Indeed it seems likely based on archaeological evidence that common wines drunk in the region and at the time contained additives for flavor! See https://www.vivino.com/wine-news/searching-for-the-wine-from...
Furthermore, how far should one take this silly adherence to imagined fact? If we discover that in Jerusalem they drank predominantly wine from some now extinct local varietal, does that make all masses since invalid?
I, like the poster you’re replying to, grew up Catholic, and this sort of slavish adherence to stuff some church person made up at some point in the past has always struck me as one of the more ridiculous parts of the religion.
But on the other hand it's important for your religion to stand out. Unless it's going to result in mass persecution or genocide, you want your believers to stand out, the requirements of your religion to impact on everybody else. So you get silly rules - not really that tricky to obey but seemingly pointless because hey, if nobody is grousing about your silly rules, nobody is noticing your religion exists.
This sort of thing is only a big problem once it tilts the whole society. People will probably vary in their tolerance but somewhere between "The weird logo on my groceries apparently signifies that a specific religious group may consume this product" and "Your existence is prohibited by the established religion in this country and so you'll be executed" there's a line crossed.
But the last supper wasn't a Catholic mass. Why is this one arbitrary detail so important when the entire ritual bears only a superficial resemblance to a dinner held by Jews in 33AD Jerusalem?
It seems odd that the man who said (paraphrasing because I don't want to look it up) "The Sabbath was made to serve men, not men the Sabbath" would insist on such pedantry.
During Jesus lifetime, there is archeological evidence that apices and fruits - including pomegranates, mandrakes, saffron and cinnamon - were used to flavour wines, and tree resin were added to help preserve them.
So, the wine drank at the Last Supper might actually resemble the mulled wine some of us drink at Christmas.
Basically, this has nothing to do with being faithful to Jesus, but more with archaic rules that were agreed upon centuries after Jesus' lifetime.They are canonical to Catholic teachings though.
I'm sure there's some traditionalist Catholic rebuttal to this! And I'm fine with that. I'd just say: traditionalist Catholicism is not the same religion that ordinary mainstream Catholics practice.
He used a specific bottle. But catholics were pragmatic enough to say "well, surely he didn't mean that bottle specifically." And they don't latch on to the vintage, either- doesn't have to be the same grapes grown in the same region. They don't latch on to the age of the wine, or its alcohol content. But those variations don't matter! Because.... I guess because, uh.... oh heavens me-oh-my-oh, this is a pickle. Turns out it's all subjective.
For example, God can come back tomorrow riding in from heaven on a Ford mustang but the church isn't going to declare this as true and make everyone wait for it tomorrow.
If God tells you to do X so Y happens, then you should do X. You should not do Z and then expect Y to happen with certainty. It might. It might not. You cannot know.
Another former Catholic here. We should all care because a controversy such as this:
- diverts attention from Jesus' "Prime Directive" — which was straight from the Hebrew Bible, of course (Leviticus 19:18) — that we seek the best for others, even our enemies, as we do for ourselves; and
- falsely implies that not following pharisaic rules makes one less worthy and thus excluded from the Prime Directive.
This harms civil society in general, not just Catholics.
From the first century A.D. to the present, the Church has cared about holding true to the Apostolic tradition, which includes teachings re: how to treat others as well how to worship God.
Oh. So then I guess either Matthew or Acts got it wrong about whose name should be invoked in baptizing: If Jesus really said to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then the apostles apparently ignored his instructions — compare Matt. 28.19 with Acts 2.38, 8.16, 10.48, 19.5. [0]
On a tangentially-related subject: Peter, preaching at Pentecost, seems to have flagrantly misrepresented his scriptural source. [1]
While we're at it: The Apostles all indisputably thought that Jesus would be returning Real Soon Now — and that just didn't happen. [2]
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/troubling_incon...
[1] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2004/10/troubling_incon...
[2] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2005/10/is_jesus_coming...
This still very much allows for disagreement on matters not formally settled, and is no barrier to a person untrained in ecclesiastical history and dogmatic theology from being edified by reading and/or hearing the Bible.
You may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.The church is the pillar and bulwark, and we are on the surest footing when interpreting Sacred Scripture standing atop the pillar; everything else is a complete non-starter, though can be fodder for debates and whatnot.
On that much, we agree.
> the context for understanding Matthew, Acts, et al. is the teachings of the Councils, Fathers, and Doctors of the Church ....
You might consider another possibility: That the apostolic succession belongs to all the baptized, not just to what I once referred to as "the Twelve's decisions to anoint themselves as a self-perpetuating elite" in the early church. [0]
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2007/02/the_apostolic_s...
1. Unfalsifiable, ipse dixit proclamations by church "overseers," i.e., bishops (Greek: ἐπίσκοπος, episkopos, whence English's episcopal) aren't persuasive.
Long ago I read translations of the surviving writings of some of the earliest church fathers — such as in the page you linked. I was struck by the distinct impression that the first bishops essentially bootstrapped themselves into authority — they peremptorily announced:
- that they were successors of the Apostles; and
- that their apostolic succession entitled them to be in charge.
(EDIT: This foreshadowed, by some 1,700 years, the U.S. Supreme Court's bootstrapped declaration that judges have the power to decide the constitutionality of congressional legislation, in Marbury vs. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall famously said that in case of conflicting statutory- and constitutional provisions, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. ...")
And these first bishops persuaded their (self-selected?) flocks to acknowledge their authority; eventually, what started out as an arguable heresy on the part of these "overseers" became carved in stone as a core principle of church governance. [0]
2. The church fathers relied extensively on the letters of Paul, né Saul, of Tarsus. Recall that Saul/Paul started out as a fiery persecutor of Christians — then suddenly "flipped" and became equally zealous preaching his version of Christianity.
And remember that Paul preached what he claimed to be his own gospel, not received from any man, but directly from Jesus himself, whom he had never met in life — if Paul had known Jesus before the latter's execution, he surely would have trumpeted the fact, in his Epistle to the Galatians and elsewhere.
[0] https://www.questioningchristian.org/2006/04/what_is_the_pro...