The Host with the Most?

[steepholm]

A few posts ago I was maundering on about the rain falling on just and unjust alike, and whether that saying would have had the same connotations in the relatively arid climate where it was coined as it now carries in my own soggier corner of the world. I suppose my next question is rather similar, though more doctrinally central: just how common was it to drink wine in first-century Palestine?

Clearly they had several skinfuls at the Cana wedding, and at the Last Supper too, but those were special occasions. Was it an everyday drink for your ordinary Joe? Or a luxury good? It makes a big difference to the significance of the Eucharist. If wine is the drinking equivalent of bread - the most staple of staples - then that gives it one kind of significance. But if it's seen as something special, that gives it another.

Even if wine flowed freely and cheaply in Jesus's particular time and place, that certainly hasn't always been the case in the cultures to which Christianity has been introduced. It must have been another story in beer-drinking countries such as Egypt and Germany, for example. The same goes for England, where wine was seen as a posh drink until very recent times. Telling an Anglo-Saxon peasant to drink wine in memory of Christ must have conveyed a very different message from telling a first-century Roman to do the same.

Christopher Marlowe is said to have joked that the Eucharist "would have bin much better being administred in a Tobacco pipe" - and after all, why not? One for the alternative historians, perhaps.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I think the concept of wine as a rarer good in at least the English and Welsh sections of these islands stems from the climate change of my very own 17th century. Up to then wine was being produced a good way north and rough wine at least would have been an everyday beverage for all but the very poorest, even if quality stuff was a gentry import. And this also overlooks fruit wines in their various forms.

You forget that Germany is and has been for centuries a major wine producing culture.

Interestingly, the Scottish tradition at the Eucharist is to serve a fortified wine such as port, although I don't know how old the tradition is- Scotland would never have been able to produce wine of its own.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more of Germany in the days when Christianity was first introduced there. However, that's a good point about the fruit wines: I wonder how well that sorted with the rather specifically vinicultural imagery in the Bible?

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

There is a non commercial vineyard in Lincoln, and a barely commercial one in Durham; but were they ever common in the northern half of England?

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

They certainly were more common, although the Midland counties were about as far north as the better wines ever went- the Roman city of Wroxeter in Shopshire had a reputation for its wine and it's being produced locally again today.

The 17th century saw climate change and a mini ice age which saw a lot of English production off until the climate change of our own times- my home county of Kent now produces fizz which takes awards away from the Champagne region much to the chagrin of our French neighbours! :o)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks, particularly for the information about Wroxeter, which I didn't know.

(We lived in Rochester for three years, and certainly enjoyed the local wines then).

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Small world! I'm Rochester born and bred and live in Gillingham at present!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Indeed! :-)