Cheap wine (New American Bible “common wine”) appears as “sour wine” in Goodspeed, Phillips, and New English Bible; Barclay has “bitter wine” Moffatt, Jerusalem Bible, and Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch render “vinegar.” The Greek word refers to a diluted, vinegary wine. Since it was cheaper than regular wine, it was a favorite drink of laborers, soldiers, and other persons in moderate circumstances. The translations “sour wine,” “bitter wine,” and “vinegar” suggest that offering this drink to Jesus was an act of cruelty, whereas in fact it had the humanitarian purpose of relieving his thirst.

So a sponge was soaked in the wine, put on a stalk of hyssop is literally “so putting on hyssop a sponge full of wine.” New English Bible translates “they soaked a sponge with the wine, fixed it on a javelin.” Good News Translation prefers a passive construction. In some languages it may be necessary to paraphrase the verb “soak,” for example, “they caused a sponge to drink up the wine” or “they caused a sponge to become wet with the wine.”

The noun hyssop causes a difficulty, since the Palestinian variety of this small, bushy plant does not have a stalk large enough to support a wet sponge. In the parallel passages in (Matthew 27.48) and (Mark 15.36) the sponge is put on the end of a stick, in Good News Translation‘s translation. One Greek manuscript reads “javelin” (Greek hussos) in place of hyssop (Greek hussopos), and this is the basis for the rendering of Goodspeed (“pike”), Moffatt, New English Bible, and Phillips. However, this reading is almost certainly an attempt to solve the difficulty mentioned above, and it is better for the translator to follow either Good News Translation or Jerusalem Bible (“a hyssop stick”), leaving open the precise identification of the plant.

If the term used to render stalk clearly designates the stalk of a plant, then hyssop is sufficiently identified. Otherwise, it may be necessary to say, “on a branch of a plant called hyssop.”

To his lips (so a number of translations) is literally “to his mouth.”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of John. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1980. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .