Matthew 9:17, New wine… new wineskins. Sadly, the translation as found in most of our English Bibles —“New wine into old wineskins… new wine into new wineskins”— is a muddy translation from the Koine Greek, and therefore doesn’t give us the proper understanding of Yeshua’s words. Here is the verse from Matthew 9:17 with the Greek words following in parenthesis:

Neither do men put new (neos) wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new (neos) wine into new (kainos) bottles, and both are preserved. (KJV)

In English, the word “new” can mean “brand new, never been used before” or it can mean “new to you, although it may have been used by someone else.” It can also mean “renewed, reconditioned new.” In Koine Greek, there are two words for our one word “new”. They are neos and kainos.

The Greek word neos means new as in brand new. The Greek word kainos means new in the sense that something is “renewed or reconditioned,” so it‘s not brand new.

Both Mark and Luke in their accounts use kainos in the same way Matthew does in his account (Mark 2:22; Luke 5:38).

This verse would have been better translated as:

Neither do men put new (neos) wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new (neos) wine into reconditioned (kainos) bottles, and both are preserved.

Stern captures this meaning in his Complete Jewish Bible where he translates kainos as “freshly prepared wineskins.” J. P. Green in his Bible translates kainos as “fresh.”

Interestingly, Luke adds a statement that the other two Gospel writers (see Matt 9:17 and Mark 2:22) omit:

And no one, having drunk the old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, “The old is better.” (Luke 5:39)

What is the meaning of this? One commentator states that in ancient times, aged wine (i.e., being fully fermented, and thus having a higher alcohol content) was generally preferred over new wine (not fully fermented, thus having a lower alcohol content). He suggests that Yeshua is probably indicating why the religious people were objecting to the joy of Yeshua’s disciples (verse 33): because it was something new (The IVP Bible Background Commentary, p. 203, by Craig Keener). So depending on the context of Yeshua’s usage of the new/old wine analogy, sometimes the new is better, sometimes the old is better.