Endnote 9 – Dinner with Jesus & Paul

Athenaeus, writing sometime around 200 C.E., described the Greek custom in this way: “When the unmixed wine is poured during dinner, the Greeks call upon the name of the ‘Good Deity,’ giving honor to the deity who discovered the wine; he was Dionysus” (238d, quoting from an earlier source, Philochorus, of the late fourth century B.C.E.). The Jewish prayer quoted above derives from Mishnah Berakot 6.1.