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

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

As someone notes above the Roman church decided at some stage to withhold the cup from the laity. I suppose this had something to do with cost and availability. The English church returned the cup to the people- as (I assume other Protestant groups did as well) but only celebrated the eucharist on special occasions- which meant they weren't getting through great quantities of wine.

In my day most churches got their wines from ecclesiastical suppliers. It was nasty, sugary stuff; you wouldn't want to drink it socially. I did however have a colleague with a drink problem who used to "cream" small amounts off the top of all the bottles in the hope that nobody would notice.

[sue-bursztynski.livejournal.com]

That makes me wonder if it"s the same disgustingly sweet Kosher stuff we have to,drink on Friday nights. :-) Sweet as in slightly alcoholic grape juice rather than sweet as in port or sherry, which are another matter. No, you wouldn't drink it socially. No way!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking sweet wine keeps better. You can put half a bottle back in the cupboard and be confident that it won't go off.

[sue-bursztynski.livejournal.com]

We keep ours in the fridge. But yes, a good thought there, because it has to last a while when nobody want to drink any more than necessary. ;-)