John’s audience would have understood that the Wedding at Cana wasn’t just a party trick, and that the wine wasn’t just party wine. It was a liquid pharmakon, with a rich heritage behind it. The use of drugged wine didn’t just accidentally creep its way into Galilee in the first century AD. A couple of thousand years before the Greeks, and long before Jesus and the Gospel of John, the sacrament that would turn eastern Mediterraneans from beer drinkers into wine drinkers didn’t just make a passing visit to the vineyards of Galilee.
