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

[joyeuce]

I have a vague memory from back in my theology-student days, of being told that wine was common in first-century Palestine, and discussing the difference this made to one's conception of the Eucharist. Probably as part of my final-year liturgy module.

I wonder whether the relative rarity of wine contributed to the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic tradition that only the priest received the Eucharist in both kinds. However, this has been illegal in the Church of England since the Sacrament Act of 1547, except in cases of grave emergency. (That was a contribution from my husband the church historian.)

My Nonconformist-mixed-with-Anglican background means that I have received the blood of Christ in the form of Communion wine (vile), non-alcoholic Communion wine (worse, and I once had to drink a full chalice of it), grape juice, Ribena (because the Communion steward was embarrassed to buy grape juice - ?), sherry, and Lindisfarne mead.

Here endeth the spill of random chunks of information!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

All random chunks gratefully received! I find it bizarre that one could be embarrassed about buying grape juice (but not Ribena).

Perhaps it's as well that Jesus didn't institute the eat-y part of the process in Marmite soldiers. That would have sorted the sheep from the goats!

[joyeuce]

It is bizarre. My parents, who gave me this explanation (presumably when I was old enough to notice that the Methodist Service Book stated "The juice of the grape shall be used"), couldn't tell me any more, and I believe the lady in question is now dead, so it will remain forever a mystery.

I wonder whether it would have been possible for yeast extract to have been invented by the first century?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of a funny story one of the people at the Episcopalian church I used to go to told me. She is from the South, and was a member of some other church, can't remember what. She and the pastor's daughter sneaked a bottle of the communion wine once when she was a teenager, and got drunk in the attic. They found out later that it was not alcoholic, and their drunken giggles had just been ordinary teenage giggling, amped up by suggestion.

[joyeuce]

I'm amazed they could get it down - it's disgustingly sweet. But I suppose teenage palates are not necessarily refined!