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The Elements of
the Lord’s Supper
What Kind of Bread and Fruit of the Vine Are We
to Use?
part 4
Peter Ditzel
2. Could the fruit of the vine
in the Lord’s Supper have been grape juice?
As
mentioned earlier, Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper at the time of
the Passover. This feast was celebrated in the first month, sometimes called
Abib and sometimes Nisan. Hebrew months do not exactly correspond to the
months on our calendar, but Abib/Nisan occurs in the spring, around
March/April. Grapes are harvested in summer. At the time Jesus instituted the
Lord’s Supper, no fresh grape juice would have been available.
But
could not grape juice from the last summer’s harvest have been
preserved until spring?
The
proponents of grape juice for the Lord’s Supper insist that the
ancients knew how to preserve grape juice, but the evidence they present is
flawed. There is often a reference to the Roman statesman, Cato, saying in De Agri Cultura CXX, “If you
wish to have must [grape-juice] all year, put grape-juice in an amphora and
seal the cork with pitch; sink it in a fishpond. After 30 days take it out.
It will be grape-juice for a whole year.” But Cato’s De Agri Cultura is not the inerrant
Bible. In CLX of this same book, we can read how to cure any dislocation:
“Any kind of dislocation may be cured by the following charm: Take a
green reed four or five feet long and split it down the middle, and let two
men hold it to your hips. Begin to chant: 'motas uaeta daries dardares
astataries dissunapiter' and continue until they meet. Brandish a knife over
them, and when the reeds meet so that one touches the other, grasp with the
hand and cut right and left. If the pieces are applied to the dislocation or
the fracture, it will heal. And none the less chant every day, and, in the
case of a dislocation, in this manner, if you wish: 'huat haut haut istasis
tarsis ardannabou dannaustra.'” (See http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cato/De_Agricultura/L*.html .) Is Cato truly a source to be trusted?
Several
other ancient methods of being able to have unfermented grape juice are
usually given, such as making juice from raisons or from boiled-down
concentrate. Perhaps some of these methods would have some success. But does
the Bible give us any reason to believe that Jesus was using raison juice or
reconstituted concentrate or a drink made from any of the other methods? No.
As we have already seen, wine—even strong wine—is what pictured
Jesus’ blood in the Old Testament sacrifices. The extra-biblical data
cited by the advocates of grape juice for the Lord’s Supper simply
cannot stand up to the plain biblical evidence.
Critics
also say that grape juice, and not wine, must be the fruit of the vine
because wine is too many steps distant from the vine to be called its fruit.
These critics should then criticize God for inspiring Psalm 104:14-15, which
says, “He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the
service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth; And wine that
maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread
which strengtheneth man's heart.” Does bread come directly from the
earth? No. There are several steps of processing by humans between the grain
harvest and the loaf of bread. Yet, these verses say that food and wine and
oil and bread are brought forth out of the earth. If God can say this in
Psalm 104, why cannot Jesus call wine the fruit of the vine?
Deuteronomy
7:13 is similar: “And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply
thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land,
thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the
flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he swore unto thy fathers to give
thee.” Notice that wine is specifically listed as one of the fruits of
the land.
For
some reason, the proponents of grape juice in the Lord’s Supper usually
assert that the bottled wines available today are much stronger than the
fermented wines of Bible times. They usually wind up saying or hinting that
modern wines are fortified. The facts about wine are easily found both in print
and electronically (on the Internet, for example, see the Wikipedia articles
on wine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine
and fortified wine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortified_wine),
but some people have continued to perpetuate this myth. Fortified wines are
wines to which additional alcohol has been added. This raises the level of
alcohol in these wines to 14 to 20%. These are, however, specialty dessert,
liqueur, apéritif, or appetizer wines. These include sherry, port, marsala, Madeira,
vermouth, and muscatel, as well as such cheap wines as Ripple and
Thunderbird. But the vast majority of wines, the common red and white table
wines, are naturally fermented without fortification. Their alcohol content
is from 8 to 15.5%, but is usually in the range of 10 to 14%. Since these
wines are naturally fermented, they are not much different from the naturally
fermented wines that have been made for millennia.
Objections
to the use of wine in the Lord’s Supper are almost unheard of before
the nineteenth century. Dr. Benjamin Rush (b. 1745 d. 1813), a Founding
Father of the United States, might be said to be the father of the American
temperance movement. Rush had many ideas that we would never accept today.
For example: He advocated bleeding for almost any illness long after it had
lost popularity with other physicians, he concocted laxatives that he made
with more than 50% mercury, his favorite method of psychiatric treatment was
to tie the patient to a board and rapidly spin it until the blood went to the
head, and he believed that being black was a hereditary illness that he
called “negroidism.” But he had one idea that caught on. Rush
started the idea of addiction, and he believed that abstinence is the only
cure for addiction. Influenced by Rush’s ideas, temperance movements
began to spring up around the United States.
The
temperance movement was especially popular among feminists and Methodists
(feminists, because they saw women as the victims of violence and broken
homes caused by drunkenness; Methodists, because they saw alcohol as a
temptation hindering people from attaining what they call “entire
sanctification” or “Christian perfection,” a completely
unbiblical idea).
One
such Methodist was Thomas Bramwell Welch (b. 1825 d. 1903). Welch was a
physician and dentist in Vineland, New Jersey. He was also the communion steward in his
church. In 1869, Welch developed what he called “unfermented
sacramental wine,” and was, in fact, the first person to successfully
pasteurize grape juice for commercial purposes. His work was based on that of
Louis Pasteur (b. 1822
d. 1895).
Four
years before, Pasteur had found that wine fermentation was the result of the
activity of yeast (before this, it had been thought to be the result of
purely chemical processes). He showed that it was the yeast microorganisms
that collected on the skin of the grapes as they grew that then caused the fermentation
when the grapes were crushed. If the grapes were grown under wraps, or if the
juice was drawn out of the skins with sterile needles, the juice would not
ferment. Also, if juice that had been sterilized with heat was put into a
flask with a swan-shaped neck, so that air could get to it, but not dust, it
would not ferment. But when the flask was tipped so that some of the juice
went into the neck and picked up some dust and was then allowed to drip back
into the flask, the juice began to ferment (see the article here http://www.foundersofscience.net/interest1.htm
).
What
Welch did was to quickly heat the grape juice to kill the yeast cells in it,
and then vacuum bottle it to prevent any more yeast from getting to it. His
son, Charles E Welch, who was also a dentist, successfully promoted "Dr.
Welch's Unfermented Wine" to other churches. Charles promoted the
product at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. He is quoted as saying that unfermented grape
juice was born “out of a passion to serve God by helping his church to
give its communion ‘the fruit of the vine’ instead of the
‘cup of devils’” (see http://www.news-star.com/stories/060102/rel_1.shtml#
). Eventually, Welch’s Grape Juice was sold as a general beverage.
One
reason I point out this information about Rush, Pasteur, Welch, and the
temperance movement is to show that the questioning of wine in the
Lord’s Supper is indeed the result of an eighteenth-century medical
theory (addiction and, hence, abstinence) and a nineteenth century social
movement, is not soundly based on the Bible, and was only able to be put into
practice because of scientific advancements in microbiology. I will address
another reason below.
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