SRR #54 | Roman Catholics & The Mingled Cup Part 2

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 Meaning of Wine

Okay, welcome back everybody. This is Tim Shaughnessy from Simple Riff around the radio, and this is going to be part two in our series on the mingled cup with Tim Coffman. I just want to remind everybody that we are part of the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network, so please check out all of the other podcasts.

But today, we're just going to dive right into the topic. Last week, we were going over the claim that well, you know,.

It's.

Better if I just let Tim Coffman give us a recap of the issue. This is pertaining to Roman Catholicism, and he is our expert in that area, and this is a topic that I have very, very little knowledge about, so I'm very grateful that he's here.

I'm very grateful that we're getting to learn from him. He's done a tremendous amount of research on this, a tremendous amount of research in this area to really refute the claim that the Roman Catholics have an apostolic tradition that Protestants don't have, and therefore they are the true church.

So Brother Tim, I'm just going to let you do the recap. I'm looking at your notes, and they're extensive, and I think that you're better to do that, so can you give us a recap of what we talked about last week, and then let's just dive into the topic this week.

Sure,.

Sure, no problem at all. Glad to be back, and I hope people are enjoying this series on the mixing of water and wine. It matters to us because Roman Catholics will point to early church fathers in their reference to a mingled cup being used during the Lord's Supper, and say, see, it proves that Jesus himself added water to his wine at the Last Supper, and therefore we should too.

In fact, Roman Catholics will say that even though the Gospel narratives imply that Jesus used pure wine, the fact is that the ritual was to add water to that pure wine during the Lord's Supper. Now, here's the problem with that.

First, the Gospel doesn't actually imply that Jesus used pure wine, because pure wine is a very specific term when it comes to wine manufacturing. Pure wine, or a mirum, is actually wine concentrate. Now, I want you to think for just a second if you were to, just think about orange juice concentrate.

It's that frozen orange juice that comes in a can,.

And.

When you buy orange juice at the grocery store, you get it in that frozen concentrate can, you bring it home, you mix it with water, and then you serve it at the table as mixed orange juice. But nobody would actually put the orange juice concentrate in one cup, and water in another cup, and have their kids mix their own orange juice at the table.

In fact, the mixing of orange juice concentrate with water is done in the kitchen, not at the table. And that's what we find in the early church, what we find actually from the ancient Greek time through the Jewish period and the Roman period and the early Christian period, that mirum, or grape juice wine concentrate would not have been served at the table, but it would have been mixed in the kitchen with water as the final step in the manufacturing process.

Now, Roman Catholics will say, well, Jesus must have mixed the water and wine himself at the table because the early church makes reference to the mingled cup. What we'll find is when we get to the, we're going to eventually end up in the 11th century here in a controversy that erupted between the East and the West about what's the right way to mix the water with wine during the Lord's Supper, and both of them based their positions on a historical misunderstanding, and both of them were wrong, and yet they both believed that they had an apostolic tradition.

So,.

Mirum, and this is a key word because we're going to come back to mirum over and over again. Mirum is wine that has not been mixed with water. It is like orange juice concentrate, it is wine concentrate.

It's high in alcohol content, and as we covered last week, only the uncivilized barbarians would consider drinking it straight. The Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians all considered it unhealthy to drink mirum straight.

I'm going to keep emphasizing that because when we get to the latter part of the 4th century, mirum becomes a very important issue when we understand the Lord's Supper and importantly the marriage at Cana, which we covered last week.

But, as we covered last week, mirum is wine without water, or pure wine. Water with mirum is called wine. Wine without mirum would be water, and if you think about it, if mirum is wine without water, then mirum with water is simply wine without water plus water, which is wine, or in some cases, the early church referred to wine as water.

I'm sorry, wine and water, wine with water. This is just the way they described wine back then. It's no more liturgically or apostolically significant than the mixing of flour and water to get dough, or the baking of dough and kneading of dough to make bread.

It's not liturgically significant, it's just part of a manufacturing process, and what we find when we read through the early church fathers in their reference to the mixed cup, we'll find that they were not referring to an apostolic rite, but to a manufacturing process, and you cannot validly infer an apostolic ritual from a secular manufacturing process.

Everybody in the known world mixed their mirum with water before serving it at the table, and that mixing was performed in the kitchen, not at the table. It was the last step in the manufacturing process, and just like you would not say that Jesus mixed flour with water and kneaded the dough and then baked it at the table, you also wouldn't say that Jesus took water and mixed it with mirum at the table, and yet that's exactly what Roman Catholics would have us believe, just because the early church makes reference to a mixed cup being used in the Lord's Supper.

They want you to take from that that Jesus himself poured water into the wine at the last supper, and therefore instituted the apostolic rite of mixing water with wine at the table, and Roman Catholics will point to the early church fathers and say, see, they used a mixed cup, therefore you need to add water to the wine.

When the early church reflected on the wine used in the last supper, it was simply assumed that the wine Jesus had used was already manufactured, it was already mixed. What we'll find when we read through the early church fathers is that a mixed cup was brought to the table.

That is, a cup that was mixed, mirum with water, was brought forward. It is not something that was brought forward separately for Jesus to do the mixing himself. We'll find as we go through the early church fathers that they did not believe that Jesus mixed the water and wine himself, and it's not until you get to the latter part of the 4th century that you start seeing references to the mixing of water with wine as an apostolic rite.

Like so many of the novelties of Roman Catholicism, you can find it as recently as the late 4th century, but no earlier.

So,.

What I want to do now, Tim, is to jump into the early church fathers and the mingled.

Cup.

And what's important here is that the early church was constantly battling all sorts of heresies, and they often used the symbolism of the Lord's Supper.

As.

A point of defense against the heresies. And one of the heresies of the early church is that Jesus had not really become like us. Something that's absolutely critical to the gospel is that Jesus became a man like us.

He was truly a man in all ways but sin. The heretics and the gnostics of the early church tried to pass off Jesus' incarnation as simply the appearance of taking on a body. That was called the docetic or the Marcionite heresy of thinking that Jesus had just been a phantom.

He had not really taken on a body. And so when the early church referred to the Lord's Supper, they often highlighted the facts that Jesus had used mingled ingredients in both elements of the Lord's Supper, that is the bread and the wine, and that he had used these mingled elements to show that he had truly mingled himself with his own creation.

And in the process they were simply making reference to the standard manufacturing processes for bread and the standard manufacturing process for wine. It's important to understand that in the early church the mixed cup was no more liturgically significant than the mixing and grinding of grains or the adding of water to flour or the kneading of dough to make bread.

These are just common agricultural processes. The significance to the early church was not that Jesus mixed water with wine at the Lord's Supper, at the Last Supper, but rather that he had used bread and wine that were both composed of mixed ingredients.

In their mind the bread was mixed with grain ground up and mixed with water and it was mirum that was mixed up with water to make the wine. And so when we look through, say, Irenaeus he rejoiced in the knowledge that in the incarnation God had quote, mingled with his own creation.

Tertullian delighted that in the manger in Bethlehem it showed God mingled with man. And Cyprian of Carthage celebrated the knowledge that in Jesus.

God.

Had mingled with man. And John Chrysostom also made reference to, in Jesus he had kneaded up his body with ours. It was a reference to the kneading process of making bread. You mix the grain, you grind the grain, you add to make flour, you add water, you knead the dough, and then you bake it.

What we notice is that in the making of bread you have all these mingled ingredients. Different grains, water, flour. In the making of wine you have mirum, which is pure wine, mixed with water. And Jesus had used mixed ingredients for both elements of the Lord's Supper, and they used that to show that, see, he really had become a part of his own creation, or he never would have used solid elements like, or solid and liquid elements like bread and wine to figure his body and blood.

That's how the early church responded to the heresies. They pointed to the Last Supper and they said, look, Jesus took bread that was made out of mixed grains, he took wine that was mixed, it was mirum that was mixed with water.

He mingled himself with his own creation, and that's why he used these appropriate symbols of his incarnation. Not that the bread and wine were literally his body and blood, but that he never would have referred to them as his body and blood if he was just a phantom.

Because a phantom is incapable of being figured by something that is solid. So, as was often the case in the early church, such rich, symbolic soil was just too tempting to leave untilled, and thus they often brought forward the figures of mixed bread and mixed wine as a profound representation of what God had done to become like us.

And the early writers expressed and defended his incarnation in those very terms, using the liturgy of the Lord's Supper to show that he really had been incarnated, and had really become part of creation like us.

What they didn't do is say that Jesus mixed the water and wine himself. That's never actually stated. In fact, what we find when we get into some of the early representations of the Lord's Supper is that the wine was brought forward already mixed.

You can't legitimately get an apostolic rite of Jesus mixing the water and wine himself from a cup that was brought forward already mixed.

When you attend a. If a person were to attend a Roman Catholic Mass today, they would see this being played out, that the priest will take. I don't know if it would be called mirum, but he mixes it up there in front of everybody, and then he administers it to the congregation.

Is that.

Right? That's correct. In fact, in a Roman Catholic Mass, three elements are brought forward to the altar. Wine, water, and bread. And what happens is that they bring forward the wine, the water, and the bread, and the priest then mixes it.

Now the problem is that it's this historical misunderstanding. The wine that you and I consume today has pretty much already been mixed with water. It's already in the right concentration for consumption.

It's just normal wine. Because that's how we make wine. And they add water in the process at some point, but nobody ever gets pure, unadulterated wine as a let's say, pure wine concentrate off the shelf.

They get wine that's already mixed to the right concentration for alcohol, for ideal taste, and ideal alcohol concentration. So you don't need to actually mix it again. What Roman Catholics have done is they've taken the ancient wine craft of mixing wine concentrate with water to make wine, and then they add even more water to it as if it was an apostolic ritual.

And that's the error, is that they think that you should bring three items to the table. Water, wine, and bread, and then mix the water and wine at the table. What we'll find as we proceed through the early church fathers, all the way through the 4th century, we find that mixing water with mirum was something that was done in the kitchen or at home before bringing the wine to church.

It's not something that was done at the table. And we'll see that when we jump into the very first detailed reference to the liturgy of the Lord's Supper, which we find in Justin Martyr, is that on a casual reading, it looks like three elements are brought forward, and Roman Catholicism will camp on that.

But on a closer reading, you see that he actually Justin Martyr simply reports that when they're celebrating the Lord's Supper, they bring forward two elements. Bread and a cup of wine that's already been mixed with water.

Because that's what wine was. So let's jump into Justin.

Martyr.

He's from the 2nd century. And if we just skip forward to chapter 67 of his first apology, it doesn't mean what we mean by apology today. It's a defense. Apologia is just a defense of his Christian faith.

And he's explaining Christianity to unbelieving friends. And he says, here's why we do what we do. So this is from chapter 67. And he's describing the Lord's Supper. He says, Then we all rise together and pray, and as we before said, when our prayer is ended, the bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgiving according to his ability, and the people ascend, saying Amen.

Chapter 67 of the first apology. So bread and wine and water, right? It sounds like Justin Martyr is saying.

Yeah.

The earliest reference to this is the earliest reference on record to the details of the Lord's Supper. And he says you bring forward bread and wine and water. Sounds like you bring forward three elements.

But two paragraphs earlier, he had actually explained the actual ritual for bringing forward the elements of the Lord's Supper. And this is chapter 65. He says, Having ended the prayers, we salute one another with a kiss.

There is then brought to the president, that is to say the president is whoever is presiding over the ministry of the Lord's Supper. Says there is brought forward, there is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water.

That's chapter 65. When Justin Martyr was describing the Lord's Supper, he said you bring forward bread and you bring forward wine and water. Wine and water is simply mirim plus water to make wine for consumption.

And when he explains this, he says what gets brought forward is bread and a cup of wine that is already mixed with water. Now, the reason this matters to us is because Roman Catholics want to say that there is an ancient apostolic ritual of Jesus mixing the wine and water himself at the Last Supper.

And here we have the most ancient reference to the details of the Lord's Supper outside of the scriptures. And what does Justin Martyr say? He says what gets brought forward to the person presiding over the supper is bread and a cup of wine that has already been mixed.

Do you see the significance there? You would not signify Jesus mixing the water and wine himself by bringing to the person presiding at the meal a cup that was already mixed. You can't get an apostolic tradition of Jesus mixing the wine with water out of a church father who explains that the wine was brought forward mixed already.

And so, he lived from 100 to 165 and this would be the earliest reference that we have? It's the.

Earliest detailed reference on the Liturgy of the Eucharist or the Liturgy of the Lord's Supper. That's correct. There are references to it in other writings, but this is the first one that actually describes how it happens.

So, I'm wondering if they would actually try to claim that they can get past the latter part of the 4th century with their apostolic tradition. And, of course, you've just demonstrated that if you go to the preceding chapter, you see that water was already mixed with the wine, but I find that interesting because our claim is that they can't get past the latter part of the 4th century with their apostolic tradition.

And I'm wondering if your average Roman Catholic who maybe has looked into this a little bit would think that they can based off of the misrepresentation of Justin Martyr by the Roman Catholic Church on this particular point right here.

In fact, I've heard Roman Catholics argue based on chapter 67 of the First Apology that they brought forward three things, bread and wine and water.

But,.

As I would say, if you look at the ancient practice of wine craft, wine for consumption is called wine and water. And, in fact, two chapters earlier, that's exactly how Justin Martyr describes it, a cup of wine mixed with water.

A cup of wine already mixed with water is brought forward. And I remember talking with a Roman Catholic about this. He said, well, it's obviously that Justin Martyr made a mistake in chapter 65 and the truth is that he really meant that he brought forward three elements to the table.

Well, the only basis for saying that Justin Martyr had made a mistake is the Roman Catholic belief that this is an apostolic right to mix the water at the table. What we find in the earliest representation from Justin Martyr is that the cup was brought forward already mixed because that's what wine was.

Just like the bread was brought forward already baked, the wine was brought forward already mixed. That's just simply how meals were done back then. It's not an apostolic right. It's simply a standard manufacturing and preparation process.

The same way that you wouldn't put orange juice concentrate and water on the table together, you would mix them in the kitchen and then bring them as just orange juice, orange juice concentrate mixed with water, or mirum mixed with water, which is what Justin Martyr was referring to.

Does that make sense? Yeah, I'm tracking.

With you. Okay, so we're now going to fast forward to the 2nd century. We've been in the 2nd century, but we're talking about Irenaeus of Lyons, who lived from the early 2nd century to just the beginning of the 3rd century.

Irenaeus, in his arguments against the Valentinians, the Ibanites, and the Marcionites, referred more than once to the mixture of water with wine. The Ibanites believed that Jesus was a man, but denied his divinity, and they do not receive by faith the union of God and man.

So this is Irenaeus describing the error of the Ibanites, that they don't really believe that Jesus became man, and that God in Jesus had brought man and God together. In his arguments against them, he refers to the elements of the Lord's Supper.

He says.

Vain also are the Ibanites who do not receive by faith into their soul the union of God and man. Therefore do these men reject the co-mixture of the heavenly wine, and wish it to be water of the world only.

So all Irenaeus of Lyons has done here is say, okay, we know that wine.

Is.

Wine for consumption is mirum plus water, and he calls this a co-mixture of heavenly wine. And he's using this in reference to the Eucharistic Liturgy or the Liturgy of the Lord's Table.

And so.

As we noted before, remember when the early church was combating heretics, they would often appeal to the mixed element of the bread and the mixed element of wine. The bread had been made out of grains mixed together, the wine had been made out of mirum mixed together with water, and truly Jesus had mixed himself up with us.

And that's all that Irenaeus of Lyons is saying. As we noted in our previous installment last week, mirum with water is wine, and therefore wine without mirum is water. And this is a concept that Irenaeus restates for us here.

When it came to this particular symbolism, Irenaeus thought that the mirum signified Jesus' divinity and the water signified humanity in his mind. The Ebionites would be more consistent, of course, if they celebrated the Lord's Supper just with water, not mixing it with mirum.

But again, it's just, what I want to highlight here is how the early church deferred to the elements of the Lord's Supper to show that Jesus had truly become physical with a body, otherwise he would not have used physical elements to symbolize his body.

And if he had not truly become part of creation, it made no sense for him to use physical elements from creation to symbolize himself. And here he simply returns to the mingled cup. Just as the bread and wine are part of creation, Jesus too had become part of creation for us.

It doesn't confirm transubstantiation, which I know that Roman Catholics would like to use. They want to use this argument to show that he really believed that the bread and wine became Jesus' flesh and blood.

In fact, in Fragment 37, Irenaeus acknowledges that the bread and wine, after they're blessed by the minister, are still just antitypical or symbolic of Jesus' body and blood. But here, he's simply arguing that Jesus, as divine, had taken on our human flesh in order to save it.

And here is where I want to highlight the fact that Irenaeus is simply referring to a manufacturing process. And this is his argument, Book 5, Against Heresies. He says, he has acknowledged the cup, which is part of the creation, as his own blood, from which he bedews our blood.

And the bread, also part of the creation, he has established as his own body, from which he gives increase to our bodies. When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the word of God, and the Eucharist of the body and blood of Christ is made, from which things the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which flesh is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of him?

That's against Heresies, Book 5. Now here, Roman Catholics want to camp on the fact that Irenaeus says, hey, he made the bread and wine to be his body and.

Blood. And yet, as.

We mentioned in our series on the Sacrifice of the Mass, and as I just mentioned in Fragment 37, even after the bread and wine have been blessed by the minister, Irenaeus still refers to them as antitypes, or symbols, of Jesus' body and blood.

So he's not saying that Jesus actually turned the bread and wine into his body and blood, but what he does refer to is the mingled cup and the manufactured bread. That's explicit words from Irenaeus. The mingled cup refers to the manufacturing process for wine, and the manufactured bread is just an explicit statement of the manufactured bread.

Take grains, grind them up to make flour, you add water, you knead the dough, you bake it, it becomes bread. To do wine, you take mirum, which is pure wine, and you add water to it to make a mingled cup.

And Jesus took a mingled cup, which is just wine, or the typical beverage for consumption, and he takes manufactured bread. And he's highlighting the fact that Jesus took elements of creation to symbolize the fact that he himself had a body and had flesh and blood.

This was central to the gospel for Irenaeus, not because he thought Jesus turned the bread and wine into his body and blood to sacrifice it to God, but rather that he had taken part of creation to signify that Jesus truly had become part of creation like us.

In other words, the heretics were wrong to say that Jesus had not really taken on creation in taking on a body. And Irenaeus has simply used the elements of the Lord's Supper to emphasize that in the process, Irenaeus highlights a manufacturing process, one for bread and one for wine, showing that the mingled cup here in his reference is not a reference to an apostolic ritual for adding water to wine at the Lord's Supper, but simply a reference to the standard secular manufacturing process for wine as a beverage.

Now he continues on this same thing, and he keeps on referring to that standard manufacturing process. As we go through Book 5, Chapter 2 of Against Heresies, he refers to the flesh, which is nourished by the cup, which is his blood, and receives increase from the bread, which is his body.

A reference to the cup and to the bread. He continues, he says, just as cutting from the vine planted in the ground fructifies in its season, or as a grain of wheat falling into the earth and becoming decomposed rises, so also are bodies being nourished by it, the cup, and deposited in the earth and suffering decomposition there, like the grain of wheat shall rise.

All he is doing is, notice that he's referring to the vine that's planted in the ground and it bears fruit of a grape, or the grain of wheat falls into the ground and decomposes and then grows up into a wheat plant that is then harvested.

He's simply referring to a standard manufacturing process for wine and a standard manufacturing process for bread, and when he refers to the mixed cup and the manufactured bread, that's all he's talking about.

What's missing in Irenaeus is any attempt to show that Jesus mixed water with wine at the Last Supper. So you can't get a liturgical rite out of a known secular manufacturing process for wine in the same way you can't get a liturgical rite of Jesus mixing flour with water and kneading the dough and baking it at the table.

He used bread that had been manufactured and he used wine that had been mixed, but there's no evidence from this to show that he actually mixed the wine himself, which is the apostolic ritual that Roman Catholics are trying to impose on us.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. You know, I'm just thinking because I had a conversation with a Roman Catholic one time and I remember just pointing out that you can't really substantiate this from Scripture. Not this point.

Obviously it was a different point because I wouldn't be able to really lay this out for them, but if I remember correctly, I think it was pertaining to the Mass but one of the things that he said to me was well, we don't really need to substantiate it from Scripture explicitly because the Church has the authority and yeah, it was actually the Mass.

I do remember because he said that the Mass was passed down from the beginning when Christ set up the Church and so that there's an apostolic tradition from the very beginning and what I'm finding fascinating about just going through this with you is that we're seeing that not only can they not substantiate this from Scripture, but the early Church didn't hold to this and so there is absolutely no apostolic tradition with this and you know, there's I mean, at that point there's really no basis for their position.

Clement of Alexandria on Wine, Bread, and John 6

Yeah, well, there's a couple.

Points that I think are worth highlighting and we're going to get to them in a later episode, but what's interesting here is that Roman Catholics will say that they have to mix their water with wine at the altar because it's an ancient tradition that's received on the authority of the apostolic.

Church.

After Christ. So they'll say, hey, they used a mixed cup therefore Jesus must have mixed it himself which is an invalid inference and then they impose it as an apostolic ritual upon us and yet it's not an actual apostolic ritual, it's a manufacturing process and importantly the manufacturing process was completed in the kitchen, not at the table.

But what's interesting is there's a lot of other things that the early Church taught about the Lord's Supper like receiving communion in the hand or making sure that the wine you use is red or making sure that everybody who's present drinks from the mixed cup and all of those traditions have been abandoned by Roman Catholicism they've been set aside as unnecessary.

So what's funny, and we'll get to this when we get to our wrap up on the inconsistency of Roman Catholicism, is that they'll appeal to the high authority of the early Church tradition to say we absolutely have to mix our wine with water.

And then you point out that the early Church took communion in the hand and some Roman Catholics.

Will say, oh,.

Well we don't do that anymore because as the Church became more and more aware of the real presence of Christ in the bread, they didn't administer it in the hand anymore.

That's really interesting that you say that because I remember as a kid one of the first times, I don't think it was the first time, but I remember very early on in my childhood going and taking communion and my cousin after the priest put the bread in his mouth, I suppose that he didn't like the taste of it and he took it out.

He grabbed it and took it out and looked at it and then put it back in his mouth. I remember that being a big deal and it was like he tainted it and my family was really upset by it and they told all of us, don't touch it.

You eat it or whatever but don't touch it. I just remember he kind of got into trouble for that so I thought that was funny.

Some churches, some Roman Catholic churches today will allow people to take communion in the hand and then put it in the mouth themselves. Some people consider that to be very disrespectful and only the priest should be allowed to touch it and should place it directly on the tongue.

In fact, the Roman Catholic arguments against taking it in the hand is that because it is Christ's body, according to them, it should only be handled by a priest and therefore it's probably not the best practice for people to take the bread in their own hand.

But what's interesting is that the early church believed that the wine used in the Lord's Supper ought to be red so that it would properly signify Christ's blood. Yet the Roman Catholic church today says you can use wine, red or white wine, it doesn't really matter.

The important thing is that it's wine. The early church actually allowed people, whether deacons or even lay people, to take some of the consecrated bread home with them. Well, now the Roman Catholic church says, oh, we don't do that anymore because as the church became more aware of the real presence of Christ in the bread, they stopped treating it that way.

So it's the same thing, taking it in the hand, using red wine, or allowing people to take it home with them. These are all practices that are documented in the early church that the Roman Catholic church rejects, right?

And so they can't consistently say, oh, we have to mix our water with wine because the early church did, and then have all these other things the early church actually did and say we don't do that anymore because the church has decided that it's not reverent.

You either have to take the early church, I mean, as Roman Catholics they appeal to the high authority of the early church as the basis for mixing water with wine at the table, something the early church didn't do.

They say we have to do that. And then you find things that the early church actually did, and they say, oh, we don't do that anymore because it's irreverent. Well, that's interesting because they think that it was known from the beginning that Jesus was physically present in the bread, right?

It's not until later that they actually started forbidding people from taking it home with them because they thought, well, the church became more aware of Christ's real presence. Well, the fact is that the early church wasn't aware of Christ's real presence in the bread, and we can cover that in another series.

But what I wanted to get to now is that Clement of Alexandria, now we're late 2nd century getting into the 3rd century here, and what I want our listeners to remember is that Clement is the one who said that generally speaking, and he was not referring to the liturgy of the Lord's Supper, he was just saying, and this is a quote from him, it is best to mix the wine with as much water as possible.

And he said this to avoid drunkenness and immorality, and he said this in reference to just the beverage itself. Mix the wine with as much water as possible, and what he's referring to here is mirum, that wine concentrate.

So when he says you have to take the wine without water and add water to it in as much quantity as possible is to water it down so much that you avoid drunkenness. And as we talked earlier, mirum and water was such a common mixture that Clement believed that the miracle at Cana had simply been to create mixed wine out of water.

Not pure wine or mirum out of water, but mixed wine out of water, which makes sense because nobody would have served straight mirum at a wedding feast. So we'll get to that in a little bit, but Clement of Alexandria when expounding on John chapter 6 refers to the mixed wine and the baked bread, but the important thing I want to highlight here is that he's talking about Jesus being the heavenly bread for us, and that the bread which I give is my flesh.