The fourteenth passage of the Sefer Yeshua is based on Mk 2:22, Mt 9:17, Lk 5:37-39, and Thomas 47:3-4. As with SY passage 13, the main source of this saying is from Mark (Matthew and Luke both borrow from Mark, and so they both place the saying where Mark places it). The form of the saying in Thomas is very similar to that of Luke, in that there is an emphasis on not wanting to drink new wine because the old wine is good enough.
14. 1Yeshua said, ‘No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the old skins; then the wine will be lost and the skins will be ruined. 2And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, because he says, “The old wine is good enough”.’
Overview
The earliest Greek texts of Mark do not have the line about ‘new wine must be put into fresh wineskins’. The line is also missing from Thomas. It only appears in Matthew and Luke, and the theological implication inherent in the extraneous line is that the ‘new’ teaching of ‘Jesus Christ’ cannot be contained within the ‘old’ Jewish faith, and so Christianity must be separate from Judaism (the Greek word for ‘fresh’, kainos, in describing the new wineskins, implies something new that hasn’t been used before). If, in the mind of the writer of Matthew, Jesus’s teaching was so incompatible with Judaism, then why did the author of Matthew spend so much time claiming that ‘Christ’ is the fulfilment of the Hebrew bible? If Christ and the Judaism which is founded on the Jewish bible are so irreconcilable, why use the Hebrew Bible to prove Christ’s teaching?
Furthermore, the fact that both Matthew and Luke do have this line, suggests that it appeared in the version of the Q-gospel that they both worked from. In my view, the line is a christological addition, and suggests that the version of the Q-gospel they had in their possession was a Q3 version (Q1 would be the original version, like ‘The Book of the Preaching’, Q2 would have some slight messianic amendments, and Q3 would have been a full-blown proto-Christian version, with an almost Paullist slant to it). I have therefore not included these words in the SY version of the saying.
The words about not desiring new wine because the old wine is good enough, only appear in Luke and Thomas. I therefore think that these words appeared in the Q1 version of the Q-Gospel, and were deliberately omitted by Matthew, because they inherently imply that the old ways and old values are good enough. I have included these words in the SY passage, because they accord with the emphasis of the words in the previous verses – that new cloth should not be sewn onto old cloth, with the underlying implication that the old should be preserved.
Much of the background to this passage is the same as that for the previous passage (SY 13), so I would encourage you to go back and re-read that first. Basically, the way these verses are used in the gospels, makes it seem that they suggest that Jesus’s teaching is incompatible with Jewish teaching. However, the fact that there is an underlying concern that the old should not be damaged, raises doubts that this is how Yeshua himself intended the sayings to be used. It is therefore likely that his meaning was that there were new beliefs and teachings around in his own day, which were incompatible with the ideals of the original Israelite faith. As I demonstrated in my last commentary, by looking at certain biblical passages, we can see that what is ‘old’ referred not to Pharisaic Judaism, but rather to the older and original Israelite faith, which would be rebuilt by the righteous (Isa 58:12).
The practical difference between old and new wine
In ancient times, old wine was used as a metaphor for something good, reliable and valued. Ben Sirach 9:10 says,
‘Do not abandon old friendships, for new ones cannot equal them. A new friendship is like new wine – only when it has aged, can you drink it at your pleasure.’
It’s possible that Yeshua knew of this saying, or at least, he may have been culturally familiar with the metaphorical image.
As anyone who knows anything about making wine is aware, ‘old wine’ has had ample time to mature, and therefore has a higher alcohol content. The flavours and aromas have also had more time to come out, and so old wine tastes better overall than ‘new wine’, which has not had so long to develop. The detail about the new wine bursting the old wineskins suggests that the new wine is wine which is still in the process of fermenting. Apparently the first stage of fermentation took place in a vat, and the final stages were completed in freshly-made new wineskins.
The new wine will burst the old wineskins
Once again, as in passage 13, there is concern that by putting the new into something old, the old will be damaged. Please see my notes in the commentary for passage 13.
A wineskin was usually made from the entire skin of a goat, with only the head, tail and lower parts of the legs removed. It was specially tanned in such a way that it did not affect the taste of what was put inside it. The skin was then sewn up, so that the part that you drank from or poured from was the head-end. You could store water, milk or wine in it (this is how water was stored and carried on long journeys).
This passage goes beyond the previous one on old and new cloth. Whereas the new cloth damages the old cloth, in this saying the new wine completely ruins the old wineskins, to the extent that both the wineskins and the new wine are lost. Old wineskins will grow brittle and less supple over time (the inside also has to remain wet). If fermenting wine is put into them, the old wineskin will crack and burst, and thereby become unusable.
There might be some temptation here to think that eventually the old wineskin – and therefore the old religion – would have to be thrown away. However, in his commentary on Mark, P Trudinger argues that old wineskins could continue to be used if they were first reconditioned – the leather could be made to become supple again by using a type of conditioning oil on the de-furred outside of the wineskin. This has cultural implications too: metaphorically reconditioning an ancient religion for ongoing use, so that it remains relevant.
In my personal view, I think there are some alien beliefs and teachings that, if we try to reconcile them with the ethos of the original Yahwist Israelite faith, then not only will that faith be damaged, it will be lost. It will be lost in the sense that the new, alien beliefs will completely subsume, pervert and overtake the original teachings that God gave us, and so the new will not represent anything like what YHVH originally gave us, or intended for us to have.
If someone is so enamoured of a new belief or teaching that is ill-suited to Yahwist theology, then the best thing to do is not try to forcibly cram it into somewhere it doesn’t fit, but rather leave and start a new community. For example, Paullist Christian theology is incompatible with the beliefs and values of the Israelite faith, and so rather than trying to do what Messianic Judaism tries to do, by forcing the two together, claiming that Paullist beliefs are what Judaism should have been, it would be better to admit that Messianic Judaism is not Judaism at all, but a form of Christianity made to look like Judaism, and leave it at that.
In the early 1990s, not being aware of any Ebionite community, I made do by taking refuge in a Messianic Jewish community. I attended several national conventions of Messianics, and the overall impression I got was that of an Evangelical Christian movement doing some Jewish things. I also attended several large Evangelical gatherings while I was in the US in 2005, and I can honestly say that there was no difference in the overall ambience of the two – the Evangelicals and Messianics.
Yahwism teaches a God who has the full, innate power to cleanse human souls of the blemish and injury of sin; Paullism’s god does not have this power, and can only forgive sin through the death of a god-man. Yahwism is also about a God who is irrevocably indivisible. In contrast, by teaching a god who is divisible, and an emasculated god who needs the death of a god-man, Messianic Jews are no longer theologically Jews, but rather Christians doing a few Jewish things to give the semblance of Jewishness; Paullism and Yahwism are not compatible.
However, if you look at the true core of what Yeshua would have genuinely taught – what he was calling his followers to return to – then his teachings pair up nicely with the values and ideals of the original Yahwist Israelite faith.
No one having drunk the old will desire the new
If all you have ever known all your life is ‘new wine’, then that is what you will be used to, and you will be wary of even trying the ‘old wine’. However, once you have tasted a really good, mature vintage wine, you won’t want to go back to the new.
Once you have seen what the original Israelite faith was meant to be – what its outlook, its values, principles and practices were – you will realise how wise, beautiful, ennobling and nourishing the Israelite faith was, and that what you have known all your life has simply been a poor imitation of it.
This is how I came to feel after I had been studying the Israelite religion for a few years. My eyes were opened to the Jewish meaning of many of Yeshua’s sayings – to the extent that quite a few of them had the opposite meaning to how they were interpreted in Christianity (such as these sayings about the old and new cloth, and the old and new wine).
The old wine is good enough
Just as YHVH our living God is eternal, so too, the Way that YHVH taught us was meant to be eternal as well. The paths and values that YHVH taught us were meant to last for all time, not replaced by something we have never known before, or by a god we have never experienced.
An older religious faith will have had more time to develop and ruminate over the important ethical and moral concerns of life, and hopefully will have arrived at wiser stances on the key issues of life. A newer religious faith, on the other hand, is still finding its feet, and if it rejects wholesale the valuable lessons that the older faith has learned (like the Paullist rejection of the principles and values of Torah), it will require time for the newer faith to work out what its position will be on a whole range of issues. Somewhat like fermenting wine, it will push and expand in many directions, burst out and so make mistakes while in search of its purpose and position, until eventually it finds that new identity. So it was in the early years of Christianity, with its beliefs evolving as it took on a distinctly Gentile and Paullist identity.
In the Israelite faith, we are given the importance of sticking to the path that YHVH intended us to walk – “You shall not deviate, either to the right or to the left” (Dt 5:32). What is new may seem at first to be fresh and exciting, but sometimes what is new can cause people to deviate wildly from the path that God showed us. If we set out from Nazareth, and set our faces to the south, we will eventually reach Jerusalem and the Holy Temple. However, if someone comes along and says, ‘No, we should head north-west’, then eventually we will arrive in Rome, not Jerusalem.
Just as the old wine is good enough, so too the original route-map is good enough to get us to where we are supposed to go – where our beloved YHVH yearns for us to get to: the blessedness of God’s Kingdom.
Other thoughts
If Yeshua genuinely said the words, “No one, after drinking old wine, will desire new wine, but says, ‘The old wine is good enough’”, then we cannot conclude that Yeshua saw his ministry either as replacing the old faith, or being detrimental to the old faith.
The problem in Yeshua’s time was not that he wanted to make a break from the old religion; the problem was that the old, wise and tested Israelite religion was not being followed; it was being replaced by the corrupted values of those who had no interest in God’s noble principles or ideals.
Yeshua did not see his ministry as instituting a new religion or a new philosophy, but rather that he was trying to restore the original ideals of the Israelite faith – ideals which had been abandoned by the religious hypocrites, the greedy rich and the violent religious extremists of his day. Rather than seeing Yeshua as someone who opposed Judaism, if instead you understand Yeshua being opposed to a warped version of what religion should be, then you will realise that his opposition is just as relevant today as it was then – the problems he confronted then, still exist in our society today.