December is a month of religious festivals. Christians are celebrating Christmas, the solemnity that recalls the birth of the Savior. And Jews are celebrating Hanukkah, a festival that recalls the reconsecration of the temple in Jerusalem in 164 BC. As part of their celebrations, many Christians and Jews will enjoy wine, “the fruit of the vine.”

Given the fact that there are religions that forbid the drinking of beverages containing alcohol, it’s an interesting exercise to investigate how it is that the Bible does not forbid its consumption. After all, wine was popular among Jews at the time of Jesus, and he clearly enjoyed it. For Christians—as for Jesus—wine possesses both social and religious significance.

Wine serves as a flavor-enhancing, pleasure-giving component of the messianic banquet initiated by Christ. Receiving it in faith, we seek to be “enthused,” filled with the divine reality that is the source of all life. In a sacramental sense we know it as the Blood of Christ when we gather as a community that offers bread and wine to the Lord in holy eucharist. Our word “eucharist” comes to us from the Greek word that means “thanksgiving,” and it’s no coincidence that wine and thankfulness are combined in the most significant form of Christian worship.

Historical insight into the consumption of wine and other alcoholic beverages suggests that we humans have been saying “bottoms up” (or its equivalent) for a long time. Along with bread and olive oil, wine has been a staple in the Middle East for thousands of years. The popular red wine known as Shiraz is the oldest cultivated grape and receives its name from a city in southwestern Iran where its grapes were first farmed many centuries ago.

Because grapes ferment on the vine if invaded by a particular bacterium, the pleasurable effects of alcohol consumption were probably discovered by accident. Those effects were undoubtedly experienced by wild animals prior to their discovery by humans! As a cultivated crop, fruit of the vine became an important part of daily life and religious rituals. It had medicinal purposes and was a safe alternative to unsanitary water.
The religious rituals of ancient Greeks and Romans included many uses for wine. It was offered as a libation poured out to the gods, often in honor of the dead. The Greeks understood wine consumption as an actual imbibing of the god of wine into their own bodies while the sense of inebriation demonstrated the deity’s control over them. Wine spilled accidentally was considered by the Romans to belong to the gods and it had to be handled in a ritual manner.

A thriving wine trade existed in Palestine and Egypt by 2500 BC and the Egyptian elite considered certain wines a necessary component for a satisfying afterlife. The Hebrews understood wine to be a divine gift for the purposes of bringing joy to the heart, an obvious reference to the effects of fermentation (Psalm 104:15). To this day many Jewish prayers are offered with a glass of wine held aloft, a simple gesture now incorporated in the Christian celebration of eucharist.

Although drunkenness is condemned in both testaments of the Bible, there is no outright condemnation of alcohol consumption. As with all of God’s creation, the problem is not with the divine gift but with misuse of the gift. In Judaism and Christianity, the enjoyment of wine has traditionally been understood as a legitimate experience of a blessed life, overindulgence being frowned upon because of the foolishness and impropriety that serve as its byproducts. Perhaps this is why cultures around the Mediterranean have long diluted their wine with water, a practice that was popular in Judea at the time of Jesus.

Though not required by the rubrics of The Book of Common Prayer, many priests add water to the wine before it is consecrated in the eucharistic prayer. This act may have begun to dilute the alcoholic effects of the wine, but it eventually took on a symbolic meaning signifying the Christian hope of deification in Christ: May we come to share in the divinity of Christ as he humbled himself to share in our humanity.

The Rev. Dr. John Switzer is professor emeritus of theology at Spring Hill College as well as rector emeritus and theologian-in-residence at St. Pierre’s/Gautier.