...oinos is used in the Septuagint for both fermented and unfermented grape juice. Since it can mean either one, it is valid to insist that in some cases it may simply mean grape juice and not fermented wine.
...the Roman writer Cato, in his treatise On Agriculture, gave this prescription: "If you wish to keep new wine sweet the whole year round, put new wine in a jar, cover the stopper with pitch, place the jar in a fishpond, take it out after the thirtieth day; you will have sweet wine all the year round." ...
Does fermented wine have medicinal value? The present writer once put this question to a noted surgeon, the head of a department in a university medical school. His answer was an emphatic no.
One thing, of course, must be insisted on: Paul was not advocating the general use of wine as a beverage. The most that that can be said is that he was suggesting that Timothy, because of frequent stomach illness, should take "a little wine" as medicine. And the possibility is still open that the apostle referred to unfermented grape juice, which of course is good for a weak stomach.
Ralph Earle - Word Meanings in the New Testament, Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1986, on 1 Tim. 5:23.
Ralph Earle is Distinguished Professor of New Testament Emeritus at the Nazarene Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri, where he first began teaching in 1945. While holding pastorates in Woonsocket, Rhode Land, and Everett, Massachussetts, from 1933 to 1945, he was professor of biblical literature at Eastern Nazarene College, Wollaston, Massachussetts. In more recent years he has served on the fifteen-man Committee on Bible Translation, the governing body for the New International Version of the Bible. Dr. Earle is a graduate of Eastern Nazarene College (B.A.), Boston University (M.A.), and Gordon Divinity School (B.D. and Th.D.). He has also taken postdoctoral studies at Harvard and Edinburgh universities. - NPH
Water to wine miracle:
NO REASON to assume it's alcoholic
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