor as the load-bearing consideration and lets that consideration govern one’s own practice. It is not a categorical claim that wine is intrinsically evil; it is a practical claim that the risk of causing another’s drunkenness is high enough, and the pastoral cost of alcoholism serious enough, that a Christian host should not offer the substance. Whether or not one accepts the reading, the pastoral concern it protects is real and Christian.

The anti-serving family has a New Testament companion of its own — the strongest single verse in the abstentionist arsenal, because it is the only place Scripture says in so many words that it is good not to drink wine: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak” (Romans 14:21). The standard deployment, running from the temperance commentaries into modern Independent Fundamental Baptist and Southern Baptist teaching, universalizes the verse’s condition: in an age of mass media, mobile congregations, and public lives, every Christian’s drinking is potentially visible to some weaker brother somewhere; the verse’s “whereby thy brother stumbleth” is therefore always satisfied; and the voluntary abstention Paul calls “good” hardens into the standing counsel — practically, the standing rule — for every believer in every place. On this reading the moderationist’s own proof-text for liberty becomes the abstentionist’s proof-text for its permanent suspension.

4. 1 Thessalonians 5:22 — the appearance of evil

Abstain from all appearance of evil. — 1 Thessalonians 5:22

The prohibitionist tradition treats 1 Thessalonians 5:22 as a warrant for universal Christian abstention on the ground that drinking always appears to some observer as evidence of intemperance, whatever the actual practice may be. The argument is:

Wine drinking can appear to a weaker brother, a recovering alcoholic, or a non-Christian observer as evidence of drunkenness or of accommodation to the world’s appetites.
A Christian’s witness is compromised by any behavior that so appears.
1 Thessalonians 5:22 commands abstention from every appearance of evil.
Therefore the Christian must abstain from wine entirely, so as not to compromise his witness.

The argument has a particular force in cultures where the surrounding society treats moderate drinking as unremarkable, but where the church distinguishes itself from that society by a visible discipline of abstention. This is the pastoral shape of much American evangelical Baptist and Methodist and Pentecostal culture through the twentieth century — a discipline that visibly marks the Christian from the world by refraining from what the world takes as normal. Abstention becomes not merely personal vocation but corporate witness.

The extended reading takes 1 Thessalonians 5:22 to be commanding not just avoidance of actual evil, but avoidance of everything that looks evil to an observer. On this reading, wine can appear evil (even when its use is moderate), and therefore wine falls under the command.

5. Ezekiel 44:21 and the universal priesthood

The Old Testament restricted priestly drinking during sanctuary service:

Neither shall any priest drink wine, when they enter into the inner court. — Ezekiel 44:21

The prohibitionist extension joins this text to the New Testament’s teaching that all believers share in a priestly calling:

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. — 1 Peter 2:9

The syllogism is straightforward. Old Testament priests, on duty in the sanctuary, must not drink wine. New Testament Christians are a royal priesthood, on duty always in a spiritual sanctuary. Therefore New Testament Christians must not drink wine.

The argument has a royal twin. Proverbs 31:4-5 forbids wine to kings — “It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted” — and the New Testament calls believers not only priests but kings: “and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father” (Revelation 1:6, KJV). If priests may not drink on duty, and kings may not drink lest they pervert judgment, and every Christian is perpetually both king and priest, the double office yields a double prohibition. Patton presses the Lemuel text into exactly this service: “Hence the scriptural injunction, ‘It is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert judgment’” (Bible Wines, on the deceitful power of alcohol). The kings-and-priests pairing as a formal syllogism circulates chiefly in fundamentalist homiletics rather than in a single canonical text, but its components are all present in the temperance sources. Isaiah 28:7 supplies the argument’s cautionary exhibit: “the priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink… they err in vision, they stumble in judgment” — if wine could ruin the judgment of Israel’s consecrated officers, the prohibitionist asks, why would the universal priesthood risk it at all?

The pastoral application extends the priestly discipline to the whole life of the believer. If a priest at the temple in Jerusalem could not have his judgment compromised by wine, how much more the Christian whose worship is continuous, whose temple is his own body (1 Cor 6:19), whose priestly service is always underway. The Israelite priest’s sanctuary was a physical place; the Christian’s sanctuary is his own life. If the ban applied there, it applies here.

6. Deuteronomy 21:20 and the severity of drunkenness

The Torah’s provision for the persistently drunken son carries a capital penalty:

Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. — Deuteronomy 21:19-20

The prohibitionist tradition reads Deuteronomy 21 as evidence of God’s severe assessment of drunkenness. A composite portrait — stubborn, rebellious, glutton, drunkard — carries a death penalty. Whether or not the passage was ever actually invoked in Israel is beside the point; the canonical presence of the passage tells us how God regards habitual drunkenness. And the pastoral inference is that any drinking is a step onto a path God views with capital seriousness. A Christian who would not attempt any other capital sin — murder, adultery, kidnapping — should also not attempt the first step toward a sin the Torah punishes with death.

This is not the argument that any drinking is drunkenness. It is the argument that any drinking places the drinker on a path toward drunkenness, and that a substance capable of producing a state Scripture treats with capital severity should be avoided out of holy fear. The argument uses Deuteronomy 21 not to condemn moderate drinkers, but to warn moderate drinkers of the seriousness of what could follow.

7. The Nazirite and Rechabite patterns universalized

Chapter 1 §5 examined the Nazirite (Numbers 6), the Rechabites (Jeremiah 35), and John the Baptist (Luke 1:15) as vocational abstention — set apart for particular persons or seasons, honored but not universalized. The prohibitionist tradition contests this reading at its strongest form.

The argument runs: God commends the Rechabites (Jer 35:18-19). What God commends is by definition the pattern of faithfulness. The Rechabites’ pattern was total abstention from wine, propagated through generations by parental instruction. What God commended in Jeremiah’s day was the pattern of abstention, not merely the fact of obedience-to-father — obedience to a wicked father-instruction would not have been commended. Therefore the Rechabite pattern itself is what God endorsed. If a family, or a church, or an entire Christian tradition, propagates a Rechabite pattern of total abstention through the generations, they too walk in what Jeremiah 35 shows God commending.

Similarly with the Nazirite. The Nazirite was set apart for the Lord. The New Testament proclaims that all believers are set apart for the Lord (1 Pet 2:9; Rom 12:1). If the Old Testament pattern of being set apart included wine abstention as its most visible discipline, and if the New Testament universalizes being set apart to all believers, then the wine-abstention discipline is likewise universalized. The distinction between temporary and permanent abstention, or between vocational and universal, is a Christian distinction the prohibitionist tradition contests. Every Christian is under a Nazirite-like calling, and every Christian should walk in Nazirite-like discipline.

John the Baptist is the New Testament figure most closely aligned with this pattern. Luke 1:15 announces him as an abstainer from the womb. Jesus commends him with the highest praise: “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist” (Matt 11:11). What is highest praise in Jesus’s own mouth is set-apart abstention. The Christian who imitates John, on the prohibitionist reading, walks in the tradition of the greatest man born of a woman.

This reading was rejected by the mainstream church in the second century when the Encratites made wine-abstention doctrine (Chapter 3 §5). It has been renewed in modern American evangelicalism. Whether the mainstream church was right or the Encratites were right on this point is contested by the tradition itself.

8. Ellen G. White and the health-reform theology

The Seventh-day Adventist tradition, since Ellen G. White’s writings in the late nineteenth century, has developed a positive theology of temperance that goes beyond the prohibitionist reading of specific texts. White taught that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost (1 Cor 6:19), and that a Christian’s stewardship of that temple includes the choice of what to put into it. Wine, tobacco, tea, coffee, and heavy meat consumption are treated as adverse to the temple; a plain, largely vegetarian, temperance diet is the mature Christian discipline.

White’s argument is not that wine is intrinsically evil in the same sense that murder or adultery is. It is that a Christian who is serious about the stewardship of his body — who understands the body as the vehicle of continuing spiritual service — will make health-informed choices, and abstention from alcohol is one of those. The Adventist “eight laws of health” (nutrition, exercise, water, sunshine, temperance, air, rest, trust in God) fold wine abstention into a comprehensive discipline of physical stewardship.

Bacchiocchi extends White’s theological framework with the exegetical apparatus of the two-wine theory. The two together form a coherent pastoral position: the biblical case for two wines (Chapter 4 §1.6) shows that Christ produced unfermented wine at Cana; the health-reform case shows why Christians today should follow the same pattern. The Adventist tradition thus offers not merely a set of proof-texts but a whole-life theology of temperance rooted in stewardship of the body-as-temple.

9. Modern pastoral testimony

Beyond formal theological argument, the prohibitionist tradition draws heavily on pastoral testimony from ministers whose experience with the pastoral cost of alcoholism has shaped their teaching.

David Wilkerson (1931-2011), founder of Teen Challenge, ministered for decades to addicts and their families, and his ministry’s teaching treated abstention as the safest and most loving practice — for the recovering addict above all, and for the Christian whose drinking might become a snare. Whatever one makes of the exegesis, no serious reader dismisses the pastoral experience behind it: Teen Challenge’s recovery work is among the most sustained bodies of Christian addiction ministry in the American twentieth century.

Jack Van Impe (1931-2020) argued the biblical case for total abstention at book length in Alcohol: The Beloved Enemy (Thomas Nelson, 1980), drawing on the two-wine theory in the Patton line and on the New Testament passages surveyed above, and carried the case to a mass television audience across four decades of broadcast ministry.

John MacArthur (1939-2025) — a mainstream Reformed expositor not aligned with the two-wine theory — taught that while Scripture does not categorically forbid drinking, wisdom and pastoral concern for weaker brothers commend abstention for the Christian leader in the present American context (see the Grace to You sermon series on Ephesians 5:18 and related Q&A material). His position illustrates that the pastoral concern can generate functional abstention teaching even where the prohibitionist exegesis is rejected.

John Piper’s 1981 message “Total Abstinence and Church Membership” (Bethlehem Baptist Church, 4 October 1981) gives the pattern its most carefully argued double form. To the question whether Christians in America should abstain from alcohol, Piper answered yes — for himself and as counsel — on grounds of alcohol’s desensitizing effect on the desire for holiness and the harm of encouraging others toward what he rejected for himself. But to the question whether abstinence should be required for church membership, he answered no: “My answer to the first question is yes, and my answer to the second question is no.” He argued that the New Testament allows a difference of conviction and practice on this issue in the church, and he led his elders to strike the total-abstinence clause from Bethlehem’s church covenant, replacing a specific behavioral mandate with a general pledge to avoid what harms the body or jeopardizes one’s own or another’s faith. Piper’s profile matters for this chapter precisely because it shows the abstention conviction at full pastoral strength without the prohibitionist exegesis and without the membership fence — the strongest evidence that the pastoral concern is separable from the two-wine theory.

The same pattern — wine permitted in principle, abstention taught in practice — is widespread among pastors of large American evangelical congregations, where the pastoral cost of misuse is judged too high to make moderation the default counsel from the pulpit.

The testimony of these pastors is not exegetical argument, and it does not depend on the two-wine theory being correct. It is the testimony of ministry-shaped pastoral wisdom. A Christian who reads their reasoning may still hold a moderationist exegesis and yet find their pastoral counsel compelling for his own community.

10. “The fruit of the vine” at the Last Supper

A tenth argument concerns the vocabulary Jesus himself used at the Last Supper. The Synoptic accounts avoid the ordinary word oinos; they use the phrase gennēma tēs ampelou, “fruit of the vine” (Matt 26:29 / Mark 14:25 / Luke 22:18). The prohibitionist reading takes this vocabulary choice as intentional. If Jesus had meant fermented wine, he had a specific word for it (oinos). He chose instead the more generic phrase — “fruit of the vine” — which the prohibitionist reads as pointing specifically to unfermented grape juice.

The moderationist response, developed in Chapter 5 (§2, response 10) and grounded in the study’s Chapter 2, will contest this reading on liturgical grounds. But the prohibitionist reading of “fruit of the vine” as deliberately distinguishing itself from oinos is present in the literature and deserves its place here, on its own terms.

11. Jesus as member of a wine-abstaining Jewish sect

An eleventh argument, present in the popular literature and in some Adventist and Ebionite-revivalist teaching, holds that Jesus belonged to a Jewish sect that took a corporate vow of abstention from wine, and that his family, upbringing, and closest disciples all shared that discipline.

The strong form of the argument runs as follows. The Jewish world of Jesus’s time knew several rigorist purity groups that took vows of set-apartness — the Nazirites (Numbers 6), the Rechabites (Jeremiah 35), the Essenes (Josephus, Philo), the Therapeutae (Philo). John the Baptist was announced from the womb as a permanent Nazirite (Luke 1:15). Jesus was John’s cousin, was baptized by John, and named him the greatest man born of a woman (Matthew 11:11). Jesus’s family, on the argument developed most fully by Robert Eisenman in James the Brother of Jesus (1997), was rooted in a Jerusalem-priestly Nazirite-Rechabite-Essene network. Hegesippus, preserved by Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica II.23), reports of James the brother of the Lord that “he drank no wine or strong drink, nor did he eat flesh; no razor went upon his head; he did not anoint himself with oil, and he did not go to the baths” (Loeb, Kirsopp Lake). James lived under a lifelong Nazirite-style discipline. If Jesus was raised in the same household, the argument concludes, his practice must have been the same. The Ebionites — the Jewish-Christian descendants of that original family sect — preserved the Nazirite-abstinent pattern and used water at eucharist (Epiphanius, Panarion 30.16). This chain of evidence, on the strong reading, tells us that the original Jesus movement was a wine-abstaining Nazirite sect and that the wine-tolerant Christianity we know is a later Pauline/Gentile innovation.

The pastoral force of this argument, where it is held, is considerable. If Jesus belonged to a sect that treated wine-abstention as covenantal discipline, then the temperance-era prohibitionist reading of the New Testament acquires a Christological anchor. Christian abstention is not a nineteenth-century American cultural development but the recovery of an original apostolic pattern. Modern denominational traditions that teach abstention are not innovating against the church’s tradition; they are recovering it.

The full historical evidence — the Qumran corpus, the Josephus and Philo material, the Mishnah on Passover cups, the New Testament portrait — is examined in Appendix C. One further argument remains.

12. The officer-qualification argument (μὴ πάροινον)

A final scriptural argument concerns the qualifications for church office. Paul requires that a bishop be “not given to wine” (1 Timothy 3:3; Titus 1:7 — Greek μὴ πάροινον), while deacons and aged women are held to the different standard “not given to much wine” (1 Tim 3:8; Titus 2:3 — μὴ οἴνῳ πολλῷ). The prohibitionist reading takes the difference in wording as a difference in standard: deacons are limited to little; overseers are forbidden the substance altogether. On this reading paroinos is parsed etymologically — para + oinos, “at” or “beside wine” — so that μὴ πάροινον means “not [even] beside wine”: the overseer must not be a wine-user at all. The strongest form pairs this with a second lexical datum: the same qualification list requires the overseer to be νηφάλιος (1 Tim 3:2; also 3:11; Titus 2:2), and in classical Greek religious usage nēphalios described wineless offerings (νηφάλια ἱερά); older lexicons such as Thayer gloss it for the Pastorals as “abstaining from wine, either entirely or at least from its immoderate use.” On the two-datum reading, the overseer must be both wineless (nēphalios) and never at wine (mē paroinos). Since every Christian is called to aspire to the character of the overseer (the qualification list is elsewhere read as a portrait of mature Christian character generally), the leadership standard becomes the discipleship standard, and total abstention follows for all who would be mature.

This argument has real pastoral force in traditions where the pastor’s visible example is treated as the congregation’s template, and it explains a widespread practice: many churches that permit lay moderation still require ministerial abstention. The tradition also has a prepared answer to the obvious objection from 1 Timothy 5:23: on the prohibitionist reading, “drink no longer water” (mēketi hydropotei) proves Timothy was habitually a water-drinker — living proof of the ministerial abstention baseline — and Paul’s “use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake” is a strictly medicinal prescription (Bacchiocchi adds that the medicinal wine may itself have been unfermented), not a sanction for beverage use.

The pastoral coherence

The twelve arguments above form a coherent whole. They are not a random collection of proof-texts; they are a system of readings that fit together.

The Christ who is sinless produced unfermented wine at Cana, because Scripture commands even the look upon fermented wine to be avoided (Prov 23:31). The biblical vocabulary that would otherwise seem to describe fermented wine actually names a broader category, one that includes unfermented preserved substances (the four pillars). The pastoral warnings against drunkenness — Deuteronomy 21, 1 Corinthians 6, Galatians 5 — extend into a pastoral warning against any drinking that risks it (the severity argument). The Old Testament patterns of vocational abstention — Nazirite, Rechabite, priest — are extended to universal Christian discipline through the New Testament’s universalization of priestly identity (1 Pet 2:9). The pastoral texts (Habakkuk 2:15, 1 Thessalonians 5:22) provide direct application: do not serve, do not even appear as one who serves. And the whole apparatus is embedded in a health-reform theology that treats the body as temple and its stewardship as spiritual service.

The tradition that walks in this reading is not a Christian oddity. It is Ellen G. White’s Seventh-day Adventist body, whose sanitariums (Battle Creek, Loma Linda) contributed substantially to modern American public-health medicine. It is Orange Scott’s Wesleyan Methodist Connection, abstentionist from its 1843 founding at Utica, New York. It is the fundamentalist Baptist movement that separated from the Northern Baptist Convention, whose Sunday-school and Bible-institute curricula formed generations of American Protestants. It is the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union whose institutional presence carried the moral weight of American Protestant womanhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And it is the Independent Fundamental Baptist and Wesleyan Holiness bodies that today, in the twenty-first century, continue to teach abstention on the ground that Scripture read as a whole commends it.

The moderationist argument this study has developed disagrees with the prohibitionist reading. The disagreement is exegetical (the reading of Prov 23:31, of Cana, of gleukos at Acts 2:13), historical (the pre-Nicene evidence, the temperance-era origin of the two-wine theory), and philological (the LXX bridging, the archaeological consensus). But the disagreement is between Christian traditions, both of which read Scripture, both of which honor Christ, both of which take drunkenness seriously as sin. Chapter 5 offers the study’s response — but as a response within a Christian family, not as a dismissal of a stranger’s voice.

The next chapter is the synthesis. It answers this one.