@JulieMillerFan - Well ma’am, better buckle your seatbelt, as you’ve given me a lot to cover.

First off, you say that there were two different kinds of wine–the undiluted wine that only “drunkards” drank, and the diluted wine that was safe for everyone.  Well, let me go to my Strong’s and see what’s up with the Greek here.

Just going with the New Testament, we have:

γλεῦκος — “Sweet wine,” which apparently was intoxicating.  Used only once, in Acts 2:13 — “They are drunk with new wine!”

οἶνος  — Used in Matthew 9:17; Mark 2:22, 15:23; Luke 1:15, 5:37-38, 7:33, John 2, Ephesians 5:18, 1 Timothy 3:18, 5:23, Titus 2:3, Revelation 19:15.  This is the word used for what Jesus turned the water into.  At first glance this looks like grape juice, because Jesus talks about not putting new οἶνος in old wineskins.  However, Paul warns that deacons must not be given to οἶνος, and says “Be not drunk with οἶνος.”  Not only that Jesus talks about how John the Baptist abstained from οἶνος, as opposed to Jesus who came “eating and drinking” and thus was accused of being a “winebibber.”  Therefore οἶνος is also used to refer to an intoxicating drink.

πάροινος — “Given to wine” (one word), derived from οἶνος.  Used in 1 Timothy 3:3 and Titus 1:7, in the sense that elders and bishops cannot be given to wine.

οἰνοφλυγία “Excess of wine” (one word), derived from οἶνος, literally something like “wine-babbling” or “wine-bubbling.”  Used in 1 Peter 4:3.

All of these Greek words are used in connection with drunkenness in one passage or another.  So if first-century wine was in some instances mixed with water and in some instances not mixed with water, the terminology at least does not differ between the two.

To be honest, I don’t doubt that the wine was mixed with water, to some extent, but I don’t think it was as diluted as you seem to think.  Or rather, I don’t think it was so strong pre-dilution as you seem to think.  To quote from Dr. Macarthur’s sermon:

“Wine in those days
would have a two to four percent alcohol content, maybe as high as
twelve to fourteen in the Gentile world… So we answered the question, was the beverage they drank in the
Bible times the same as today when you have undiluted alcoholic drinks
that would go all the way up to 75 percent alcohol? Far cry from what
they consumed in Bible times.”

A little comparison:
–Mike’s Hard Lemonade is about 5% alcohol
–Budweiser is about 5% alcohol.  Bud Light is about 4.2%.
–your average table wine is about 9%-12% alcohol
–a very alcoholic wine (like port) is no higher than 20% alcohol, and that is only if it is fortified with brandy or made with very special yeast.  No yeast can continue to make alcohol once the content reaches about 18-20%, because then the alcohol is strong enough to kill yeast.  After that, you need to distill the liquid to get its alcohol content higher.
–Traditional vodka is 38% alcohol.  Most modern vodkas are about 40%.
–Brandy contains 35% to 60% alcohol, depending on the kind.
–Absinthe, a highly alcoholic drink that was used in Victorian times, may achieve up to 74% alcohol content.  Absinthe is also traditionally drunk diluted 1 part absinthe to 3-5 parts water, just before consumption.

So even diluted, Macarthur’s description of Biblical wine isn’t much different from modern alcoholic beverages.  Your average beer is probably less alcoholic than the wine he’s describing.  And we all know that people can get drunk just fine on Bud Light (4%): you don’t need to drink Everclear moonshine to get drunk.  To quote from this excellent article,  “…it must be remembered that the juice of grapes, under natural
circumstances, will have an alcoholic content of 10-17%, thus even a 3:1
ratio would yield a drink of 3-5%, which is similar to an average
American beer. “

Regarding the wine that Jesus made from water, the master of ceremonies seems to refer to it as a drink with the potential to intoxicate, in that he tells the groom that most people bring out the inferior wine at the end of the feast after “men have well drunk,” but that he saved the good wine for last.  The Greek word for “well drunk” is μεθύω, and in almost every other use in Scripture refers to drunkards, as in 1 Corinthians 11:21 and Acts 2:15.  Thus, the MC is equating Jesus’s “best wine” with a drink that has intoxicated in the past, regardless of whether it had been diluted or not.

I do wish Macarthur had listed some sources in his sermon.  I understand that this is a transcript of a sermon and not an essay, and thus sources aren’t really as necessary, but still.

Another problem I have with Macarthur’s statements is that drinking wine was in place of water for sanitary purposes.  He says, “it was a sanitary
provision by God in a fallen world that wine or any other fruit ferments
because fermentation produces within the fermented juice deadly killers
of bacteria. And we talked about that, didn’t we? And I read you some
modern science about that. What they did was purify their water by
mixing it with fermented wine because of the properties of fermentation
act to kill the bacteria.“

This doesn’t hold water (pun intended).  In order to sterilize water and kill bacteria in it, you would need to raise its alcohol percentage far higher than mixing it with some wine.  Wine itself is not alcoholic enough to be sterile–wine turns to vinegar because a bacteria culture converts it.  Antiseptic alcohol is generally 60%-90%, far more concentrated than even vodka.  So mixing water with wine would not sanitize the water.  As someone once said, “If your water contains enough alcohol to kill bacteria, it contains enough alcohol to kill you.”  They would have had much better results by boiling the water.  (In fact, this may be why low-alcohol beer was used as a safer water substitute in medieval times, not because the alcohol killed pathogens, but because making the beer involved boiling the ingredients.)

For further reading on the wine-would-not-sanitize-water angle, see this link, in which researchers show that pathogens from an icecube may still survive in 40% alcohol.   Also, this article explains that “Vodka is typically 80 proof, a mere 40 percent alcohol—not
enough to kill off disease-causing bacteria or viruses.”  So if vodka isn’t strong enough to do it, diluted wine could never be.  And in this link, someone with a microbiology textbook states that “60-90% [alcohol] will kill bacteria with 10 seconds of exposure. 50% will prevent
growth with 30 seconds or more exposure, while anything below that is
registered as having growth. While most concentrations will kill some
bacteria, 5% will still likely leave significant numbers.”  Here’s another.

Macarthur isn’t wrong about some of the other things he says.  Drinking should never be an opportunity to offend a weaker brother, especially one in recovery.  And strictly speaking, drinking isn’t necessary.  But think of what wine symbolized in the Bible.  Wine represented joy, celebration.  (See the Cup of Plagues in a Passover Seder.)  This is why the Nazarites gave it up (along with grapes and raisins and haircuts), but Jesus did not.  The friends of the bridegroom cannot mourn while the bridegroom is with them, remember?  Wine isn’t necessary, it never was–but neither is it a bad thing for everyone, so long as it is not taken to drunkenness.

And so in summation: while I do not dispute that biblical wine may have been diluted, I dispute that it was diluted until it was no longer intoxicating–and I dispute that it was ever used for “sanitation.”  Macarthur needs to double-check his sources.