SRR #53 | Roman Catholics & The Mingled Cup

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Roman Catholic Claims About the Mingled Cup

All right. Welcome back, everybody. This is Tim with Semper Reformanda Radio. And I have with me the other Tim, Tim Kaufman. And today we're going to be talking about some stuff that pertains to Roman Catholicism.

And I just want to say thank you, Tim, for joining us. What are we going to be talking about today?

Okay. Today, our topic is the mingled cup. And what we'll be talking about is the Roman Catholic practice of adding water to the wine during the Lord's Supper or during the 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 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. And wine was made before the meal.

It was not made during the meal. And Roman Catholics will appeal to the early church fathers to show that there was an apostolic right of adding water to the wine during the Lord's Supper. And that's why they do it.

But it turns out it was just simply a secular manufacturing process. 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.

When in fact, when you evaluate the early church fathers, you find out that they weren't referring to a liturgical apostolic right at all. And in fact, the liturgical apostolic right doesn't emerge until the latter part of the fourth century.

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.

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. 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. So let's go ahead and do this. I believe that we're going to do a series on this. 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. So I'm going to allow him to lead the conversation today, and I might be jumping in with some questions and some clarifications. And, you know, I find this really interesting because after we stopped going to the Roman Catholic Church as a kid, I remember as a teenager, I started going to a Baptist church and they used grape juice.

So some of our listeners might be asking, what's the big deal? And I appreciate the fact that you just explained that, you know, this is an argument that the Roman Catholics will use. And so that's why we want to address this.

But, yeah, I'm going to, in case, you know, there's a cricket behind me. So I'm going to minimize the amount of talking that I do. And then I'm just going to be following along with Tim on the notes that he's provided.

So I'm just going to let Tim take us away.

Tim Coffman. Okay. Well, thank you, Tim, for helping me co-host the show today. 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 Roman Catholic arguments for their beliefs and practices.

And we want to equip our listeners to be able to respond. 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.

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 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 fourth century.

And then there's 300 years away from the apostles, and they want us just to fill that in by assumption. And I want to start by giving a few examples of Roman Catholic apologists who acknowledge this problem.

Or if they don't acknowledge the problem, they at least acknowledge the symptom of the problem. 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.

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 fourth century.

So let's talk about Mary's sinlessness. This is from Father Juniper Carroll and his volume one of Mariology, a very highly esteemed Mariologist from Roman Catholicism. 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 West does not occur until 377 A .D. with the publication of St. Ambrose's three books on virginity.

The attitude of Ambrose toward Mary is something novel in Latin literature. So here he's acknowledging the latter part of the fourth century. 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 fourth century.

So I was reading another article by, it's called, Some Little Known Early Witnesses to Mary's Virginitas in Part Two. And when we talked about this in our series on Mary, we talked about her physical virginity being preserved in childbirth.

And it has everything to do with the Roman Catholic beliefs that Mary was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Christ. And so Joseph Plumb writes about Mary's virginity in Part Two, that is in the birth of Christ.

And he says the early fathers are not so clear. 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 fourth century about Mary's virginity in Part Two.

When it comes to Mary as mother of God, as we mentioned in our series on Mary, there's no evidence in the Greek sources for Mary under the title mother of God, except for a forgery that came from the latter part of the fourth century.

And it doesn't show up in Latin literature until the latter part of the fourth century. 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 fourth century by St. Ambrose of Milan on the rite of consecrated virginity.

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. And I was reading from David Hunter, who is a Roman Catholic professor of Catholic studies at the University of Kentucky.

And he says the ritual of consecration of virgins had become a formal practice in the Western church only at the end of the fourth century. And so on clerical celibacy, this is actually, this is a book that was quoted by Pope Benedict XVI when he was talking about clerical celibacy.

And this is, the book is called Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy. And it says, we will therefore choose the late fourth century as our chronological basis for inquiry on the birth and development of the law on clerical celibacy.

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 fourth century.

And we'll talk later on this podcast about the eschatological significance of that. But for today, I just want to talk about the practice of mixing water into the wine during the 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 Last Supper.

There's no evidence for it. And the first time we ever see this arise as an apostolic liturgical rite in the church is the latter part of the fourth century. And before then, the mixing of water with wine was just considered a standard manufacturing process.

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.

And in the end, they were simply acknowledging something that was very common back then, which is the knowledge of how to make wine. 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 Roman Catholics make to support their belief that Jesus himself mixed the water with the wine at the Last Supper.

We'll then review the ancient craft of winemaking to show where the mixing of wine with water originated and why it was necessary. 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.

What we'll do as we proceed through the series will show that at the end of the fourth 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 Lord's Supper.

And that does not emerge until the latter part of the fourth 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.

Because without that information, we don't notice the mistake that Hilary of Poitiers made and the mistake that Ambrose made. Both of them, based on ignorance and misunderstanding, concluded that there must have been an apostolic rite.

But that doesn't come to the surface unless you first understand the ancient practice of winecraft. When you do, begin to understand the mistake that Hilary of Poitiers made and the mistake that Ambrose made.

Now, what's interesting is that in this case, the story doesn't end in the latter part of the fourth century. 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 East and West in 1054 AD.

And they were arguing about whether or not they should have mixed their water with their wine. And we'll get to that big argument that erupted in the 11th century over this very issue. And both sides were claiming that they had an apostolic rite, an apostolic tradition on their side.

And both of them were wrong. Both of them were mistaken because they did not understand the ancient practice of winecraft. And then at the very end of the series, we'll just walk through the inconsistency of the 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 Lord's table until you get to the end of the fourth century.

So once again, the mixing of water with wine during the Lord's Supper is a late fourth century novelty. Protestants generally don't practice this, although some do, like the Anglicans do mix water with their wine during the ministry of the 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 fourth century. 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.

But Roman Catholics do. In fact, they often stop and say, Jesus probably mixed this himself during the Last Supper. So isn't it interesting, Tim, that there's something for which there's no evidence in the 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. And then you get to the latter part of the fourth century, and suddenly it's an official Roman Catholic doctrine.

And later on, we'll find out that people could be excommunicated for denying that you're supposed to mix water with wine, and it's all based on a historical misunderstanding.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting. When you said that the East and the West were arguing over it, neither one of them got it right. It made me think of an argument between a Mormon and a Jehovah's Witness about who Christ is.

It's like, well, neither one of them are going to get it right. So folks, today, and probably for the next couple of episodes, this is pretty much going to be all 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. And once again, I mean, 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, and this really can't be used in their favor.

So yeah, let's dive into it, Tim.

Roman Catholic Appeals to Mary, Celibacy, and Other Late Fourth-Century Practices

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.

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 fifth century, and that in fact, the early church rejected the use of icons, at least until the latter part of the fourth century.

And you find people saying, well, I converted to Roman Catholicism because I found out that Mary was considered to be the mother of God in the early church. Then you find out that there's actually no evidence that she was ever called mother of God until you get to the latter part of the fourth century.

And you find other 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 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. And this comes from the general instructions of the Roman Missal, which is basically the instructions on how to conduct a mass.

And the mass, for those who don't know, the mass is the Eucharistic rite of the Lord's Supper, according to Roman Catholicism. They would call it the 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 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. Okay, 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 supper, water, wine, and bread, and that they were brought forward to him separately. Okay, so continuing with the general instruction of the Roman Missal, it says, during the celebration of the Lord's Supper, the priest stands at the side of the altar and pours wine and a little water into the chalice.

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 Jesus did. Now, this was so important to them that at the 22nd session of the 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.

It's Canon 9 in the Canons on the Sacrifice of the Mass. So this is a pretty big deal to them. If you were to deny, as a Roman Catholic, Tim, we've talked about this before, someone might say, well, 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. 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.

Well, Roman Catholicism requires you to believe that, and if you deny it, then you're excommunicated.

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 Council of Trent. That was a long time ago, and sort of saying that that's no longer valid.

And I just remind our listeners that the official church teaching is that what came out of the Council of Trent was deemed infallible, and so they can't really go back on it.

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 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.

So yes, the Council of Trent was an ecumenical council, according to Roman Catholicism, and therefore infallible. 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.

That's, I mean, this is not, you know, the Council of Trent was a long time ago, but the catechism is just from a couple decades ago, and 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 fourth century.

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. So yeah, well, let's go ahead and continue.

Roman Catholic Claims That Jesus Mixed Water and Wine at the Last Supper

Okay, so here's the Roman Catholicism. Let's get into how Roman Catholicism portrays this as an ancient apostolic rite. And I'm going to quote from an article by Mike Aquilina, who is a Roman Catholic apologist, and he wrote an article in 2016 called Why Does the Priest Mix Water and Wine?

And he refers to the moment when the priest pours the water into the wine, and he says, as the priest pours the two elements, a devout Christian can't help but remember this scene from the scriptures.

Well, that's a pretty interesting statement, because I've looked through the gospels, and I can't find a scene like that anywhere. I don't see anywhere where Jesus adds water to his wine. I just, I'm not finding it.

I go through the Last Supper narratives, and what I don't find is Jesus pouring water into his wine. 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.

Well, it's not there. And so I want to turn now to a Roman Catholic news agency called 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 Last Supper.

So he says, I'm sorry, this is from Zenit, Roman Catholic News, 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.

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 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.

But what's missing is evidence that Jesus instituted it as a rite. Notice that it says a brief rite of pouring water into wine is very ancient because it was a common practice among the Jews in the Mediterranean culture in general.

But the problem is the Mediterranean culture did not have a rite of pouring water into wine. 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.

But I want you to notice that the words that are used, it is believed that our Lord himself used wine tempered with water. 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. 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.

But that doesn't mean that Jesus had made an apostolic ritual out of mixing water with flour or baking the dough. 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.

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. Well, it's not true. There was no apostolic ritual of actually adding water to wine during the Lord's Supper.

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. They acknowledge that Jesus didn't actually mix water with wine.

So I want to switch now to the Catholic Encyclopedia, and the Catholic Encyclopedia says something very interesting, and they're acknowledging that it's just hard to figure out why this came about as an apostolic rite.

And this is from their entry called The Liturgical Use of Water. And they say, the 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.

Okay, notice that language. The fathers from the earliest times have tried to find reasons. 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.

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. 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, but they believe that it must be an apostolic ritual because Ambrose, in the latter part of the fourth century, described it as an apostolic ritual.

But there's something very specific, and this is a key point that I want to make here, is that the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia says that the gospel narrative implies that Christ consecrated pure wine.

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.

Pure wine is a thick, syrupy substance. 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.

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, and you might send your wife, 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, 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. 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.

You'd say, hey, I got some orange juice at the grocery store, but it was really orange juice concentrate, 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, grapey substance at a meal. 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.

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 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.

The truth about mixing water with wine at the mass, though, is that Roman Catholics don't actually know why they do it. 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, 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.

That's pretty amazing. Think about the Roman Catholic Church claiming to be the pillar and ground of truth, and they take a historical misunderstanding, impose it with an iron fist, and say, if you deny this, you're not going to heaven, and it turns out it's just a simple historical mistake based on later ignorance of the ancient practice of winecraft.

So what I'd like to do next is let's walk through what actual winecraft was back in the day. So we're going to talk about... I'm going to quote from the Encyclopedia Romana, and this is in an entry called Wine in Rome, and this is just simply an explanation of how they made wine back then, 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 Encyclopedia Romana, and that word mirum is exactly what they were arguing about in the 11th century leading up to the split between the East and West.

Whether or not Christ had consecrated pure mirum, or whether or not he had consecrated and mixed water with wine himself. 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.

So let's start with mirum, which is pure wine or undiluted wine. It's that thick syrupy substance, and again I want you to think of orange juice concentrate, and just like you would never serve orange juice concentrate to your kids, Jesus would never have served mirum at a meal.

So let's read from the Encyclopedia Romana. It says that wine almost always was mixed with water for drinking. Undiluted wine or mirum was considered the habit of provincials and barbarians. What it means is that only the uncivilized and barbarians would ever drink their mirum straight.

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. The Greeks tended to dilute their wine with three or four parts water, which they always mixed by adding the wine.

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.

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. And so the mirum, as we noted in that definition, is considered undiluted wine or pure wine.

And the word mirum comes from the word myrrh. And myrrh is often used to denote purity or something that has not been diluted. And so you might say, and you probably remember a famous work by C .S. Lewis called Myrrh Christianity.

The title of the book is simply intended to convey pure Christianity. 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.

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. To make it suitable for drinking, you then add water to that.

It's basically wine concentrate. That's what mirum is. When you prepare it for drinking, wine is then called mixed wine, mingled wine, wine and water, or wine with water. And importantly, nobody at this time would have served mirum at a meal.

It simply was not done in civilized circles. 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.

They could believe 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 Last Supper.

So are you with me so far, Tim?

Yeah, I'm with you. This is really interesting.

Yeah, so here's the thing is that 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.

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.

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.

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 Lord's Supper, it's probably mixed wine. There's no apostolic rite that requires that you add water to the wine during the Lord's Supper.

Just what Jesus used at the Lord's Supper at the Last Supper was wine. And wine back then is simply wine concentrate plus water, which was often called wine with water. 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 Lord's Supper? Because I know a lot of Protestant churches, like some Baptist churches, they use grape juice.

That's an interesting question. And what we'll notice at the marriage at Cana, they explicitly, 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.

At the Last Supper, he never actually uses the word wine. He says fruit of the vine in the cup. But what you find in the gospel narratives is you don't find reference to wine being used. Now, the reason I mentioned 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 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.