Chapter 0: Overview — Kept the Good Wine Until Now

Wine, Jesus, and 1,900 Years of Christian Practice — the study in brief

Two questions sit at the center of this study.

Did Jesus drink alcoholic wine?

Is wine as a substance — distinct from drunkenness — sinful?

Both are practical questions, not merely academic ones. If you attend a church that uses grape juice at communion because wine is understood as morally suspect, the questions matter to what happens at your Lord’s Table. If you have a family member in recovery from alcoholism, the questions matter to how you host dinners. If you have grown up in one American Christian culture (where any drinking is compromise) and married into another (where wine at Passover is unremarkable), the questions matter to how you live between them.

The answers, on close examination of Scripture, of what Jesus himself did, of what the early church practiced, and of how the modern division came about, are clearer than the current confusion suggests. This chapter walks through the whole picture in short form.

Where the confusion came from

For nineteen centuries, the Christian church used fermented wine at communion. Every early Christian community that celebrated the Lord’s Supper — from the Syrian churches whose practice appears in the Didache, through the mid-second-century Roman church described by Justin Martyr, through the Gallic churches Irenaeus led, through the North African communion Cyprian shepherded, through the medieval Latin mass and the Byzantine liturgy — put wine on the table. When bishops in some places substituted water for wine — “water is offered in some places in the Lord’s cup,” Cyprian reports — the church’s leading North African bishop wrote a lengthy letter correcting the practice. When the Encratite sect in the second century tried making wine-abstention a universal Christian rule, they were counted as heretics.

Then, over the course of about a generation in nineteenth-century America, a large section of American Protestantism changed the practice. Methodists resolved in 1864 that “the pure juice of the grape” be used at the Lord’s Supper. A Wesleyan Methodist dentist named Thomas Welch, working in Vineland, New Jersey, applied Louis Pasteur’s newly published pasteurization technique to grape juice in 1869, producing the first commercially viable, shelf-stable non-fermenting grape juice made specifically for communion use — the ancients could boil juice to syrup or retard fermentation, but no one before had a drinkable table juice that kept. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, put mass pressure on Methodist and Baptist churches to adopt the new substance. By 1880, the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Discipline had made grape juice the standard. Baptist, Restorationist, Holiness, and Pentecostal bodies followed. When Prohibition arrived in 1920 with a sacramental-wine exemption for religious use — the exemption on which Catholic and Jewish practice depended — most American Protestant communion tables had already switched — and the association of communion with grape juice became deeply embedded through the thirteen Prohibition years.

Alongside the practical shift came a reading of Scripture designed to justify it. The “two-wine theory”, articulated within the temperance movement of the 1830s-40s (Eliphalet Nott’s 1838-9 lectures, first printed 1846; Moses Stuart’s 1848 letter to Nott lending it philological authority), consolidated by Lees & Burns (1868) and William Patton (1874), and revived by Samuele Bacchiocchi (Andrews University, 1989), argued that biblical vocabulary for “wine” is generic — that Scripture’s approved “wine” is unfermented and its condemned “wine” is fermented. If the theory holds, then Jesus never made or drank alcoholic wine; the Cana miracle produced boiled grape syrup; the Last Supper cup was unfermented juice; Christian communion should follow suit.

The theory has one virtue: it takes seriously that Scripture warns strongly against drunkenness and blesses wine as gift. But the theory pays a heavy price for its resolution of that tension. It requires reading the biblical vocabulary in a way no ancient Hebrew or Greek reader read it. It requires reading Jesus’s own life in a way no early Christian writer read it. It requires making the miracle of Cana a substance-swap that undermines the miracle’s own narrative point. And it requires treating the whole church’s practice from AD 30 to AD 1869 as either mistaken or corrupted.

What Scripture says

Read whole, Scripture teaches a clear pattern.

Wine appears as gift and blessing. The Psalmist lists it with bread and oil as the three staple gifts of God’s provision: “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” (Ps 104:15). The Deuteronomic tithe law explicitly authorizes buying wine and even strong drink with tithe silver for the covenant feast before the LORD (Deut 14:26). The prophetic vision of the messianic feast is a feast of aged wine “on the lees well refined” (Isa 25:6). Even the daily sanctuary libation was of shekar, the strongest of the substance-words: “in the holy place shalt thou cause the strong wine to be poured unto the LORD for a drink offering” (Num 28:7). The substance itself is not the sin — the substance is offered in worship.

Wine appears at feast and covenant. The first named wine in Scripture is Melchizedek’s bread and wine, blessing Abram before the covenant (Gen 14:18). Jesus’s first sign is turning water into wine at a wedding at Cana. His last meal before the cross is a Passover meal, at which he lifts what he calls “the fruit of the vine” and institutes a memorial for his blood to be shed. The line runs from Genesis 14 through John 2 to Matthew 26.

Wine appears with warnings. Scripture is not naive about the substance’s potential for harm. Proverbs warns diagnostically about tarrying too long over the wine and its downstream costs: “at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder” (Prov 23:32). The prophets warn against the drunkards of Ephraim, the woes for those who rise early to follow strong drink. Paul warns bishops and deacons against being “given to wine”. Ephesians 5:18 gives the diagnostic hinge: “Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit”. Note the grammar. The imperative is not “do not drink wine” — it is “do not be drunk with wine”. The moral operator is drunkenness, not the substance.

Wine is treated as a substance that can be misused, always. Scripture does not romanticize it. Noah’s drunkenness, Lot’s shame with his daughters, Nabal’s stupor before David — the narrative record is honest about the human cost of intoxication. But the moral verdict lands on the state, not the substance.

Abstention is honored — as a vocation. The Nazirite vow authorizes any Israelite, man or woman, to take a temporary vow of separation that includes total abstention from grape products of any kind (Num 6). Priests on duty must abstain when they enter the tabernacle (Lev 10). Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist stand in the Nazirite line — set apart from the womb for a prophetic ministry. But the vocation is voluntary in the Nazirite case, task-specific in the priestly case, and prophetic in the case of John. Scripture never universalizes abstention as a Christian norm.

The “new wine” question has a decisive test-case. Acts 2:13 has the crowd mocking the apostles at Pentecost: “these men are full of new wine”. The Greek word is gleukos — the word later two-wine theorists translate as “grape juice”. But the whole force of the mockery depends on gleukos being intoxicating. If it named grape juice, the mockers would have no accusation. Peter’s response (Acts 2:15) does not correct the vocabulary but the timing: “it is but the third hour of the day” — too early to be drunk. Peter takes gleukos to mean an intoxicating substance and refutes the accusation on the ground that the timing rules it out. The two-wine theory’s central lexical claim breaks on this passage.

What Jesus did

Three moments in Jesus’s own life answer the question directly.

At Cana, Jesus produces something like 120-180 gallons of wine for a wedding. The master of the feast pronounces it “the good wine” and remarks that customary practice is to serve the good wine first, before “men have well drunk” and their palates are dulled. His remark works only if both the wine expected at that point in a feast and the wine now being tasted are the same kind of substance — fermented wine, in different qualities. Grape juice would not carry the master’s punchline. Every ancient reader of the passage — beginning with the church of the second and third centuries — read the Cana wine as ordinary fermented wine. Cyprian’s letter to Caecilius, some two centuries later, uses Cana as decisive proof that “the Lord at the marriage made wine of water” and therefore “we should make water of wine” is a perverse inversion.

At Matthew 11:19 (paralleled at Luke 7:34), Jesus tells us about his own reputation. He contrasts himself with John the Baptist: John came neither eating nor drinking, and the crowd said he had a devil; Jesus came eating and drinking, and the crowd called him “a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”. Jesus does not deny the factual basis of the accusation. He denies its moral interpretation. If Jesus had not drunk wine — observably, ordinarily — the crowd could not have accused him of being a winebibber, and the parallel with John’s Nazirite abstention would collapse. That Jesus drank wine is his own testimony.

At the Last Supper, Jesus takes the Passover cup — a cup of wine, by unanimous Jewish witness both biblical and rabbinic — and blesses it. He does not call it oinos in the Synoptic accounts; he uses the Jewish liturgical phrase “the fruit of the vine”. This is the standard Passover blessing formula for wine, preserved in the kiddush to this day. He then pledges not to drink of the fruit of the vine “until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt 26:29). The word “new” (kainon) presupposes continuity between the present substance and the future substance. The kingdom’s cup is a wine cup, refracted through resurrection glory. Which means the present cup is a wine cup.

Jesus taught nothing prohibitive about wine as substance. He warned against drunkenness (Luke 21:34) exactly the way Scripture does. His silence on the substance-question is not neutrality — it is a pointed absence in a teacher who was seldom silent about the moral valuation of created things. When Jesus wanted to say a thing was to be refused, he said so — of divorce, of oaths, of Sabbath legalism. He never so classified wine.

What the early church did

The mainstream pre-Nicene evidence is uniform: every second- and third-century source the church received as authoritative that names the eucharistic cup names it as wine. The Didache thanks God for “the holy vine of Thy son David” over the cup. Ignatius desires the “blood” of Christ “for a draught”. Justin Martyr describes twice in one chapter — 1 Apology 65 — a Christian communion of “bread and a cup of wine mixed with water”. A chapter later, Justin’s polemic against the Mithraic mysteries turns on the fact that Mithraic initiation uses “bread and a cup of water” — Justin regards this as a demonic parody, an argument that works only because the Christian cup is not water. Irenaeus, defending eucharistic realism against Gnostic teachers, speaks of “the mingled cup and the manufactured bread”.

When one third-century group in North Africa did adopt water-only communion — the “Aquarii” — Cyprian of Carthage wrote the definitive rebuttal. His letter to Caecilius (Ep. 62 in Ante-Nicene Fathers numbering) marshals the Last Supper narrative, the LXX Psalm 22/23:5 (“your inebriating cup, how excellent it is”), and the Cana miracle to argue that departing from wine is departing from Christ’s own institution. His key line: “the cup which inebriates is assuredly mingled with wine, for water cannot inebriate anybody”. Cyprian treats the eucharistic cup as a wine cup whose natural property is to inebriate — as Noah’s wine did, he says in the same breath — even while insisting that the Lord’s cup produces a sobering, spiritual inebriation. The substance-point stands either way: only wine can carry his argument.

Clement of Alexandria, in his Paedagogus II.2, provides the fullest pre-Nicene pastoral treatment of Christian drinking. His whole discussion presupposes wine is fermented and intoxicating. He counsels near-abstention to the young (“boys and girls should keep as much as possible away from this medicine”), moderate use at supper for mature adults, and permissive use for the aged (“who by reason and time as by anchors, they stand with greater ease the storm of passions which rushes down from intemperance”). He honors ascetic abstention as a personal vocation. His line “for both are works of God” — of water AND of wine — is the pre-Nicene deposit against the fringe movements (Encratites, Marcionites) that made wine-abstention a doctrine.

Tertullian, defending the Christian love-feast (agape) against pagan slander in his Apologeticus 39, tells us the measure of Christian drinking: after the meal, each participant must be able to stand up and sing a hymn without slurring. “A proof of the measure of our drinking.” He defends moderation, not abstention.

The pattern is uniform. The pre-Nicene church put wine on the eucharistic table, drank wine at ordinary meals, condemned drunkenness, honored personal ascetic abstention, and read Scripture the way the study reads it. The one competing practice that emerged (the Aquarii) was corrected. The one heretical movement that pushed universal abstention (the Encratites) was rejected.

What the modern academic evidence adds

The archaeological record has made the ancient world’s viticulture much clearer than it was to nineteenth-century commentators. Patrick McGovern’s biomolecular archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania has traced wine-fermentation in the Near East to at least 5400 BC (Hajji Firuz, northern Iran) — some seven thousand years before the biblical period. Magen Broshi’s economic archaeology places ordinary adult wine consumption in Roman-period Palestine on the order of a liter a day, varying by class and season. Fermented wine was the ordinary table drink; unfermented juice was a marginal preservation category, not a substance-word for what the biblical writers meant by yayin or oinos.

The lexical case has been re-examined and settled. Gordon Wenham’s Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis explicitly states the position: neither drinking nor wine, but drunkenness is condemned. Kenneth Gentry’s God Gave Wine (2000, 2007) provides the most sustained scholarly evangelical critique of the two-wine theory, showing that it rests on circular reasoning (identifying which biblical “wine” is fermented by whether Scripture approves or condemns it, then using this identification to prove the biblical distinction). Michael Wilkins in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels and Gary Meadors in the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters — the standard evangelical NT reference works — both conclude that oinos in the Gospels and Pauline epistles denotes fermented wine, and that Paul’s teaching distinguishes moderate use (a matter of Christian liberty) from drunkenness (which he consistently condemns).

The academic case is largely settled. The two-wine theory has found essentially no sustained defense among evangelical Old Testament or New Testament scholars publishing in major refereed journals since roughly 1980 — though it retains vigorous advocacy in confessional and popular-level literature: Seventh-day Adventist scholarship (anchored by Bacchiocchi), independent-fundamental-Baptist circles, and Wesleyan Holiness heirs of the nineteenth-century Methodist Discipline. In the mainstream academy it has been quietly set aside; its remaining defenders would reply that refereed venues are not neutral arbiters of confessional questions, and that point is noted.

Where this leaves us

Two conclusions are secure.

Jesus drank fermented wine. Scripture, Jesus’s own testimony, the pre-Nicene church, and the academic record all agree. Cana produced fermented wine; the Last Supper cup was the ordinary Passover wine; Jesus’s own reputation as a “winebibber” makes no sense on any other reading.

Wine as a substance is not itself sinful. Scripture treats it as gift, covenant sign, and eschatological image. Jesus made it and drank it. The pre-Nicene church used it in every communion cup it commemorated. The academic case for the substance-verdict is decisive.

A third conclusion is equally important, and the study returns to it in the synthesis chapter: the substance-question is not first-order in Jesus’s own priority-structure. The love of God and neighbor is first-order. The confession of Christ crucified and risen is first-order. The unity of his body is first-order. Where communion substance serves the first-order things, its exact composition — Catholic wine, Methodist grape juice, Catholic mustum accommodation — is prudential and pastoral. Where communion substance becomes the wedge that divides brothers, the question has been mis-scaled.

The pastoral concern behind the two-wine theory is real, even where its lexical case fails. Alcoholism is a genuine ministry problem. Recovery is a genuine priority. Communities with high addiction burdens have a legitimate interest in what appears on their communion tables. The mature response of the sacramental traditions — the Catholic mustum provision for clergy unable to consume alcohol (2003), the Lutheran and Anglican patterns of discreet individual accommodation, the ELCA’s whole-assembly flexibility — takes the pastoral concern seriously without rewriting the lexicon.

Personal vocation matters. If you find, on your own honest self-knowledge, that ordinary drinking is a snare for you, abstain — with the church’s blessing, in the tradition of Nazirite and monastic vocation. If your community’s needs point toward a corporate practice of abstention, that is a legitimate pastoral judgment. Neither individual nor corporate abstention has to be defended as biblical rule to be honored as biblical vocation.

Do not universalize your particular practice. A community that keeps wine at communion should not treat a community that keeps grape juice as sub-Christian. A community that keeps grape juice should not treat a community that keeps wine as compromised. Both are trying, in their own local shape, to live inside a pattern that is bigger than either of them.

The full chapters that follow this overview walk through the evidence in detail. Chapter 1 covers Scripture in seven categories of evidence (framed by a vocabulary orientation and a closing summary), presenting the whole counsel — every relevant passage the moderationist and prohibitionist voices lean on — with every citation drawn verbatim from the King James Version. Chapter 2 examines Jesus’s own life in the three decisive passages. Chapter 3 walks through the pre-Nicene evidence, with the key passages of Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Clement of Alexandria quoted at length. Chapter 4 tells the modern history — the two-wine theory’s rise in nineteenth-century America, Welch’s grape-juice invention, the denominational split by doctrine of the sacraments, and the twentieth-century academic response. Chapter 4.5 presents the prohibitionist case at its strongest — twelve arguments the Independent Fundamental Baptist, Wesleyan Holiness, and Seventh-day Adventist traditions have advanced from Scripture, Christology, and pastoral testimony (including the “Jesus was part of an abstaining Jewish sect” claim) — before the synthesis responds. Chapter 5 draws the synthesis, addressing both what the evidence establishes, how the prohibitionist arguments are answered, and how a community can live inside the pattern well. Three appendices provide the Hebrew and Greek word study (Appendix A), the collected verbatim texts of the principal pre-Nicene sources (Appendix B), and the Dead Sea Scrolls / rabbinic evidence together with the Jesus-sect question examined in full (Appendix C).

The opposing case, previewed. So that the reader carries the full weight of the other side into the evidence chapters, here are the twelve prohibitionist arguments Chapter 4.5 presents at strength, one sentence each: (1) Proverbs 23:31 forbids even looking on fermented wine, so the sinless Christ cannot have made it at Cana — with the companion slander-reading of Matthew 11:19 (“winebibber” is enemy slander, not self-report); (2) the biblical wine-words are generic, so “approved wine” may be unfermented — the two-wine lexicon, carrying with it five companion sub-arguments answered alongside it in Chapter 5: the Hosea 4:11 defense, the shekar-as-saccharine etymology, the Ephesians 5:18 “wherein” parse (the dissoluteness is in the wine), the dilution argument (ancient wine was watered to 2-4%, so modern wine is not the biblical substance), and the “unanimity of the winners” historical argument — together with two exhibits inside the pillars themselves, the Proverbs 20:1 “mocker” grammar and the wineskins inversion; (3) Habakkuk 2:15 pronounces woe on whoever gives his neighbour drink — with the companion universalized Romans 14:21 (every drink is visible to some weaker brother, so Paul’s “good” becomes standing counsel); (4) 1 Thessalonians 5:22 commands abstention from every appearance of evil; (5) priests could not drink on duty, kings could not drink lest they pervert judgment, and Christians are perpetually kings and priests; (6) Deuteronomy 21’s death penalty shows God treats drunkenness with a severity that makes any drinking reckless; (7) the Nazirite and Rechabite patterns, commended by God, universalize to all who are set apart; (8) stewardship of the body as God’s temple counsels abstention (the Adventist health-reform theology); (9) pastors with long addiction ministries testify that abstention is the only safe counsel; (10) “fruit of the vine” at the Last Supper deliberately avoids the word for wine; (11) Jesus belonged to a Nazirite-Essene family network that abstained; (12) overseers are commanded to be “not given to wine” categorically. Chapter 4.5 gives each its fullest form; Chapter 5 answers each in order.

Read as much as you find useful. The pattern is what matters: use with thanksgiving, moderation always, honor for those whose vocation calls for something different, love and unity above every substance-question. That is what Scripture teaches. That is what Jesus practiced. That is what the early church did. That is what a modern Christian community, of any denominational stripe, can honor in its own place.

The SCAR quadrilateral used throughout this study — Scripture, Christocentrism, Antiquity, Reality — is a restatement of Dean Taylor’s Apostolic Quadrilateral (see his A Change of Allegiance*, 2009), with thanks.*