Wednesday, April 3, 2013

A funny little interpretation about wine in the Bible

This is a small thing, but it's still quite amusing.

There are some Christians (I'm not sure how much of a minority they are, but they certainly exist in significant numbers) who are so absolutely and completely obsessed with absolutism (ie. the total avoidance of any alcoholic beverages of any kind) and who think that that alcohol is so evil, that they actually furiously maintain that all references to wine in the Bible (especially the New Testament) actually refer to "unfermented grape juice."

Yes, that's right. Jesus changes water into "grape juice," he and his apostles drink "grape juice" during the last supper, and overall all references to wine are "grape juice."

This is some serious revisionism. Not only is it quite blatant historical revisionism, but even from a biblical perspective it's quite egregious.

These people completely ignore the fact that wine is today and has been a completely normal food drink in many countries, especially the southern European and Middle Eastern countries, for as long as history has cared to record. Moreover, wine was very highly regarded because it was one of the very few drinks that could be stored for longer periods of time. (Even pure water couldn't be preserved for anywhere that long because it would quickly gather harmful bacteria or other micro-organisms.)

And even moreover, grape juice would quickly ferment if stored for even short periods of time. If not done properly, it would easily go bad and be undrinkable (or, at the very least, taste very bad.) It would have been quite a waste.

Just goes to show the egregious lengths to what many Christians are ready to go in order to promote their own particular brand of theology, even from a Christian perspective.

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