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Loading...Writing my last post on Papias made me think of something that is rather humorous even if it is only very tangentially related. If you recall, Papias claimed that Jesus taught the following about the future utopian kingdom on earth:
The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches. And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in every cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine.
When I was writing up that post, I was reminded of the story in the Gospel of John in which Jesus turns the water into wine. Jesus appears to have enjoyed wine in great abundance.
The story in John is particularly interesting, and what is humorous to me is how I’ve heard it interpreted by well-meaning conservative Christians who were certain that Jesus would not ever encourage people to partake of alcoholic beverages.
In John 2 Jesus and his disciples are invited to a wedding. (Contrary to what you sometimes here by creative interpreters, this could not be Jesus’ own wedding! He gets invited to it by someone else.) These wedding ceremonies could last for days. After a while, the wine runs out. That’s very bad indeed. Jesus’ mother asks him to do something. He rebukes her, but then does what she asks. There are six large jars there, each large enough to hold over 20 gallons. Jesus tells the slaves to fill them up to the brim. He then tells the master of ceremonies to taste what is in them. The master of ceremonies does so and to his amazement the water has turned into wine. And not just any ole wine, but fantastic wine. He goes to the bridegroom and praises him, saying that most people at long weddings serve the good wine first, and then when everyone has had a lot to drink, bring out the second-rate stuff (since no one much cares any more at that point). But you, he says, have saved the best wine for last.
When I was a youth pastor of a conservative Christian church in Oak Lawn Illinois, back in the mid 1970s, a sincere and rather severe mother of one of my kids told me that this story in John could not really about Jesus turning water into wine. (Since good Christians would not drink wine.) No, she told me, the Greek word for “wine” in the passage means “new wine.” And new wine is wine that has not yet fermented, so that it has no alcoholic content.
I’ve always found this interpretation highly amusing, and it has always struck me as a perfect example of how people will try to get around what a text says in order to make it mean what they want it to mean.
For one thing – something I didn’t know at the time – the word used for “wine” in this passage is not a special word meaning “new wine.” It is simply the word wine. That is, the stuff with alcohol in it.
For another thing, something that I *did* think at the time, but didn’t feel like I should tell this sincere woman who would have taken offense, the story simply makes no sense if the point was the Jesus turned the water into new wine. Just imagine the scene. People have been having a good time, hanging out, drinking good wine, enjoying themselves. The supplies run low. Jesus intervenes and performs a miracle. And the master of ceremonies can’t believe it. He goes up to the bridegroom and praises him. Most people serve the best wine first and then bring out the second-rate stuff. But you have outdone yourself! At first we were drinking wine, but now you have given us GRAPE JUICE!!
As miraculous as this famous deed of Jesus is (recorded only in John 2), it pales in comparison with what will happen in the utopian kingdom according to Papias, who claims he is simply citing a saying of Jesus. According to that saying, each and every grapevine in the kingdom will have ten thousand boughs; each of those ten thousand boughs will have ten thousand branches; each of those branches will have ten thousand shoots; each of those shoots will have ten thousand clusters of grapes; each of those clusters will have ten thousand grapes; and each grape will produce 25 gallons of wine.
Now that’s a lot of wine! Probably someone on the blog can do the math, and tell us how many gallons this one vine – presumably there are millions of them – will produce. And it should be stressed: this won’t be the cheap stuff you buy at the supermarket. This will be Chateauneuf du Pape. And since this is the coming kingdom will have no suffering, there will be no downside of drinking it in abundance. Now *that’s* a utopia!
Bart:
I too have heard the “new wine” (i.e. grape juice explanation) and have always asked the proponents to then explain the Acts passage of Pentecost where the disciples are thought perhaps to be drunk on new wine. I don’t know how much grape juice you have to drink to get drunk and speak in tongues, or how long you have to wait, but those two alone seem to negate the “new wine” = “grape juice” assertion.
BTW Papias’ description ends up with 15 x 10^16 or 25 quintillion gallons.
15 with 16 zeros after it!!!???? now thats just silly. after the first bajiollion litres im gonna be sick of wine and want a scotch and coke
I do hope you don’t *mix* your scotch and soda!!!
The grapejuice thing might have worked. I recall how easy it was to convince already drunken friends that they were drinking gin when you have them water, or wine if you gave them apple juice. I should point out by way of confession that this was done not to sober them up, but for fun. I must have had a low fun threshold. Or maybe it was the alcohol…
This story is especially interesting the light of Luke 33-34 where Jesus admits he enjoys eating and drinking and doesn’t deny his drink contains alcohol when he is accused of being a drunkard:
“For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon!’ 34″The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
It’s an interesting tradition about Jesus.
100 Quintillion grapes X 25 = 2500 quintillion gallons. A couple of sites I visited claim that the Pacific ocean contains approximately 187 quintillion gallons of water. So, 2500 divided by 187 gives you 13.4 Pacific Oceans full of really good Vino. And that’s just from 1 vine! Welcome to Heaven 🙂
Rough calculation (I’m notorious for getting powers of ten calculations wrong though!)
Each vine will produce 2.5 followed by twenty zeros ( 2.5 sextillion gallons) This is approximately 2.5 times the number of grains of sand in the world and is 11.3 thousand trillion litres of wine ( if Jesus works in Imperial gallons not US gallons)
This is 450 years of wine consumption for the entire world in 2012!!
Party time!
You started my day with a smile. But people do make the Bible say what they want it to say.
Each grape will produce 25 gallons? Them grapes must be absolutely huge!
Just curious, do we know of any forms of early christianity that were against drinking alcohol?
There were some groups that celebrated the Eucharist with water instead of wine, but they were very small and on the margins.
This was fun reading. Thanks.
Would Mary have prevailed upon Jesus to do something about the wine situation had she not already seen him do miraculous things? Maybe this wasn’t the first.
As for miracles, your posting DAILY with all you have going on is beyond the capability of mere mortals. Do not let us make you kill yourself. We’ll be here when you get back from your trip even if you do not post again. At least I promise I will be.
Good question about mary!
Delightful!
I do not believe the water to wine event actually happened but at a wedding reception such as this, why would Jesus’ mother had any concern with the wine running out? Wouldn’t there have been servers, etc. to take care of this? It seems odd that a guest would think she needed to be involved.
According to my initial calculations each vine would yield 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of wine. That is 2.5 sextillion gallons. And as Dr Ehrman has pointed out this the cream of all time wine. Evangelicals for some reason do not promote this as a true saying of Jesus. They love Papias elsewhere.
Hi Bart,
Couldn’t one say that since there are mainstream scholars who believe that the Gospel of John contains little historically accurate material, that anyone (Christian or otherwise) who says that Jesus turned water into wine is probably wrong? That one shouldn’t accept a later made-up story as indicating anything at all about the historical Jesus?
I bring this up because I hear Christians saying that people should either drink wine because Jesus produced it, or drink grape juice because that’s what he produced. When actually, he probably didn’t do either. So why should we look to a made-up story as an authority for what we should do?
Yes, it’s a made up story. But made-up stories can convey truth! That’s the point of fiction, after all.
My undergraduate degrees are in biology, not mathematics. I may have made a mistake somewhere, but I think each vine will produce a volume of wine a bigger than the planet Mercury and smaller than the planet Mars. Each vine would produce a sphere of wine about 5,620 kilometers in diameter. We can call this the planet Bacchus.
If that number is correct, then another way to conceptualize the volume is that the yield from each vine should be approximately 76 times the volume of the ocean, enough to cover the earth with a alcoholic ocean approximately 180 kilometers above current sea level.
STOP READING HERE UNLESS YOU WANT TO CHECK MY MATH. All numbers are rounded to three significant digits.
Ten thousand is 10 to the power of 4. Unknown number of vines with 10 to the power of 4 branches/vine x 10 to the power of 4 twigs/branches x 10 to the power of 4 shoots/twig x 10 to the power of 4 clusters/shoot x 10 to the power of 4 grapes/cluster = 10 to the power of 20 grapes.
Every grape will yield twenty-five measures. A translation by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson says five-and-twenty “metretes” of wine. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0125.htm. Wikipedia defines a metretes as about 37.4 liters. if that is correct, then:
25 metretes/grape x 37.4 liters/metretes = 935 liters/grape. 935 liters/grape = .935 x 10 to the power of 3 liters/grape. .935 x 10 to the power of 3 liters/grape x 10 to the power of 20 grapes = .935 x 10 to the power of 23 liters.
1,000 liters = 1 cubic meter. Therefore: .935 x 10 to the power of 23 liters x 1 cubic meter/10 to the power of 3 liters = .935 x 10 to the power of 20 cubic meters.
The formula for the volume of a sphere is: v = 4/3 π r3. By rearranging this formula you can find the radius: where v is the volume. Plugging the volume into this formula is as follows.
r = cube root of (3 x .935 x 10 to the power of 20 cubic meters) ÷ (4 x 3.14)
r = cube root of (2.81 x 10 to the power of 20 cubic meters) ÷ (12.6)
r = cube root of (.223 x 10 to the power of 20 cubic meters)
r = cube root of (22.3 x 10 to the power of 18 cubic meters)
r = 2.81 x 10 to the power of 6 meters
r = 2,810,000 meters
r = 2,810 kilometers
diameter = 5,620 kilometers
When I plug 2,810,000 into a Internet site that calculates the volume of a sphere, I get V ≈ 9.29×10 to the power of 19 which equals .929×10 to the power of 20. Therefore, I think my calculation for the size of the planet Bacchus is reasonably accurate. I guesstimated the depth of the alcoholic ocean by fiddling around with the same Internet site.
Bart, did people living in Palestine in this era drink large quantities of wine diluted with water, as the Greeks famously did? Or did they drink it straight up? Is that something we have reliable information about?
That’s what I’ve always heard, but I don’t know the evidence for it!
“Millions” isn’t even close. It’s 2.5 sextillion (2.5E+21), or 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000. And that’s one vine. Surely the kingdom will be a happy place!
Amusing!
As a child growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, I remember being puzzled that the communion ” wine’ was actually Welch’s grape juice even though the bible speaks of wine. When I questioned this, I was told that Jesus would never drink real wine
I got the line that people didn’t understand the effects of wine in Biblical times, and Jesus was special and could do what he wanted.
According to wolframalpha.com, each vine would produce enough wine to fill the volume of 87 entire Earths:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2825+gallons+*+10000+*+10000+*+10000+*+10000+*+10000+*+10000%29+%2F+%28volume+of+earth%29
That would be 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of wine per vine,
With approximately 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable
and maybe one earth-like planed per 1,600 stars, that’s 1 million gallons per
vine per earth-like stars. Assume these planets are all inhabited, and that there
are 100 vineyards, each with 100 vines for some region similar in size as Israel.
That yields 10 billion gallons of wine per year. Enough for a few weddings at least.
DR Ehrman:
Not only will we have wine, but we’ll also have weddings in the kingdom of God!
And yes each will sit under his fig tree and there will be vines and aged old wine.
Isaiah 25:6-The LORD of hosts will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples on this mountain;
A banquet of aged wine, choice pieces with marrow,
And refined, aged wine.
As for Papias’ ten thousand boughs with ten thousand branches on every single bough; and ten thousand shoots on every single branch; and ten thousand clusters on every single shoot; and ten thousand grapes on every cluster, and every grape yielding twenty-five measures of wine when pressed. God doesn’t like wasting anything. For a family of four this many grapes will not be practical…God is practical you know;
Each household will have a vine producing commensurate to their household if they wish to drink wine.
Hi Bart, I am so glad you brought this up!
John 2:6 has always interested me because I can’t figure out what the intended message to the audience is supposed to be.
6 “Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons”.
>> Why did the author need to add the part about “the kind used by jews for ceremonial washing”- was this a slap to the jews to make fun of their ceremonial traditions? Does it mean something else? Was it added later by someone else?
Also, Would turning water into great wine be something people of the time would expect in a savior messiah?
Everything about this miracle seems….. wierd….
I can’t figure it out.
Please tell us..
Thank You!
Jesus is the one who creates wine. In other words, he is a divine being, not just a human being.
It amounts to 10,000 to the fifth power in grapes = 100 Quintillion (one Quintillion has 18 zeros) grapes
Multiply 25 gallons per grape = 2 sextillion (21 zeros) 500 Quintillion gallons or 2.5 sextillion gallons
In the United Methodist church which I used to belong to, they use grape juice during communion. I believe it was because the Methodist church was heavily involved in the American temperance movement which led to prohibition in 1920. I don’t know if there are any other denominations that don’t use wine for communion.
Yes there are! Plenty of Protestant groups.
Ha!
Bart, in the version of the pious “unfermented wine” interpretation I was once given, the *reason* for the high praise by the ruler of the feast is that Jesus’ wine was unfermented. *That’s* what made it so exceptionally good, lol!
By the way, as someone who’s health has moved him to tee-totaling in his old age, I’ve been curious about how you managed alcohol during your conservative Christian years. Somewhere I had gotten the impression that you never entirely went in for abstinence even when you were at Moody? But, how could that possibly be right? Well, none of my business, I know, but the mind does wander back to “bright college years” sometimes, lol.
Thanks so much for everything you *do* so generously share with us! 🙂
I tee-totaled when at school, but didn’t mind having a beer when home. I pretty much stuck to the rules!
Ah. Well, Moody *did* have a system, didn’t it. Thanks so much for sharing, Bart! 🙂
BART: About time these fundamentalist bible belt thumpers get over the idea that Christ find’ t drink wine. Going to Lutheran seminary I can contest that besides Lutherans, liturgical seminaries including Roman Catholic and Eepiscopalian ones definitely swear that the Greek translation, I.e., Greek Lexicon, will state that it was alcoholic wine. Get with it you Bible belt thumpers.
I remember giving a sermon on the John text and using it to show the symbolism in the passage. I can’t recall all of it now, but I remeber there seemed to be a lot. I don’t think John was trying to recount history as much as say Jesus was divine and the bringer of vitality. (Wine=fertility=life). That being said, I don’t think for a moment Jesus refused any alcohol. That would probably be blasphemous in itself for his time!
Prof what is the situation with the “slaves” in this story? are they basically just servents or is it more like the US black slaves situation? what sort of rights/freedoms might they have (if any)?
thank you
Ah, that’s a very long story. Maybe I’ll post on it. (Short answer: it was not based on race; and there was an enormous range of status and condition of slaves, to the poor souls in the salt mines to the highly placed and influential secretaries and tutors in the imperial families)
Brian Muraresku wrote a recent book (mid-2020) titled “The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” In it he argues that John’s gospel drew a parallel between Jesus and Dionysius. He makes a convincing argument that the story of the wine at Cana was intended to demonstrate that Jesus had the same spiritual power as the Greek god. And the wedding feast was a parallel to the alcohol-ladened celebrations carried out annually in the Mysteries of Eleusis. He also has some thoughts on what made that wine ‘special.’
Have you run across any comparisons of Jesus to Greek/Roman deities like this?
Yes, the Dionysius comparison is a very old one: water to wine makes it a fairly obvious parallel. The idea that the mystery religions influneced Xty is also very old: it was a VERY big theory at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in Germany. Most of the time the comparisons are interesting, but very limited. That is, there are some things that are interestingly similar, and lots and lots of things that aren’t.
Dr Ehrman,
I have read of scholars who maintain that the Gospel of John puts Jesus in competition with Dionysus, or in any case that it was influenced by the cult of Dionysus.
Do you agree with them?
Thank you
I think there may have been some allusion to Dionysus, but I don’t think it is the overarching theme. The point is that God alone can do that kind of thing.