In the Early Church, “mixed wine” was such a common wedding drink, they simply assumed that Jesus had made already “mixed wine” out of water at Cana (John 2:1-11)
In the first installment in this series, we provided a survey of the manufacture and consumption of wine in the ancient Greek, Jewish, Roman and Christian cultures. In all these cultures, merum—“pure wine,” or “undiluted wine”—was mixed with water prior to drinking because the consumption of straight merum was both unpalatable and uncivilized. Because merum was unfit for consumption except by barbarians, the whole civilized world added water to merum to make wine. Wine for drinking, therefore, was simply “pure wine” mingled with water. Or, more succinctly, wine was called “wine with water” or “wine and water,” in reference to its two ingredients: “pure wine” (merum) and water. Continue reading The Mingled Cup, part 3→
In the math of ancient wine production, “wine and water” was wine.
In our previous installment, we discussed the ancient practice of mixing “pure wine,” or merum, with water to make “wine,” as well as the ancient Greek, Jewish, Roman and Christian aversion to drinking merum straight. That ancient practice and that ancient aversion were widely known, and it should come as no surprise that the Early Church Fathers were aware of them, too. Roman Catholicism claims that the liturgical rite of mixing wine with water as part of the Eucharistic liturgy can be traced all the way back to Jesus’ own administration of the Last Supper. But their evidence for the early origination of the “liturgical rite” is based not on any actual liturgical tradition of the Early Church, but solely on the early Church’s expressions of the ingredients and production of wine. To the early Church, “wine and water” was, in fact, wine, and that is what they used for the Lord’s Supper. There was nothing liturgically significant about mixing it. It was not until the latter part of the 4th century that the early Church’s use of “wine and water” began to be interpreted as a liturgical, apostolic rite. Over the next two installments, we will assess the ante-Nicene, Nicene and the early post-Nicene references to mixed wine—Justin Martyr, Irenæus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, Aphrahat of Persia, Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan—to show how the early references to a commonly known manufacturing process began to be interpreted as a liturgical rite that was eventually codified into Roman Catholic canon law. Continue reading The Mingled Cup, part 2→
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