What did the soldiers give Jesus to drink?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The four Gospels name what Jesus was given to drink in at least three ways, but the apparent jumble resolves substantially once the two distinct offers in the tradition are separated. The *first* offer comes before the nailing: Mark 15:23 reports wine mingled with myrrh (*esmyrnismenon oinon*), which Jesus refuses. This matches the rabbinic tradition preserved in b. Sanhedrin 43a that the condemned were given a stupefying drink — wine with a grain of frankincense, or in some accounts other additives — as an act of mercy to dull the pain. The *second* offer comes during the crucifixion: a sponge soaked in *oxos*, sour wine or wine vinegar (Mark 15:36; Luke 23:36; John 19:29). *Oxos* was *posca*, the cheap diluted wine-vinegar that Roman soldiers drank, so the soldiers offering it from their own ration is historically natural rather than an act of cruelty in itself, though Luke frames it within mockery.

The strongest harmonization, run by John Wenham and Craig Blomberg, identifies Matthew's 'vinegar mingled with gall' (27:34) with Mark's 'wine mingled with myrrh' as two descriptions of the same pre-crucifixion sedative, and keeps the later sponge as a separate event attested across the Gospels. That move dissolves most of the apparent conflict, and it deserves real credit: the two-offer structure is exegetically sound and widely accepted, including by critical commentators such as Raymond Brown.

What the harmonization cannot absorb is Matthew's specific substitution of *cholē*, gall, for myrrh. Davies and Allison, with Brown, argue this is a deliberate edit assimilating the narrative to Psalm 69:21 in the Septuagint: 'they gave me gall (*cholē*) for my food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar (*oxos*) to drink.' Matthew has conformed the historical detail to the prophetic text so that the scripture is fulfilled verbatim — the same technique that produces several of his formula citations. Mark's 'wine and myrrh' is the historically plausible reading, congruent with the anesthetic tradition; Matthew's 'vinegar and gall' is shaped by the psalm. So the divergence is not a disagreement about what was physically in the cup but a difference in how far each evangelist let scripture rewrite the detail. Notably, the actual gall offer in Matthew would be a bitter, undrinkable substance Jesus tastes and rejects, which fits the psalm better than it fits a merciful sedative — another sign of the literary pressure of Psalm 69.

John adds the singular detail of hyssop (*hyssōpō*) as the means of raising the sponge — botanically awkward, since hyssop is a small, flimsy plant ill-suited to bearing a soaked sponge to a man on a cross (a textual variant, *hyssō*, 'on a javelin,' attested in a few witnesses, looks like an attempt to ease exactly this difficulty). Brown argues the choice is theological: hyssop is the plant used to daub the Passover lambs' blood on the doorposts in Exodus 12:22, and John's Passion deliberately aligns Jesus' death with the slaughter of the Passover lambs (John 19:14, 36). The botanically improbable hyssop is retained because it carries the Passover typology John wants.

Steel-manning the apologetic case in full: the two-offer reconstruction is correct, and the gall/myrrh equivalence is *possible* if one supposes a bitter additive could be loosely called either. But the cleaner explanation of why Matthew alone writes 'gall' is that he is targeting Psalm 69 — a redactional, scripture-driven choice that bends the historical detail. The drinks contradiction is therefore mostly an artifact of conflating two moments; what remains is Matthew's prophecy-shaped wording.

Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable via the two distinct offers, with Matthew's 'gall' a genuine redactional reshaping toward Psalm 69:21.