SRR #53 | Roman Catholics & The Mingled Cup

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This podcast is a member of the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network. Alright, welcome everybody to another podcast episode with Semper Reformanda Radio.
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As opposed to, blessed are you when you have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness. It is on.
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We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle. Alright, welcome back everybody.
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This is Tim with Semper Reformanda Radio. And I have with me the other Tim, Tim Coffman. And today we're going to be talking about some stuff that pertains to Roman Catholicism.
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And I just want to say thank you, Tim, for joining us. What are we going to be talking about today?
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Okay, today our topic is the mingled cup. And what we'll be talking about is the
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Roman Catholic practice of adding water to the wine during the Lord's Supper or during the
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Roman Catholic Mass. And the reason this matters to us is that if you read the early church fathers, they do indeed make reference to water and wine being used in the
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Lord's Supper. But when you understand the ancient practice of winecraft, what comes out of the early church fathers is an understanding that this was just simply a secular manufacturing process to make wine.
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And wine was made before the meal. It was not made during the meal.
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And Roman Catholics will appeal to the early church fathers to show that there was an apostolic rite of adding water to the wine during the
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Lord's Supper. And that's why they do it. And it turns out it was just simply a secular manufacturing process.
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And it's important for us to understand that because Roman Catholics will use the evidence from the early church fathers to show that Roman Catholicism is right.
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In fact, when you evaluate the early church fathers, you find out that they weren't referring to a liturgical apostolic rite at all.
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And in fact, the liturgical apostolic rite doesn't emerge until the latter part of the fourth century.
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And it's something we've talked about many times on this podcast. When Roman Catholics try to show the historical apostolic continuity of their beliefs and practices, they always hit a dead stop at the latter part of the fourth century.
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They rarely can trace things back farther than that. And this is just one more example where they add water to wine during the mass, and they claim that it goes all the way back to the apostles.
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When you examine the historical evidence, you find out that it's a novelty from the latter part of the fourth century. Well, that sounds really interesting.
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So let's go ahead and do this. I believe that we're going to do a series on this.
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This is going to be part one, and hopefully we're going to do part two and part three as well. But this, folks, this is mainly the work that Tim Coffman has put in.
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So I'm going to allow him to lead the conversation today, and I might be jumping in with some questions and some clarifications.
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I find this really interesting because after we stopped going to the
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Roman Catholic Church as a kid, I remember as a teenager I started going to a Baptist church, and they used grape juice.
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So some of our listeners might be asking, what's the big deal? And I appreciate the fact that you just explained that this is an argument that the
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Roman Catholics will use, and so that's why we want to address this. But, yeah,
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I'm going to, in case there's a cricket behind me. So I'm going to minimize the amount of talking that I do, and then
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I'm just going to be following along with Tim on the notes that he's provided. So I'm just going to let
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Tim take us away. Okay, well, thank you, Tim, for helping me co -host the show today.
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And we're happy to be here to equip our listeners. As we have mentioned before, we want to make sure our listeners understand the
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Roman Catholic arguments for their beliefs and practices, and we want to equip our listeners to be able to respond.
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We do not have to take the Roman Catholic arguments lying down, and there's a very simple explanation for why the early church made reference to a mingled cup with wine and water in it.
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And it's not at all the apostolic ritual that Roman Catholics want to make it. One of the things that we have repeatedly returned to on our various podcasts, whether it be about relics, or Mary, or the sacrifice of the
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Mass, is that what we find consistently is you don't find evidence for these different practices until you get to the latter part of the 4th century, and then there's 300 years away from the apostles, and they want us just to fill that in by assumption.
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And I want to start by giving a few examples of Roman Catholic apologists who acknowledge this problem.
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Or if they don't acknowledge the problem, they at least acknowledge the symptom of the problem.
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And so I'm going to walk through just a few Roman Catholic beliefs and thoughts and practices, and I want you to notice a very consistent pattern.
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And the reason this is important is because the mixing of water with wine as an apostolic liturgical rite falls into the same category of one of those things you just can't find evidence for until you get to the latter part of the 4th century.
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So let's talk about Mary's sinlessness. This is from Fr.
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Juniper Carroll and his Volume I of Mariology, a very highly esteemed mariologist from Roman Catholicism.
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And he says that it's very difficult to find evidence for Mary's sinlessness in the early church, but a significant—this is quoting him now— a significant turning point in the mariological consciousness of the
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West does not occur until 377 A .D. with the publication of St. Ambrose's three books on virginity.
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The attitude of Ambrose toward Mary is something novel in Latin literature. So here he's acknowledging the latter part of the 4th century.
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You know, when it comes to finding these evidence for their beliefs, it's really hard to find it until you get to the latter part of the 4th century.
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So I was reading another article, it's called Some Little Known Early Witnesses to Mary's Virginitas in Part II.
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And when we talked about this in our series on Mary, we talked about her physical virginity being preserved in childbirth.
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And it has everything to do with the Roman Catholic belief that Mary was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Christ.
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And so Joseph Plumb writes about Mary's virginity in Part II, that is in the birth of Christ, and he says the early fathers are not so clear.
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In other words, their writings are a far cry from the precise formulation by Zeno of Verona, who wrote in the last half of the 4th century about Mary's virginity in Part II.
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When it comes to Mary as mother of God, as we mentioned in our series on Mary, there's no evidence in the
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Greek sources for Mary under the title Mother of God, except for a forgery that came from the latter part of the 4th century, and it doesn't show up in Latin literature until the latter part of the 4th century.
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On Mary as a mother of the Church, if you just look this up online, it says the title was first used in the late 4th century by St.
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Ambrose of Milan. On the rite of consecrated virginity,
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Tim, there was a recent news article about some women who had pledged themselves to consecrated virginity as brides of Christ to remain perpetually virgins.
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And I was reading from David Hunter, who is a Roman Catholic professor of Catholic studies at the
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University of Kentucky, and he says the ritual of consecration of virgins had become a formal practice in the
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Western Church only at the end of the 4th century. And so on clerical celibacy, this is actually a book that was quoted by Pope Benedict XVI when he was talking about clerical celibacy, and the book is called
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Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, and it says, we will therefore choose the late 4th century as our chronological basis for inquiry on the birth and development of the law on clerical celibacy.
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And I could go on and on about relic veneration, veneration of the true cross, and what you find over and over again is that Roman Catholic apologists and scholars acknowledge, sometimes explicitly, but frequently implicitly, that they can't find evidence for their beliefs and practices any earlier than the latter part of the 4th century.
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And we'll talk later on this podcast about the eschatological significance of that, but for today
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I just want to talk about the practice of mixing water into the wine during the
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Lord's Supper, and the Roman Catholic claim that this is an ancient apostolic rite and that it is believed that Jesus himself added water to his wine at the
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Last Supper. There's no evidence for it, and the first time we ever see this arises, an apostolic liturgical rite in the church is the latter part of the 4th century.
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And before then, the mixing of water with wine was just considered a standard manufacturing process.
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And the reason we know this is because when the early church fathers make reference to it, they frequently juxtapose it or put it in the same context as a discussion on the manufacturing process for bread.
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And in the end, they were simply acknowledging something that was very common back then, which is the knowledge of how to make wine.
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And we'll talk about that in a few minutes. So today, what we want to do in the podcast, in this series, is we want to talk about the historical arguments
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Roman Catholics make to support their belief that Jesus himself mixed the water with the wine at the Last Supper.
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We'll then review the ancient craft of winemaking to show where the mixing of wine with water originated and why it was necessary.
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And then we'll go through the early church writers' descriptions of the mingled cup to show that in the early church, they understood very well that mixing water with wine was not an apostolic rite, but was rather a standard well -known manufacturing process.
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What we'll do as we proceed through the series, we'll show that at the end of the 4th century, a mistake and some ignorance worked together with Hilary of Poitiers and with Ambrose of Milan to make it look like there had been a step of mixing water with wine during the
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Lord's Supper. And that does not emerge until the latter part of the 4th century. In order to understand the mistake that was made by Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan, we have to understand the ancient practice of winecraft and the writings of the early church fathers as they wrote about it.
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Because without that information, we don't notice the mistake that Hilary of Poitiers made and the mistake that Ambrose made.
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Both of them, based on ignorance and misunderstanding, concluded that there must have been an apostolic rite.
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But that doesn't come to the surface unless you first understand the ancient practice of winecraft. And when you do, begin to understand the mistake that Hilary of Poitiers made and the mistake that Ambrose made.
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Now, what's interesting is that, in this case, the story doesn't end in the latter part of the 4th century.
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I can't help but call it a comical misunderstanding, but a comical misunderstanding based on this exact mistake of Hilary and Ambrose contributed to the great schism between the
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East and West in 1054 AD. And they were arguing about whether or not they should have mixed their water with their wine.
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And we'll get to that big argument that erupted in the 11th century over this very issue.
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And both sides were claiming that they had an apostolic rite, an apostolic tradition on their side.
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And both of them were wrong. Both of them were mistaken because they did not understand the ancient practice of winecraft.
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And then, at the very end of the series, we'll just walk through the inconsistency of the
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Roman Catholic position on the Lord's Supper and show that there's just no early church support for having a priest mix water with wine at the
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Lord's Table until you get to the end of the 4th century. So, once again, the mixing of water with wine during the
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Lord's Supper is a late 4th century novelty. Protestants generally don't practice this, although some do, like the
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Anglicans do mix water with their wine during the ministry of the
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Lord's Supper. But, again, it's based on a novelty. It's something that carried over from Roman Catholicism, but there's no evidence for it until you get to the latter part of the 4th century.
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So, in the case of Protestants today, we don't have a step in our liturgy where we stop and say, we're going to mix water with the wine now because Jesus did this.
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But Roman Catholics do. In fact, they often stop and say, Jesus probably mixed this himself during the
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Last Supper. So, isn't it interesting, Tim, that there's something for which there's no evidence in the
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Scriptures at all? And, in fact, as we walk through the early church fathers, there's no evidence that they believed that there was a liturgical apostolic rite of mixing water with the wine.
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And then you get to the latter part of the 4th century, and suddenly it's an official Roman Catholic doctrine.
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And later on, we'll find out that people could be excommunicated for denying that you're supposed to mix water with wine.
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And it's all based on a historical misunderstanding. Yeah, that's pretty interesting.
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When you said that the East and the West were arguing over it, and neither one of them got it right, it made me think of an argument between a
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Mormon and a Jehovah's Witness about who Christ is. It's like, well, neither one of them are going to get it right.
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So, folks, today, and probably for the next couple of episodes, this is pretty much going to be all
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Tim Coffman giving us the information. This is something that I know very little about, but I'm super excited to learn from you about this.
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And, once again, this is just another reason that Roman Catholics give to support their claim that they are the true church, when, in fact, as Tim Coffman is about to demonstrate, they are not.
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And this really can't be used in their favor. So, yeah, let's dive into it,
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Tim. Yeah, so I think we covered this a little bit in our podcast on relics, but there are people that convert to Roman Catholicism because they discover that the early church used icons and incense during the liturgy.
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But if you just do some research, you'll find that, actually, even the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges that there was no knowledge, no mention of incense in the early church until the 5th century, and that, in fact, the early church rejected the use of icons, at least until the latter part of the 4th century.
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You find people saying, well, I converted to Roman Catholicism because I found out that Mary was considered to be the
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Mother of God in the early church. Then you find out that there's actually no evidence that she was ever called
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Mother of God until you get to the latter part of the 4th century. And you find other
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Roman Catholics who say, well, I converted because I found out that the early church mixed water with their wine, just like Roman Catholicism does, and that's why
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I converted, because I found the true church. So let's go through and let's look through what Roman Catholicism, how they describe the practice.
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And this comes from the general instructions of the Roman Missal, which is basically the instructions on how to conduct a
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Mass. And the Mass, for those who don't know, the Mass is the
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Eucharistic rite of the Lord's Supper, according to Roman Catholicism. They would call it the
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Eucharist, and Eucharist is based on the Greek word for Thanksgiving. And they would say that at the preparation of the gifts, and what they mean by preparation of the gifts, they mean the bringing forward of the bread and wine to the altar to conduct the sacrifice of the
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Mass. It says, at the preparation of the gifts, the bread and wine with water are brought to the altar, the same elements that Christ took into his hands.
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That's a direct quote from the general instruction of the Roman Missal. Now, what they're saying is that Jesus had three elements at the
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Supper, water, wine, and bread, and that they were brought forward to him separately.
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Okay, so continuing with the general instruction of the Roman Missal, it says, during the celebration of the
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Lord's Supper, the priest stands at the side of the altar and pours wine and a little water into the chalice.
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That is, they take a cup, they put some wine in it, and then they add a little bit of water to it because they believe that that's what
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Jesus did. Now, this was so important to them that at the 22nd session of the
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Council of Trent, this is in the 16th century, they anathematized anyone who denied that you're supposed to add water to the wine as part of the liturgy.
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It's Canon 9 in the canons on the sacrifice of the Mass. So this is a pretty big deal to them.
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If you were to deny, as a Roman Catholic, and Tim, we've talked about this before, that someone might say, well,
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I don't think it's that big of a deal whether you mix water with wine or not. Well, Roman Catholicism thinks it's a very big deal, and they will anathematize someone who denies that you're supposed to be adding water to the wine.
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So a Roman Catholic doesn't really have the option of saying, well, I don't believe that you have to mix water with wine.
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Well, Roman Catholicism requires you to believe that, and if you deny it, then you're excommunicated.
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Well, and I would just also point out, because I got into a discussion with a family member who was trying to tell me that, you know, that was the
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Council of Trent, that was a long time ago, and sort of saying that that's no longer valid.
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And I just remind our listeners that the official church teaching is that what came out of the
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Council of Trent was deemed infallible, and so they can't really go back on it.
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Yeah, that's correct. Ecumenical councils, that is councils of the entire church, and they believe that Council of Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II were all ecumenical councils, and that the attribute of infallibility belongs to the church when it speaks either through the
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Pope in a special statement from the chair of St. Peter, or what they call ex cathedra, or when the church speaks through an ecumenical council.
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So, yes, the Council of Trent was an ecumenical council according to Roman Catholicism, and therefore infallible.
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And besides that, the modern catechism from the 1990s actually says that you're supposed to mix water with the wine because the ancient church did it.
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I mean, the Council of Trent was a long time ago, but the catechism was just from a couple decades ago.
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They've been consistent about this for centuries, actually, but it didn't emerge as an apostolic rite or practice until you get to the latter part of the 4th century.
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So if you're a Roman Catholic and you reject this, then your church and the religious system that you're holding to actually anathematizes you and condemns you.
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So, yeah, well, let's go ahead and continue. Okay, so here's the
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Roman Catholicism. Let's get into how Roman Catholicism portrays this as an ancient apostolic rite.
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And I'm going to quote from an article by Mike Aquilina, who is a
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Roman Catholic apologist, and he wrote an article in 2016 called, Why Does the Priest Mix Water and Wine?
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And he refers to the moment when the priest pours the water into the wine, and he says,
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As the priest pours the two elements, a devout Christian can't help but remember this scene from the scriptures.
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Well, that's a pretty interesting statement, because I have looked through the gospels, and I can't find a scene like that anywhere.
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I don't see anywhere where Jesus adds water to his wine. I just, I'm not finding it. I go through the
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Last Supper narratives, and what I don't find is Jesus pouring water into his wine.
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And yet, in just a passing reference, this Roman Catholic apologist just wants you to believe that, yeah, he's pouring water into wine, just like that scene in the scriptures.
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Well, it's not there. And so I want to turn now to a Roman Catholic news agency called
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Zenit, and they insist that the rite of mixing water with wine is very ancient, and note the uncertainty of the language they say, and it is believed that Jesus used a mixed cup at the
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Last Supper. So he says, I'm sorry, this is from Zenit, Roman Catholic News.
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Why water and wine? That's the title of the article from June 2004. It says, The brief rite of pouring water into the wine used for consecration is very ancient.
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Indeed, it is believed that the Lord himself used wine tempered with water at the Last Supper, as this was the common practice among the
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Jews and in Mediterranean culture in general. Now, that's actually a true statement, that it was a general practice at the time to use water mixed in wine as a common beverage.
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But what's missing is evidence that Jesus instituted it as a rite. Notice that it says,
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A brief rite of pouring water into wine is very ancient, because it was a common practice among the
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Jews in the Mediterranean culture in general. But the problem is the Mediterranean culture did not have a rite of pouring water into wine.
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That is a rite, R -I -T -E. In other words, it wasn't a ritual. It was just part of a standard manufacturing process, and we'll get to that in a little bit.
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But I want you to notice that the words that are used, It is believed that our Lord himself used wine tempered with water.
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Okay, yes, it is believed that the Lord himself used wine tempered with water. I agree with that. What's missing is evidence that it was an apostolic rite.
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And the significance here, Tim, is that Jesus used bread, and we can correctly assume that Jesus did not use bread dough, and that he did not use flour, but he used actual bread.
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But that doesn't mean that Jesus had made an apostolic ritual out of mixing water with flour or baking the dough.
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What we can assume is that Jesus used baked bread. But what we can't assume is that Jesus instituted a rite of baking the bread.
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And yet, that's the same thing that's being done here, that, well, it's believed that Jesus used wine tempered with water, therefore, there must have been an apostolic rite.
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Well, that's not true. There was no apostolic ritual of actually adding water to wine during the Lord's Supper.
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It was nothing Jesus did, and it's nothing that the apostles taught. And what we'll find when we get to the early church fathers is they acknowledge this.
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They acknowledge that Jesus didn't actually mix water with wine. So, well,
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I want to switch now to the Catholic Encyclopedia. And the Catholic Encyclopedia says something very interesting.
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And they're acknowledging that it's just hard to figure out why this came about as an apostolic rite.
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And this is from their entry called The Liturgical Use of Water. And they say, the
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Catholic Encyclopedia says, With regard to the water mingled with wine in the Mass, the fathers from the earliest times have tried to find reasons why the church uses a mixed chalice, though the gospel narrative implies that Christ consecrated pure wine.
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Notice that language. The fathers from the earliest times have tried to find reasons.
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Well, I want to first say that that's not really fair to the early church fathers, because they weren't in search for reasons.
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In fact, they weren't even struggling to figure it out. The fact is, they didn't think that there was an apostolic rite, and they knew very well why water was mixed with wine back then.
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But notice that what we're seeing in the Roman Catholic arguments for the water mixed with wine is that they don't really understand where the ritual came from.
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But they believe that it must be an apostolic ritual, because Ambrose, in the latter part of the 4th century, described it as an apostolic ritual.
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But there's something very specific, and this is a key point that I want to make here, is that the
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Roman Catholic Encyclopedia says that the gospel narrative implies that Christ consecrated pure wine.
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Well, I want to stop there for a minute, because pure wine is something very specific, and it has a very specific meaning, and the gospel narrative at no point implies that Jesus consecrated pure wine.
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Pure wine is a thick, syrupy substance.
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I want you to think about orange juice concentrate for just a second. If you were to send your wife to the grocery store to pick up some orange juice, she might come home with frozen orange juice concentrate.
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You mean the stuff that comes in a can that you have to mix with water? Yeah, the stuff that comes in a can that you have to mix with water.
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And you might send your wife and say, could you grab some orange juice, and she'll go to the store and say, I got you some orange juice, but what she really got was orange juice concentrate.
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And you'd never serve that to your kids like that. It's thick and syrupy and sweet, and you'd never drink it that way.
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You would add water to it. But what's interesting about it, and we'll get to this in just a second, is that you would call it orange juice either way.
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You'd say, hey, I got some orange juice at the grocery store, but it was really orange juice concentrate.
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And then you'd add water to it, mix it up, and you'd serve it to the kids and say, come get your orange juice. The thing is that Jesus would never have served a thick, syrupy, grapy substance at a meal.
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In fact, what we'll find is nobody did that. And so it's true that Jesus used a tempered cup, that is, the thick, syrupy substance with water mixed in, and he did not consecrate pure wine because nobody served pure wine at meals back then.
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I want to get to that point because they're trying to make it sound like, oh yeah, it sounds like Jesus consecrated pure wine in the
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Gospel, but it actually doesn't say that at all. Pure wine has a very specific meaning, and we're going to get to that in just a second.
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The truth about mixing water with wine at the Mass, though, is that Roman Catholics don't actually know why they do it.
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They do not know how much water to add. They're not sure how to administer it correctly, and they don't even know what it is alleged to signify.
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And we're going to get to all these points as we walk through this series, but the entire position on the mixing of water with wine at the altar is based on a simple historical misunderstanding, and that is a thin foundation for an allegedly apostolic liturgical rite that you can get excommunicated for denying.
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That's pretty amazing. Think about the Roman Catholic Church claiming to be the pillar and ground of truth, and they take an historical misunderstanding, impose it with an iron fist, and say, if you deny this, you're not going to heaven.
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And it turns out it's just a simple historical mistake based on later ignorance of the ancient practice of winecraft.
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So what I'd like to do next is let's walk through what actual winecraft was back in the day.
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So we're going to talk about, I'm going to quote from the Encyclopedia Romana, and this is in an entry called
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Wine in Rome. And this is just simply an explanation of how they made wine back then.
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And what I want to highlight is the word mirum. We're going to get to the word mirum in a second and define it, but it shows up in the definition here from the
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Encyclopedia Romana. And that word mirum is exactly what they were arguing about in the 11th century leading up to the split between the
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East and West, whether or not Christ had consecrated pure mirum or whether or not he had consecrated and mixed water with wine himself.
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It's a pretty interesting argument that shows up in the 11th century leading up to the split between East and West, and neither side really understood the history behind winecraft.
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So let's start with mirum, which is pure wine or undiluted wine. It's that thick syrupy substance.
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And again, I want you to think of orange juice concentrate. And just like you would never serve orange juice concentrate to your kids,
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Jesus would never have served mirum at a meal. So let's read from the
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Encyclopedia Romana. It says that wine almost always was mixed with water for drinking.
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Undiluted wine, or mirum, was considered the habit of provincials and barbarians.
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What that means is that only the uncivilized and barbarians would ever drink their mirum straight.
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The Romans usually mixed one part wine to two parts water, sometimes hot or even salted with seawater to cut down on some of the sweetness.
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The Greeks tended to dilute their wine with three or four parts water, which they always mixed by adding the wine.
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So that's just a quick summary of ancient winecraft. Nobody would ever serve straight mirum at a meal because it was thick and syrupy and the alcohol content was so high that you'd actually get drunk.
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And what we'll find is that the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, the Christians all found the drinking of straight mirum to be absolutely objectionable and unthinkable.
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And so the mirum, as we noted in that definition, is considered undiluted wine or pure wine.
33:58
And the word mirum comes from the word myrrh, and myrrh is often used to denote purity or something that has not been diluted.
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And so you might say, and you probably remember a famous work by C .S.
34:16
Lewis called Myrrh Christianity. The title of the book is simply intended to convey pure Christianity.
34:25
And myrrh wine or mirum is pure wine that has not been mixed with water, and it is called pure wine, undiluted wine, unmixed wine, wine alone, wine without water, or sometimes the blood of the grape.
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So think about the blood of the grape. You press the grape. This juice comes out. It becomes fermented and thick, and that's the blood of the grape, and it's very high alcohol content.
34:54
To make it suitable for drinking, you then add water to that. It's basically wine concentrate. That's what mirum is.
35:03
When you prepare it for drinking, wine is then called mixed wine, mingled wine, wine and water, or wine with water.
35:12
And importantly, nobody at this time would have served mirum at a meal. It simply was not done in civilized circles.
35:18
And this is very important because we're going to get to the marriage at Cana, and we'll find that in the early church, they didn't believe that Jesus had converted water into pure wine.
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They believed that Jesus had converted water into mixed wine because they knew very well that Jesus never would have served mirum at the marriage at Cana, just as they knew that he never would have served mirum at the
35:45
Last Supper. So are you with me so far, Tim? Yeah, I'm with you. This is really interesting.
35:53
Yeah, so here's the thing. I think if you were to do some searching online about mixing wine with water, you'll find that in the wine industry today, it's still controversial because wine manufacturers today, sometimes to cut down on the alcohol content, will add water to wine.
36:16
They mix it. And I think that it's okay to use mixed wine in the Lord's Supper because the wine you get off the grocery store shelves probably has been cut with water in order to get the alcohol content just right.
36:30
It's done to manage flavor and alcohol content. And if you just do a search on wine and water in the wine industry today, it's still controversial that yes, they say sometimes we do have to add water to the wine in order to meet the alcohol content that we're looking for.
36:46
But this is standard. It's typical. And I think that if you're buying wine off the shelf at the grocery store to use at the
36:53
Lord's Supper, it's probably mixed wine. There's no apostolic rite that requires that you add water to the wine during the
36:59
Lord's Supper. Just what Jesus used at the Lord's Supper, at the Last Supper, was wine.
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And wine back then is simply wine concentrate plus water, which was often called wine with water.
37:13
That's the simplicity of it all right there. So let me ask you a question. Should we be using wine when we take the
37:20
Lord's Supper? Because I know a lot of Protestant churches, like some
37:26
Baptist churches, they use grape juice. That's an interesting question.
37:31
And what we'll notice at the marriage at Cana, the gospel in John chapter 2 explicitly refers to the fact that they had run out of wine and Jesus' miracle is to make wine for them.
37:50
At the Last Supper, he never actually uses the word wine. He says fruit of the vine and the cup.
37:58
What you find in the gospel narratives is you don't find reference to wine being used.
38:04
Now, the reason I mention that is not because I think we shouldn't use wine. I think the wine is implied, and I think it's a valid inference that we can get from the gospel to say you should use wine in the
38:16
Last Supper. But what we also find is that the wine was so watered down at that point that the intent was not to use it to get drunk, but was simply to make a beverage that was suitable for a meal.
38:30
Now, some folks, when they look at the gospel accounts, say, well, it just says fruit of the vine.
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It doesn't actually say wine, and so grape juice works. Other folks will say, well, it's obvious that the inference is wine, and we can validly infer that it was wine that was used.
38:46
I personally prefer wine, but the church that I attend does not use wine in the Lord's Supper, and I don't think that it's a problem.
38:53
It's fruit of the vine. Right. It's nothing to anathematize anybody over, right?
38:59
Right. You wouldn't want to anathematize someone over fruit of the vine that's grape juice instead of fruit of the vine that's wine.
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What's silly is excommunicating people for not adding water, which is what
39:12
Roman Catholicism has done. Yeah, okay. Now, I want to establish something here.
39:18
Very briefly, we're going to venture into the Latin Vulgate that was translated by Jerome. The reason
39:25
I want to do this is that in Deuteronomy 32, 14, there's a reference to a series of pure food items, and they're the purest parts of everything that's in the list.
39:40
When it gets to wine, it refers to the purest blood of the grape. This is from Deuteronomy 32, 14 from the
39:48
Latin Vulgate. The English translation is, butter of the herd and milk of the sheep with the fat of lambs and of the rams of the breed of basin and goats with the marrow of wheat and the purest blood of the grape.
40:09
That blood of the grape is what we would call mirum. This is just a list of some of the most pure food items you could possibly eat.
40:19
Now, the reason this matters is because when Jerome translated this from the
40:24
Hebrew to Latin, in place of the purest blood of the grape, he used the term miricissimum.
40:32
Miricissimum is simply the superlative form of mirum. Mirum, as we mentioned, is simply pure wine concentrate.
40:44
Here, where the scriptures refer to the purest blood of the grape, Jerome translated this into miricissimum, or exceptionally pure wine, mirum.
40:57
When you look at, I want to refer to Henrici van Overbeek's Latin Dictionary of the
41:04
Scriptures. This is from 1696, but it's an ancient dictionary on the scriptures, and it's specifically referring to the
41:11
Latin terms in the Vulgate translation. He acknowledges that mirum is simply wine that has not been mixed with water.
41:20
That is, it's wine concentrate. It's important to establish this because we're going to get into whether or not mirum was actually used and what the significance of mirum is.
41:29
Mirum as an ingredient of wine, and I wanted to establish that Roman Catholics, especially from their own
41:37
Latin translation of the Vulgate, which is the Latin translation of the scriptures, and it is the authoritative translation of Roman Catholicism.
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In the authoritative translation of Roman Catholicism, mirum is the purest blood of the grape.
41:54
That is, it's wine concentrate. It's wine that has not been mixed with water. We know what mirum is.
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Mirum is a thick, syrupy, grapy substance that's an ingredient of wine that's processed for consumption, but mirum is typically not consumed straight except by the barbarians and the uncivilized.
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It's important to establish this because I make this argument with Roman Catholics, and I go, oh, mirum doesn't actually mean that.
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I say, well, actually, if you look at your own scriptures and then the scriptural dictionary that was composed by Henrici van
42:32
Overbeek, mirum and miricissimum refers to wine that has not been mixed with water.
42:38
That is, it's a wine concentrate. So let's walk through. I want to walk through just four examples.
42:44
This is from the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, and the early Christians to show how unthinkable it would have been for anybody to serve pure wine, that is, mirum, at any meal.
42:58
This is going to be very important when we get to the marriage at Cana, and particularly when we get to the dispute between East and West in the 11th century.
43:08
The question, what is mirum, and what did Jesus actually serve at the Last Supper? What we'll find when we look to the
43:14
Greek, Jewish, Roman, and early Christian sources, nobody would have served mirum at the
43:20
Last Supper, but nobody would have mixed it themselves at the meal either. It's just not what was done.
43:27
So let's walk through the Greek sources. When I say that, I said nobody would have mixed it themselves at the table.
43:33
That's one point. The other point is nobody would have served it straight either. And this becomes an issue when we get to the latter part of the 4th century with Hilary of Poitiers' mistake.
43:44
But let's start by going through the Greek sources that say only the uncivilized would drink their mirum straight.
43:52
And this is from the Greek historian Herodotus. He's writing in about the 5th century B .C., and he's referring to a man named
43:59
Cleomenes. And Cleomenes had died early, and his countrymen, according to Herodotus, attributed his untimely death to his habit of drinking wine unmixed with water, which he learned from the
44:14
Siths. So the Siths were these barbarians on the frontiers. And it says that Cleomenes unwisely drank a wine that was purer wine than common.
44:23
In other words, he drank mirum. He drank his mirum straight, and they attributed his untimely death to drinking his mirum straight, something that he had actually learned from the barbarians.
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So in other words, the Greeks thought this is something that uncivilized people do, and Cleomenes died young because he did this.
44:42
Healthy people wouldn't normally do that. So now
44:48
I'm going to refer to 2 Maccabees, and so this is written about the 2nd century B .C. And it's just a simple quote, a simple reference to mirum.
44:59
And it says in 2 Maccabees 1539, it says,
45:05
It is hurtful to drink wine or water alone. Wine mingled with water is pleasant and delighted the taste.
45:13
So that's from the RSV translation of 2 Maccabees. And it's not what we consider part of our scriptures, but it is authentic Jewish literature, and so it's important to notice that.
45:25
The RSV translation would include the apocryphal books, and the 2
45:34
Maccabees is in there. And 2 Maccabees is authentic Jewish literature. It makes a reference to the fact that it is hurtful to drink wine or water alone.
45:43
They don't recommend drinking water alone, but they also don't drink wine alone, which is mirum.
45:49
On the other hand, wine mingled with water is pleasant. So here you have the Greeks and the
45:55
Jews saying it's not helpful to drink straight mirum, but it is good to mix the mirum with water before drinking it.
46:02
So the Romans. I'm just going to quote from... We've already visited the
46:08
Encyclopedia Romana that said the Romans mixed theirs with two parts water to one part wine.
46:16
And this is from the poet Marshall, and he's from the first century. And in his poetry, he made a reference to the wine that used to be mixed for Nero.
46:30
And he says, Boy, mix me bumpers half and half, such as Pythagoras used to give to Nero.
46:40
Now, the reference here is that Nero, of course, was known to be a little bit off his rocker. And here's a reference to the idea that Pythagoras had mixed wine for Nero and had only mixed it not according to the normal mix, which is two parts water to one part wine.
46:59
But this case, it was one part water to one part wine. And the purpose was, the author is writing, saying,
47:06
I want you to mix me my wine half and half instead of two parts water to two parts wine, because I want to get drunk.
47:13
He says, mix me bumpers half and half and not too long between them.
47:20
I can do nothing sober, but when I drink, 15 poets will come to my aid. So here's a guy saying,
47:26
I want to get drunk like Nero was, and so I want you to cut the mixture down from two parts water to one part wine to just one to one.
47:36
And when you get to that point, the alcohol concentration is high enough that it'll get me a little bit drunk and I can write my poetry better.
47:44
But the point is here that the Romans were acknowledging that nobody serves their wine straight, straight mirum or straight wine concentrate.
47:54
But if you do want to get drunk, instead of making it two parts water to one part wine, let's just make it and I'll get a little bit drunk that way and the poets will help me.
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So here we have Greeks, Jews, Romans, everybody knows you don't drink your mirum straight.
48:10
So now I'm going to fast forward to the late second century. We're now with Clement of Alexandria. And he described wine, that is the wine that you drink at a meal, is called the blood of the grape mixed with water.
48:25
Now remember from the Latin Vulgate, the blood of the grape is mirum. And so here you have
48:31
Clement of Alexandria saying that wine is the blood of the grape mixed with water.
48:37
It's mirum plus water. Those are the two ingredients of wine. The grape juice, wine concentrate plus water.
48:47
And Clement thought that wine alone was the fuel of the agitation of lust and that water was the medicine of temperance and advised, of course, that pure wine be mixed with water.
48:59
And he was citing a comic poet. And in this citation, he's just agreeing with the comic poet.
49:05
He says, for unmixed wine is far from compelling a man to be wise. And so from this,
49:12
Clement of Alexandria, late second century, concludes that it is best to mix the wine with as much water as possible.
49:20
In other words, you don't want to drink your mirum straight. You want to make sure you water it down so that you don't get agitated to lust and other ridiculous behavior that happens if you drink your wine straight.
49:31
So here we have, we've just spanned about seven centuries. Centuries before the
49:38
Last Supper and centuries after the Last Supper. And we have this consistent theme from Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians.
49:47
You don't drink your mirum straight. You mix it with water. But you don't get apostolic rituals from Romans and Greeks and Jews.
49:58
You get them from the apostles and from Christ actually instituting something. And if Jesus actually brought water and wine to the table and mixed them for us, we would have an apostolic ritual from Christ himself that we could impose on people with iron fists like Roman Catholicism does, saying you have to mix your wine with water because Jesus did.
50:20
But Jesus would have used wine tempered with water because that's what wine is. Wine back then was wine concentrate mixed with water.
50:32
And so that's what Jesus would have served. But that's just standard manufacturing practice. All that we know is that wine back then was thick syrupy mirum with water added to it.
50:47
And that is what Jesus would have served. But that doesn't make an apostolic ritual out of adding water to wine, which is what
50:54
Roman Catholicism wants us to believe. So to highlight the significance of that common knowledge from these seven centuries that I just described all the way from Herodotus all the way through Clement of Alexandria, I want to highlight something here.
51:12
And this is a very significant point because we're talking now about the marriage at Cana. And in the early church, it was understood that Jesus had not made water into pure mirum.
51:28
He had actually made water into water mixed with wine. That is water mixed with mirum.
51:35
That is pure wine plus water. And this is from Clement of Alexandria again.
51:41
And it says here that if he made water wine at the marriage, he did not give permission to get drunk.
51:51
He gave life to the watery element of the meaning of the law, filling with his blood the doer of it who is
51:57
Adam. That is the whole world, supplying piety with drink from the vine of truth, the mixture of the old law and of the new word.
52:06
So that's from Clement of Alexandria, the instructor of Book 2,
52:11
Chapter 6. And what he is saying is that at the marriage at Cana, Jesus had actually taken the water and converted some of it to pure wine to make a mixture of the old law, which is water, and of the new word, which is the blood of the grape.
52:31
That's the point that Clement of Alexandria is making in this particular paragraph. It's the section on drinking.
52:39
And Clement of Alexandria is saying this, and he refers to the wedding at Cana, and he says what
52:45
Jesus did was to make water into a mixture of water and wine because he knew that's what wine was.
52:53
And he concludes by saying intemperate wine leads to insolent drunkenness.
53:01
And he said that Jesus never would have made intemperate wine at a wedding feast.
53:08
He never would have converted water into pure mirum, which is a syrupy alcohol, a substance of very high alcohol concentration.
53:18
Nobody would have done it, and Clement of Alexandria is just acknowledging. He's drawing some symbolism out of the mixture, which is beside the point here.
53:29
He's just highlighting the fact that, well, if Jesus turned water into wine, he didn't turn it into pure mirum.
53:34
He turned it into a mixture of water with wine. And he says, well, the water signifies
53:40
Adam. The blood of the grape signifies Christ, and therefore it creates a mixture of the old law and the new word.
53:48
In other words, saying that Jesus had made tempered wine at the Last Supper.
53:54
Oh, not at the Last Supper, at the marriage at Cana. Now Cyprian of Carthage, writing in the 3rd century, concluded the same thing.
54:01
He says the miracle at the marriage at Cana really was intended to show the marriage of Christ and the church.
54:08
And it says he showed that at the marriage of Christ and the church, as the Jews failed, the people of the nation should rather flow together and assemble.
54:18
For because Christ bore us all, and that he also bore our sins, we see that in the water is understood the people, but in the wine is shown the blood of Christ.
54:27
This is from Epistle 62, Cyprian of Carthage. And what he's saying is that the Jews failed and that they were water alone.
54:35
But when you add the blood of the grape to it, that is the blood of Christ, that mixes with the water and it shows the church married to Christ.
54:44
So again, he's talking about the marriage at Cana. And he's saying, of course we know that the water that was converted to wine at the marriage of Cana was actually mixed wine, that is water mixed with mirum, because nobody would have served mirum at a wedding feast.
55:02
I want you to think about that famous meal in John 2, considering what we know about what the
55:10
Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians all thought about straight mirum. Nobody drinks their mirum straight. And so Jesus would not have converted water into a thick, syrupy, unpalatable, highly alcohol -concentrated substance and then had the servants take it to the ruler of the feast and say, have him taste this.
55:29
Well, when the ruler of the feast tasted it, he said, wow, this is fantastic. But if you think about how unpalatable mirum is and how uncivilized it was to drink it, if Jesus had converted water into mirum at the marriage at Cana, the ruler of the feast would have been offended and spat it out, but instead he thought it was absolutely fantastic.
55:48
And so the point I want to make here is that when you think about what wine was in the days of Christ, what wine was for the seven centuries from Herodotus to Cyprian of Carthage, wine is simply pure wine mixed with water, or what we would say is wine and water.
56:15
And what we'll find when we get to the early church fathers is that that's what they believed. They thought when they say wine and water, they meant mingled wine, that is pure wine with water added to it.
56:28
And the fact that they would refer to the marriage at Cana as a miracle in which water was converted into mixed wine shows that they knew very well that wine back then was not pure wine, undiluted wine, the grape syrupy concentrate, but actually wine with water added to it to make it the palatable beverage that you would serve at a typical meal.
56:53
So we move from there to the Last Supper and we ask ourselves, would Jesus have served
57:00
Miram at the Last Supper? And the answer is no.
57:06
But the real question then comes, would Jesus have mixed it himself? And what we find when we get to the early church fathers is that no, they did not believe that Jesus had mixed it himself.
57:16
They just believed that he had used mixed wine, that is wine with water added to it, because that's what a typical beverage was.
57:24
And when we get to Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria and Cyprian of Carthage and then
57:30
Aphrodite of Persia in the 4th century, we find that winemaking is exactly what they had in mind when they spoke of a mingled cup being used at the
57:39
Last Supper, because they knew that that's what wine was. And Roman Catholicism has taken their references to a mingled cup and they've tried to extract an apostolic rite from it and then impose it on us with an iron fist and say, unless you believe that Jesus himself added the wine to the water,
57:59
I'm sorry, added the water to the wine at the Last Supper, then you're going to hell. You're excommunicated from the church. And it turns out it's just a misunderstanding of a historical practice, the ancient practice of winecraft, in which mirum, which is called wine, and water, and the mixture of which is called wine and water, or wine.
58:20
And what makes this matter so chronically confusing and so ripe for misuse by Roman Catholicism is that mirum and mirum mingled with water can both be called wine.
58:33
As we mentioned earlier, wine alone is what mirum is.
58:39
Mirum is wine alone that has not been mixed with water. So we'd say that's pure wine.
58:45
Mirum that's mingled with water is called wine. So you have something that can be called pure wine because it doesn't have water in it, and then something that's called wine because it does have water in it.
58:56
And this can be very confusing. But once you understand that mirum is pure wine and that wine is just mirum with water, what you find is that the expressions of the early church fathers on the use of a mingled cup at the
59:10
Last Supper is just straightforward reference to the ancient practice of winecraft and importantly, wine was mixed not at the table, but in the kitchen.
59:24
And it's not something that Jesus would have done himself at the Last Supper. And we'll get to that in our next episode when we get to the early church fathers.
59:32
What we'll find is that they repeatedly refer to wine and water, wine mixed with water, the mingled cup, the mixed cup.
59:41
And what we'll find is that they're simply referring to the ancient practice of making wine and that manufacturing process took place in the kitchen, not at the table.
59:53
And therefore, Jesus would not have mixed the water himself at the Lord's Supper. Does that make sense so far,
59:59
Tim? Yeah, that's great. So let's go ahead and wrap this episode up here, folks.
01:00:06
And then we're going to pick this up next week as well. Is this a good place to stop?
01:00:13
Yeah, this is a fantastic place. So we just want to bookmark it here and say we've gone through the ancient practice of adding water to mirim as part of the standard wine manufacturing process.
01:00:25
When we pick up with the next episode, we'll actually find the early church fathers making exactly that reference and that exact connection and not believing that Jesus had actually mixed the water and the wine himself at the table, but simply understanding that Jesus had used a mingled cup in the
01:00:41
Last Supper. Excellent. All right. Well, let me go ahead and remind everybody that you can email us at semper .refermando
01:00:50
.radio at gmail .com. If you have any questions, comments, or any feedback, we love to hear from our listeners.
01:00:59
So with that, we're going to go ahead and end part one to this series and wish everybody a blessed week.
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And we'll check you next time. God bless. Looking for that perfect track for your next evangelism outreach?
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