So the next question here is from Alan and Joni Gruber. Is it necessary to use unleavened bread and wine or can any kind of bread, food, and juice, any beverage be acceptable for communion? Yeah, my, I guess, firm belief is whatever Christ told us to do, whatever practice example we have in the Scriptures, if at all possible, let's follow that, particularly if there's no contradiction or that sort of thing.
So as far as unleavened bread, this was a surprise to me that I actually would not have learned from the early Christian writings because of my unfamiliarity with the nuances of Greek, of Koine Greek. It wasn't until I visited an Orthodox church and I noticed the bread they used was ordinary bread, leavened bread. And so I asked the priest, I thought it needed to be unleavened bread. And he pointed out to me that the Greek word that's used there when it talks about the bread just means ordinary bread.
There is a specific word that means unleavened bread. And that's not the word that Jesus uses there. Now, on the other hand, the word that means ordinary bread would include unleavened bread. So it could have been unleavened bread that he instituted it with and just, for whatever reason, did not use that specific word. But so on that basis, I would have to say I don't think the scriptures require it to be unleavened. Our church does unleavened, and that's, I guess, what I've been most used to all of my life.
But I would not quibble with someone who used leaven bread. Wine, I feel somewhat, yeah, let's do it how Jesus did it. If someone's going to use grape juice, again, I'm not going to have a big argument with them. It calls it the fruit of the vine. So you could argue grape juice meets that. But now your further question, any kind of bread, food, juice, beverage? No, no, we don't have any basis for that. It's bread and it's the fruit of the vine, which would have definitely meant from the grapes.
So whether it's leavened or not, I think there's some flexibility. Perhaps flexibility on whether it's fermented or not, but no basis to use rice or, you know, kool-aid or something like that. Now, if you're in a prison in isolation and the only way you can have communion is by using rice or something similar. Again, we have a flexible God. I mean, I think there are circumstances that might allow that. But yeah, we're not faced with that today.
And I think it would be very wrong, very disrespectful to ignore how he set it up and just do it our own way. Yeah, I had a pretty strong view on that as well myself until I heard about a church community in a part of the world that didn't grow grapes, and they were very poor, and they used grape Kool-Aid because they didn't have another choice. I was like, all right, that's not normal, but at least not normal from our perspective. But I do appreciate that.
It seems to be almost like a trend is that there's the normative approach. And then the grace of God is pretty amazing for where we're not able to live up to certain things. But yeah, I would have grown up and still practiced unleavened bread, but that's interesting. Would there be any connection between that being done around the time of Passover and the connection to unleavened bread being used at that time? So the assumption would is that where the assumption of unleavened bread comes from?
Yes, that's where the assumption comes from. And the question is, and yeah, we'd have to spend a whole session just on that. The chronology in Matthew and the synoptic gospels, it makes it sound like it's on the night of the Passover. And then you go to John and it's all before the Passover because he dies, it says when they were going to offer up the Passover lamb. So the Passover had not started yet. So that would explain why they would be using unleavened bread.
I mean, leavened bread on the chronology that we have in John, that the Passover had not started yet. The Feast of Unleavened Bread had not yet begun. Whereas in the other chronology, it sounds the other way. So yeah, to me, it's safe to use unleavened bread. And it's my tradition. And again, I'm just not going to quibble over it because I think there is some gray area there in the scriptures. Is there any language in the early church regarding type of bread that comes to mind?
No, only they use the word that means ordinary bread, but they never describe it specifically beyond that that I've caught. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for that, Alan and Joni.
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