SRR #55 | Roman Catholics & The Mingled Cup Part 3

I do a podcast.

I'm not interested in your podcast.

Folks, these are wolves. Truth be told, I oftentimes lay awake at night trying to figure out how I can get rid of wolves.

We are unabashedly, unashamedly Clarkian. And so, the next few statements that I'm going to make, I'm probably going to step on all of the Vantillian toes at the same time. And this is what we do at Simple Riff around the radio, you know.

We are polemical and polarizing, Jesus style.

I would first say that to characterize what we do as fashion is itself fashion. It's not hate, it's history. It's not fashion, it's the Bible. Jesus said, Woe to you when men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way, as opposed to blessed are you when you have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness.

It is on. We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle.

The Mingled Cup and the Claim of Apostolic Tradition

Alright, welcome back everybody. My name is Tim, and this is Simple Riff from on the radio. I want to thank you for joining us. We are going to be doing the third and final installment on the Mingled Cup today.

We have Timothy Kaufman with us. As everybody, I'm sure, is aware, he is our expert in Roman Catholicism. So, Tim, thank you for joining.

Us today. Hey, it's great to be here for the episode, episode three of the Mingled Cup. Thanks for having me.

Well, I've really been enjoying that. And we're going to get into it right now, but let's play a commercial from our sponsor. I want you guys to go out there and check out TrackPlanet, and then also, I just want to remind everybody that we are part of the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network.

Go ahead and check out the other podcasts. There are a number of other podcasts that are new to the group. So, be sure to check them out as well. And we'll be back in just a minute.

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Recap of Episodes 1 and 2 on Winecraft and the Early Church

Alright, we are back with Timothy Coffman. So, Tim, you've been doing all the research on this. As a matter of fact, Tim, how long have you been researching.

This topic? Well, this topic in particular I've been researching for a couple years, and I have written on it before, and we thought it would be nice to encapsulate it in an audio format so people can listen to it during their commute.

But the overall study, it first occurred to me back in 2012 that I kept on researching the early church, and I kept on finding that I don't get to Roman Catholicism until about the late 300s, and when I started looking at the history of mixing water with wine, I started reading through the early church fathers, and I realized they kept on referring to a manufacturing process, they kept on referring to what was common ingredients in water, the water and the mirum, as we talked about, and they would talk about it in terms of the mixed ingredients for bread as well, but what was missing for the first 300 years after the apostles was any evidence that there was a liturgical step of mixing the water with the wine.

And so, this is the result of about three years worth of research, and it's been since 2012 when I first started realizing that, wow, it's always about 300 years from the apostles before you start seeing Roman Catholicism pop up from a doctoral standpoint.

And that's what we'll be covering today. It's just one tiny little brick in that wall that shows that no matter what you look at, whatever we consider to be characteristically Roman Catholic, we always have to wait to the end of the 4th century for it to actually come up.

That's pretty interesting that so much of what is Roman Catholicism that portrays itself as ancient is actually a late 4th century novelty. And we've.

Been looking at that wall that Roman Catholicism faces when they try to trace their roots back to the beginning of the church. And as you said, they can't get past the latter part of the 4th century. And I think that's really important, and I want to go ahead, and I'm just going to throw this out there, but we are preparing an eschatology series with you.

So, folks, we're setting things up here, and it is going to be very, very good. Now, I'll say again that there's been really no other person in my personal life who has influenced my eschatology more than Tim Coffman.

The stuff that he has written about, his insight into these issues, it's fantastic. So, we're not going to get into eschatology today, but we are planning for that. We're setting ourselves up for that, but Tim, can you do this for our listeners?

Can you go ahead and give us a brief recap, just explaining what the issue is, why this matters, maybe go into what we talked about with the other two episodes. I don't know how you want to do it, but let me just give you the floor.

You give us a recap, and then we'll just get into the topic.

Okay, so we'll jump in with a summary of episodes one and two. We appreciate the folks who have been listening, and we're glad that people are finding this interesting information. It's important to us for the reasons that we have mentioned in the first two episodes, is that in the early Church, there are repeated references to using a mixed cup at the Lord's table, and the mingling of water and wine.

In the last two episodes, we've covered the history behind it, but what happens is that Roman Catholics, as a liturgical step in the Mass, what they believe is an apostolic ritual that's part of the Lord's Supper, is they bring water and wine to the altar, and then during the Lord's Supper, they mix the water with the wine, and they believe that it's an apostolic rite, and that Jesus himself instituted it.

So, when Roman Catholic apologists talk to unsuspecting Protestants, they say, look, all the early Church Fathers make reference to mixing water with wine at the Lord's table, and therefore, you're missing an important apostolic ritual, you're not performing the Lord's Supper the way Jesus instituted it.

Well, it turns out, when we study this, we find out there's no evidence of an actual liturgical step in the Lord's Supper for mixing water with wine until you get to the end of the 4th century. All the other references are unique in the fact that they reference a manufacturing process, or in one case, they actually refer to a situation where people were trying to avoid martyrdom by using only one ingredient of the wine, which is water, and they were celebrating the Lord's Supper with water, and Cyprian of Carthage had to correct them and say, you're using only one ingredient.

But let's just talk about the Roman Catholic justification for the ritual, so that we can just lay the groundwork from the last two episodes. So, the justification that Roman Catholics use for this idea, this belief they have, that they have received an oral tradition of mixing a little water with the wine at the altar because they think that Jesus did so.

First of all, in the Mediterranean culture, water was always mixed with pure wine as a part of the manufacturing process for wine. Greek, Jew, Roman, or Christian, it didn't matter. Everybody would mix their pure wine with water to cut it to taste and alcohol content to make it suitable for consumption.

So that's the first plank that Roman Catholicism lays down to justify a liturgical step of mixing water with wine at the table. We're going to discover the significance of that claim, because we need to get to the end of the 4th century to find out when did they start making it part of the liturgy.

The first plank, as I mentioned, is simply the knowledge that everybody acknowledges is that in the civilized world, the Greek period, Jewish period, Roman or Christian, everybody mixed their pure wine or mirum with water.

The second plank is that the early church fathers all mentioned the use of a mixed cup as part of the liturgy of the Lord's Supper. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, and Aphrahat of Persia.

I mentioned those 5 because these 5 are the only references we have in the first 3 centuries, and they pretty much span the first 3 centuries. They're all referencing a mixed cup, and they reference the use of a mixed cup in the Lord's Supper.

So that's the proof that Roman Catholics used that Jesus must have mixed the wine and water himself at the table, thus instituting an apostolic rite. And they believe that they've received this as an oral tradition from the apostles, and even though it's not in the scriptures, it's something we need to do today.

So, to walk back through episode 1 just very quickly, just to have a brief summary here, we showed that, according to ancient winecraft, mirum, which is a word that means mere or pure, mirum is pure wine, a thick syrupy substance, the raw product of an agricultural process, and prior to serving it as a beverage, the ancient cultures mixed mirum with water first.

1 part water to 1 part wine, or 2 parts water to 1 part wine, or 3 parts or even 4 parts water to 1 part wine, in order to cut the alcohol and flavor to an appropriate level for consumption. It's similar to what we do today with orange juice concentrate.

Nobody serves orange juice concentrate to their kids for breakfast, and nobody makes the kids mix it themselves. The mixing takes place in the kitchen, and that's what happened back then, too. You take this wine concentrate, or mirum, and you add water to it.

Now, back then, drinking water alone was considered unhealthy. Drinking wine alone was considered unhealthy. It was considered the habit of barbarians and the uncivilized. And importantly, and this is very important for today's discussion, nobody would have served pure wine or mirum at a feast without mixing it with water to cut the flavor and content for alcohol.

This was so commonly understood by the early church that Jesus' first miracle, the wedding at Cana, was actually the miracle of changing water into water mixed with mirum. And in fact, the way that the early church described the miracle was that it started with water, and then some of the water was changed to mirum, so that you end up with this suitable blend of mirum and water.

So it makes sense that they thought that the water that was turned into wine was turned into mirum plus water because with the knowledge of the manufacturing process for wine, that's what wine was, and everybody knew it.

Just think of the look on the wedding host's face if the servants had brought straight mirum for him to taste. In the Gospel account in John chapter 2, he tastes it, and he says, this is fantastic wine.

If they had brought pure mirum to him to taste, he would have spat it back out because it was the drink of barbarians. Now in addition to that, much was made of the fact in the early church that the Jews drank water from the rock in the wilderness, but they did not harvest grapes until coming into the promised land.

And again, they focused on the mixture of water with pure wine to make wine for drinking. So the mixed wine at the wedding feast was occasionally interpreted as an indication or a figure of salvation.

Say that the wine or the pure wine or mirum was a figure of Christ's divinity, and the water was Adam, and so Jesus took on flesh, and so the mirum being added to the water was an indication of His incarnation.

Or they took the mixture of the water was the old law, but the new word was the mirum, and so together Christ has completed the Testaments. Or the mixture of Christ with His people, Christ being mirum and people being water based on Revelation 17.

So the knowledge of mixing mirum with water, that is the two ingredients of wine, was so common that they just understood that, wow, that's amazing, Jesus used mixed ingredients to figure His incarnation.

He used mixed bread and He used mixed wine and He took them and said, this is my body, this is my blood.

And.

What they said of this was simply that He took agricultural products, and everybody knew that they were just manufactured products. So our first observation from Episode 1 is that at the time of Christ, wine as we know it today, pure wine, or wine and water, or mirum with water, which is essentially a common secular manufacturing process just like the manufacturing process for bread.

We started referring to the actual writings of the early Church fathers, and what we found consistently in the early writers is that they often described the mingled cup in the same context that they described the manufacturing process for bread.

Grains, adding water to flour, kneading the dough, and baking the bread. Bread and wine were both the result of a mixing process. These were simple manufacturing processes known to everyone, and the early Church often celebrated the fact that Jesus had used two elements of mixed ingredients, mixed bread and mixed wine, as figures for His body and blood.

Very appropriate physical representations for the fact that in the Incarnation, He had mixed Himself up with us. So His use of mingled or mixed products was thus special to the early Church, which again highlights for us that their focus on the mingled cup was a focus on a manufacturing process, not on an apostolic liturgical rite.

It also shows that nothing about their teachings on the mingled cup, individually or collectively, could possibly be used to justify a belief in an oral apostolic tradition that Jesus had added water to wine at the Last Supper.

So, I'm just going to walk through very quickly the five Church Fathers used to justify a liturgical rite. We'll start with Justin Martyr. He lived in the second century, from about 100 to 165 A .D. He provides the earliest representation of the liturgy of the Lord's Table, and the way he describes it is that the cup is brought to the table already mixed.

Wine and water are already mixed by the time it gets to the table. And you can't get an apostolic tradition of Jesus mixing the water and wine Himself. So, Irenaeus of Lyons, also in the second century, until about 202 A .D., just the beginning of the third century, he spoke of Christ's use of the manufactured bread and the mingled cup in the Lord's Supper, showing that His focus was on a secular manufacturing process, not on a liturgical rite.

And you can't get an apostolic tradition of mixing water with wine from a secular manufacturing process. Clement of Alexandria, middle of the second century to the beginning of the third, he spoke of wine in general.

He spoke of wine at the Miracle of Cana. He spoke of wine in the context of John chapter 6. He spoke of water mixed with wine and also juxtaposed the baking of bread with the mixing of water and wine, showing that, again, His focus is not on a liturgical rite, but on a manufacturing process.

And so whether He's talking about wine, or wine at the marriage at Cana, or wine as a figure for when Jesus talks about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, He said, well, in that case, wine is a figure for blood, and wine is mixed with water.

And importantly, He even said it was important to mix as much water as possible. He's referring to mixing the mirum with as much water as possible, so that it's not used for getting drunk. And He emphasized that in the context of talking about the marriage at Cana and in John chapter 6.

And so the Roman Catholic liturgical rite of adding a little water with wine at the Lord's table cannot be based on Clement of Alexandria's belief that you should mix the wine with as much water as possible.

He's simply talking about a secular manufacturing process. It can't serve as a foundation for the Roman Catholic rite. So we move forward to the, now we're in the 3rd century, so we're Cyprian of Carthage, from about 200 AD to 258 AD.

And he thought that Jesus had made wine mixed with water at the wedding at Cana as a symbol of Jews drinking water alone in the wilderness, that is, without Christ. But now Christians drink water with wine because Christ, that is the mirim, has been added to His people, which is the water.

And he was making much about the fact that when the people came into the promised land, the first thing they did was harvest grapes. So he said, look, they drink water in the wilderness and then they come into the promised land.

And so that's significant because when he discovered that some Christians were using water alone in the Lord's Supper, persecution, he said they were being like the Jews again, going back to drinking water alone like they were in the wilderness.

And he corrected them by saying that the Lord's Cup was neither water alone nor wine alone, but a mixture of the two. And the reason was that he knew that there are two ingredients to wine. There's mirim and there's water.

And if you were to use just water for the wine, it was the same as using just flour for the bread, or just water for the bread, because he knew that the bread is made out of flour and water. And that shows that his focus was not on an apostolic rite of adding water to wine, but a manufacturing process for wine.

Because he coupled it with the description of the manufacturing process for bread. So Cyprian also insisted that the Christians could not celebrate the Supper with water alone, but they had to add wine using actual wine.

And he was convinced that he had this on the authority of Jesus and Paul because Jesus and Paul both had made reference to wine. And that was his argument. He said, look, they said that you should use wine, and therefore it's wrong to use water alone.

Now what's interesting about that is that Roman Catholicism claims that they had this on the basis of an oral tradition. He insisted it was based on a scriptural tradition. And all he's showing is that, hey, they used wine, and therefore you have to use both ingredients, or else you're not actually using wine.

So my point here is you can't get an oral tradition of mixing water with wine at the table from Cyprian's insistence that it was actually a written tradition in the scriptures. And importantly, you can't get an apostolic ritual of adding water to wine when Cyprian's point was that you should have been adding water.

You should be adding wine to the water. Because he was writing in a very specific context. So we get now into the 3rd century and well into the 4th century, or the Afrahad of Persia. And he wrote that the wedding supper of the Lamb would simply be a reenactment of the Last Supper.

And he said at the wedding supper of the Lamb, the cup of salvation is mixed before the bridegroom takes his place at the table. And again, this indicates that Afrahad, like Justin Martyr in the 2nd century, believed that the cup was mixed before it ever got to the table, and before Christ ever arrived at the table.

And so again, you can't get an apostolic tradition of Jesus mixing water with wine at the table from Afrahad's representation that the cup was brought to the table already mixed, and that it was mixed before Jesus even sat down.

So what we find is that in summary, just to recap our first two episodes, Roman Catholicism believes that by mixing water with wine at the altar, they're holding to an ancient liturgy established by Christ himself, as if Christ himself had mixed the water with the wine at the table.

And yet for the first 300 years after the apostles, there's just no evidence for such a tradition at all. And in Afrahad or Persia, we're all the way through to 345 AD, it's the latter, the very end of the first part of the 4th century, and there's still no belief or teaching that there was a liturgical rite of adding water to the wine at the table.

All the references we have so far is simply to a common manufacturing process, and repeatedly we see them identifying that just as the bread is mixed, many grains and flour with water, and the dough is kneaded and baked, water is added to pure mirum to make wine, and then is brought to the table to be served.

And Jesus ended up using at the Last Supper two elements, bread and wine, and both of them were composed of mixed ingredients, and it was important to them that he had used physical items in order to show his incarnation.

He had mixed himself up with us, and importantly the early church thought if he's using solid and liquid items as figures for his body, then he must have really had a body. Because in the early church, the biggest heresies were that Jesus did not really even become a man.

And they said no, no, he used bread and wine to show that he had a body of blood. And if he said this is my body, then he must have really had a body. He wasn't a phantom like some of the heretics were saying.

So that gets us to the middle of the fourth century, and we still don't have an apostolic liturgical rite anywhere indicating hey, you're supposed to be mixing the water with the wine at the table in order to do what Christ did.

That's our recap.

That's outstanding. There's no way I could have done a recap as well as that. So, I mean, that just, I think, illustrates for our listeners how thoroughly you've gone through this material, how much research you've put into this.

You said you've been studying this for three years, and it obviously shows. So, real quick, I just want to remind everybody that check out Tim Coffman's blog. It's whitehorseblog .com because if you want to read some of the stuff that he's written on this, go to his website, go to his blog page, whitehorseblog .com.

I think I already said that, but he has I think it's a five-part article series on the Mingled Cup talking about this stuff if you want to be able to read some of this stuff because it's excellent. What's so interesting is that I've never heard anything like this, and it's surprising to me to see that Roman Catholics will try to use this to establish their religion as the true church, as the true religion, and furthermore, that they will actually condemn you if you don't agree with this or if you reject this.

So, let's go ahead and get into today's part. Tim, where are we going with this today?

Hilary of Poitiers and the Shift from Mixed Wine to Pure Wine

Well, we're going to go a few places. First, we're going to address.

The.

What was the turning point. At some point, they started treating this as a liturgical rite and believed that it was instituted by Christ himself, that is, the mixing of water with wine at the table. And second, we're going to go into the 11th century, and most folks are aware of the split that took place between the East and the West about 1054 and 1054 A .D.

And what they don't realize, typically, is that the mixing of water with wine was actually a key part of that split. With this background information we've given, people will then be able to understand what caused the split, and it turns out the split between East and West was based on a historical mistake and just flat-out ignorance of the ancient process of wine craft and the manufacturing process.

And we'll get to that. And then at the very end, we're going to highlight just how inconsistent Roman Catholicism is to demand that we mix water with wine on the authority of the early church, something the early church didn't actually do.

But they ignore the things that the early church actually did. And they write it off and say, well, we would never do that anymore because of this, this, and this. And so we find in the early church a lot of interesting practices that are perfectly normal if you understand that the bread and wine are just symbols of Christ's body and blood.

And those have since been rejected by Roman Catholicism, or at least minimized. But then you get to something that the early church did not do, did not implement, and they bring down the iron fist and say, you have to do it the way the early church did, or you're not really following the traditions of the apostles.

So we'll get to that at the very end. So there's three parts. The turning point at the latter part of the 4th century, how this contributed to the split between East and West in the 11th century, and then finally we'll wrap up the whole series with a summary of just how inconsistent Roman Catholicism is to insist on this as an apostolic right and then reject other things that the early church actually taught, which is perfectly consistent with the treatment of the bread and wine as simply just symbols of his body and blood.

So let's jump into the latter part of the 4th century. So where did the tradition originate? Because so far we have searched through the early church. What we don't find is anybody saying that Jesus mixed water with wine at the table.

For 300 years after the apostles, everyone knew that wine for consumption was water with mirum, and the references to the mingled cup refer to a cup that was mixed before the supper, not during the supper, because nobody would have brought straight mirum to the table, and I want to emphasize that.

Nobody would have put mirum on the table to drink, just like nobody would serve their kids frozen orange juice concentrate at the table. It gets mixed in the kitchen, and then gets served up as orange juice.

The Romans Christians, they all mixed their mirum with water to make wine. And for the first three centuries after Christ, it was understood that Jesus had made mixed wine, mirum with water, at the marriage at Cana, precisely because it would have been absolutely unthinkable to offer the beverage of barbarians or straight mirum.

To.

The wedding.

Nobody would have offered mirum to the wedding guests. That's how commonly understood it was that wine was mirum with water, wine and water, and not mirum alone.

And.

This may come as an interesting surprise, people listening to the podcast thinking, wow, I would have thought Jesus turned water into pure wine, but pure wine is mirum, and mirum is a thick syrupy substance that's high in alcohol content that only uncivilized people drink, and nobody would have served that at a wedding feast.

Jesus just turned water into water with wine, just as if he had made bread out of water. Bread actually has water in it, so he would have actually made water into water plus flour. The point is that everybody understood this was a manufacturing process.

Everybody knew what mirum was. Everybody knew how wine was made. Everybody knew how bread was made. So along comes Hilary of Portier, and in the late 4th century, he's writing in the 350s or 360s AD, and this is in his writing called On the Trinity.

It's book 3, chapter 5. And he comes up with something that's absolutely novel and unthinkable. He says, On the wedding day in Galilee, water was made wine. Have we words to tell or senses to ascertain what methods produced the change by which the tastelessness of water disappeared and was replaced by the full flavor of wine?

It was not a mixing. It was a creation, and a creation which was not a beginning but a transformation. A weaker liquid was not obtained by an admixture of a stronger element. An existing thing perished, and a new thing came into being.

So that's the end of Hilary of Portier, but notice what he has said. He has emphatically denied that the water that was turned to a wine at the wedding at Cana was turned into a mixture of mirum and water.

He's basically saying that Jesus turned water into mirum. Now, if Hilary of Portier had been familiar with the ancient process of winecraft, he never would have suggested any such thing. It would be like saying that back a long time ago, people served orange juice concentrate to their kids.

Nobody does that, and the fact was that everybody knew that Jesus had made water into water mixed with wine, because wine has two ingredients, mirum plus water. But at the end of the 4th century, Hilary of Portier suggested that no, it wasn't a mixture, it was pure wine.

Now, based on what we know of ancient winecraft, there's not a household in all of Galilee that would have served straight mirum to its wedding guests. It simply wasn't done. Instead, mirum was mixed with water in advance of the feast to prepare the wine, just as Justin Martyr from the 2nd century said, and what Aphrahat from the 4th century correctly said.

Well, let me, that would have tasted terrible, and as you've already said, yeah, and Jesus, or they complimented the wine as the best wine, saving the best for last. Do you think that he understood how awful mirum tasted?

Because you're saying that if he had understood the manufacturing process, that he wouldn't have suggested that, but I'm wondering if had he ever tasted straight mirum?

That's the thing,.

I don't think he really understood.

I don't think he understood, and so he was suggesting that it just, the water completely disappeared, and it was just pure wine. If you understood the process of winecraft, you would never suggest such a thing, and it's like you said, John 2, verses 9 -10, the servants brought straight mirum to the lord of the feast, to the master of the feast.

They did not bring straight mirum to him, they brought the mixed wine, he tasted it, and he liked it. And if they had brought him straight mirum, he would have spat it out of his mouth, because it was the beverage of barbarians, and nobody would have served that to the wedding guests, and so here Hillary insists on something that would have been unfamiliar and impractical in Jesus' day, and certainly unknown to all the earlier writers, and that was that Jesus had made water into straight mirum.

Now, folks who are reading the ancient texts and reading from the early church fathers, they probably wouldn't necessarily look at this as, you know, a seismic, ground-shaking event in the history of the church.

But the important thing is that the emergence of an opinion like Hillary's momentous departure from the understanding of the early church, whose writers had objected strenuously to the consumption of unmixed wine, and it insisted that Jesus would not have served straight mirum at a feast.

It would not have occurred to them that Jesus had made a pure, unmixed mixture. In fact, they drew a lot of meaning out of the symbolism of mirum mixed with water. They just assumed it was mixed and said, wow, that's so significant.

It's almost like a picture of Jesus marrying the church, and he's the pure wine and we're the water, and now we can never be separated because we're now mixed together.

So,.

The point is that this would have been a momentous departure from the understanding of the early church, and in fact it was a novelty, this idea that water is the pure mirum. Now, what that effectively did is that it moved the mixing of the wine from the kitchen to the table.

If Jesus is serving mirum to his wedding guests, then the wedding guests have to mix the water in themselves because, again, nobody would have served straight mirum to the wedding guests. And so this idea that mirum is now a table beverage out of the kitchen and gets it back, gets it on the table, and that's when we start seeing this idea that water and mirum were present at the Lord's table.

And so that gets us to Ambrose of Milan, and so he lived from 340 to 397 A .D., the bulk of his life, and certainly his adult life, was in the latter part of the 4th century. And so he's teaching new catechumens, these converts, about the history of the liturgy, and he's writing in the work called Concerning the Sacraments, it's Book 5, Chapter 1, and he was the first one to describe a ritual in which bread and water and wine are brought forward separately to the altar so that the wine and water could be mixed during the service as an important liturgical step, and he made a big deal about it.

It was very, very important. So now reading from Ambrose of Milan, he said, We said, therefore, that the cup and the bread are set on the altar. What is poured into the cup? Wine. And what else? Water.

But thou sayest to me, How then did Melchizedek offer bread and wine? What means the mixture of water? The priest touches the cup, the water streams into the cup, springs up to eternal life, and the people of God drink who have obtained the grace of God.

So that's the end of Ambrose's quote, and what's important here is that he even knows that Melchizedek offered bread and wine, and he's saying that we offer bread and wine and water, and so he's anticipating a question from the new catechumen saying that, well, what is the meaning of the mixture of water if Jesus is doing what Melchizedek and Melchizedek just offered bread and wine?

And so he makes a big deal about the fact that Moses had touched the rock in the wilderness and water flowed forth, and so just like that the priest touches the cup and water flows into it, and then from there he tries to make an argument that the church mixes water with wine because water and blood flowed out of Jesus' side at the cross, and neither can justify an apostolic rite.

Now, when it comes to water in the wilderness and grapes being harvested as soon as they came into the promised land, the early church saw those figures as pretty significant, and in fact Cyprian argued against the use of water alone because it was like being Jews wandering in the desert, but none of them used it to prove an apostolic rite, and certainly this idea that because water and blood flowed out of Jesus' side, therefore the church mixes water with its wine at the table, that argument was unheard of in the first three centuries after the apostles.

It was a novelty, and so what we find is, you know, this is you know, for those that are interested in this kind of thing, this is the origin of the mixing of water with wine at the table. It didn't happen at the Last Supper before Jesus died.