The Error of Using John 2:1-13 to Justify Alcoholism
I once ran into a self-proclaimed Roman Catholic apologist (and he was a shady character) who not only used John 2:1-13 to defend the heresy of Mary worship but also to justify his getting drunk. He misquoted the whole passage to justify his drunkenness. So much for teaching works salvation, isn't it? First, he accuses the born again Christians as teaching a license to sin then he misquotes the Scripture to justify his sin. It would be good to understand his serious misapplication of the Scripture.
Some Christians tend to argue about oinos which is a wine derived from grapes. Some argue that grape juice was already considered as wine back then. I decided to consult Grace To You ministries from the article called Christians and Alcohol to understand what wine really meant:
In other words, this was unfermented, non-alcoholic wine. You can think about the jelly that was mixed with water to be the healthier, non-chemical version of powdered grape juice that many people drink today. The problem is only when wine is fermented and it produces alcohol. We're talking about the use of non-alcoholic wine and not the one that gets you drunk. If alcohol was ever present it would have been very low that it wouldn't get anybody drunk that fast. The fermentation was done to fight bacteria and not to make the person drunk. The alcohol was high enough to kill bacteria but low enough not to get anyone drunk. It's a far cry from today's beverages!
To conclude, the self-proclaimed Roman Catholic apologist hasn't been doing his homework. He doesn't even know how to read the Scriptures properly because his mind is carnal. The Scriptures are spiritually discerned not carnally discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14).
See also:
Some Christians tend to argue about oinos which is a wine derived from grapes. Some argue that grape juice was already considered as wine back then. I decided to consult Grace To You ministries from the article called Christians and Alcohol to understand what wine really meant:
For example, do you remember John 2, the wedding at Cana? And do you remember that they had a wedding for the whole village and let’s assume there were 500 people in the village that would be probably be close to reality, they would all come. The wine ran out. The wine ran out. That’s the biggest event in the village, that’s the biggest event for the people and they didn’t have enough wine for a week. A wedding lasts a week and a few days they’re out. This is not a vast consumption of alcohol, and it was limited. Today there is an unlimited supply…unlimited. Now let me tell you something else about it. It was a thousand years after the New Testament that the process of distillation was developed and invented…a thousand years later. What did distillation do? It increased the alcohol content potentially from 40 percent to 75 percent. That’s what distillation did. A little after that, during the time of Napoleon, some kind of process known as chapitalization(?) was developed and that added another potential five percent alcohol. That’s where you get things like whisky, hard liquor, with this high alcohol content. Today fortified wines would be as high as twenty percent alcohol and even higher than that.
So to start with, we’re talking about a different amount of this available. We’re talking about a different alcoholic content. Something else you need to understand, very important. Wine in ancient times was boiled or mixed…boiled or mixed. And I’m not just telling you this because Bible writers talk about it, I’m telling you this is secular history. Everybody knows this was the case. And if you take wine that was typically two to four percent and you boil it, what happens to the alcohol? It’s gone. What you have left is a paste that can then be remixed with water.
On the other hand, if you just mix it with water, three parts to one would have been the average, three parts water to one part of wine, you dilute the alcohol content significantly. And I say, in ancient times, the wine was either boiled and out went all of its alcohol content, or it was mixed. Professor Samuel Lee of Cambridge University says that yayin, the Hebrew word for wine, or oinos the Greek word, does not refer only to intoxicating liquor made by fermentation. But both words, but in particular his interest is the word yayin refers to a thick, un-intoxicating syrup or paste produced by boiling to make it storable. This thick substance was stored then in skins. It is a thick syrup. It is, somebody said, to the grade of jelly and once it’s put in the skin that’s supple, it can be squeezed out of the skin on to bread like your grape jelly on bread, or dissolved in water and mixed to become a drink. So says the professor at Cambridge and he draws this from a description of this very process by Pliny, the ancient Roman historian who said this is what they did. Pliny talks about an un-intoxicating wine.
In other words, this was unfermented, non-alcoholic wine. You can think about the jelly that was mixed with water to be the healthier, non-chemical version of powdered grape juice that many people drink today. The problem is only when wine is fermented and it produces alcohol. We're talking about the use of non-alcoholic wine and not the one that gets you drunk. If alcohol was ever present it would have been very low that it wouldn't get anybody drunk that fast. The fermentation was done to fight bacteria and not to make the person drunk. The alcohol was high enough to kill bacteria but low enough not to get anyone drunk. It's a far cry from today's beverages!
To conclude, the self-proclaimed Roman Catholic apologist hasn't been doing his homework. He doesn't even know how to read the Scriptures properly because his mind is carnal. The Scriptures are spiritually discerned not carnally discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14).
See also: