LadyKate wrote:
I am inclined to agree with you, Micheal, I was just a little confused since they used a lot of "the original Greek wording really means" explanations to tell us that when they said 'wine' in the bible, they were actually referring to a reconstituted non-alcoholic grape juice mixture.
No, it was actual wine, although not necessarily just like ours.
Acts 2:13 referrs to people making fun of the Apostles for supposedly being drunk on wine, which obviously could not happen if it weren't alcoholic.
This comes from the sort of denomination that likes to proclaim things like drinking as off limits to Christians. It's a throwback to the way Jewish laws got so incredibly complicated by Jesus's time: the rabbis wanted to "build a fence around sin", so if writing was a sin they'd make a law against picking up a pen. The most common example is disallowing waliking on grass on the Sabbath because bending the blades of grass might be "work".
The same principle applies here: Getting drunk and acting foolish/violent/etc. is sinful. However, some churches aren't satisfied with that and try to argue that a Christian shouldn't drink
at all lest they become drunk. That's not a bad way to approach things, but sometimes they want to take it a step further and claim "well, drinking is really a sin in and of itself." Of course, that brings up the problem of Jesus drinking wine, telling us to drink it for Holy Communion, and changing water to wine. That's where this nonsense about "the original Greek" comes from. You can't tell what the chemical composition of a liquid is based on the original Greek term. Even if it did differ, what consituted "wine" back then and what is "wine" now is a process of evolution. "Wine" didn't just suddenly appear in the form we know it today.
It really defies the imagination for a number of reasons 1) it involves the Church taking a major risk in using alcohol for Communion for 1800 years until this novel idea of "all drinking = sin" appeared in America. If they'd used grape juice for communion for all that time and drank outside of worship one could argue that they were just ignoring that alcohol was sinful (which in itself is a highly predjudiced generalization about pre-American Protestant churches), but since they actually used it in Communion, that doesn't hold water.
2) It is a real leap to think that alcholic beverages were unknown at the time, or that Jews studiously avoided them for some reason (there is nothing in Jewish law forbidding alcohol in and of itself), or that fermented wine could not have been made.
3)
Timothy 5:23 specifically tells someone to take a little wine. Agin, one might claim "Well it's not really wine", but then we either need to think wine/alcohol was unknown at the time (absurd) or that Paul thought it unimportant to make it clear what sort of wine he was talking about.
The bottom line is that anyone telling you that the wine of the NT isn't really wine is pulling something out of his ***.