Cannibalistic Language in the Fourth Gospel and Greco-Roman Polemics of Factionalism (John 6:52-66)

Abstract

J. ALBERT HARRILL jharrill@indiana.edu Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) This essay names elephant in room around which scholarly interpreters of John 6:52-66 have long been tiptoeing with their overly circumspect discussions of eucharistie imagery in passage. That elephant is cannibalism, of course, and ignoring it leaves fundamental exegetical questions about famous crux interpretum unanswered and even unasked. What specific connotations did idiom of cannibalism have in ancient Mediterranean world? Why did Johannine author (or redactor) ascribe cannibalistic language to Jesus in a specific scene of factionalism? Did it draw on a recognizable topos familiar from wider Greek and Roman culture and not just from Hebrew Bible alone?1 What nongustatory messages about community maintenance and regeneration could such talk of cannibalism have conveyed? What connection did anthropophagy have for ancient audiences to articulate community dissent, party division, or even civil war? An exclusive focus on sacramentalism has framed kinds of questions previous commentators have brought to John 6, a preoccupation that has often been concerned more about theological controversies between Protestants and Catholics than about text itself.2 Exegetes have debated sacramental tradition of Lord's Supper in John 6, and have repeated standby interpolation hypothesis of Rudolf Bultmann's ecclesiastical redactor, to solve crux.3 One view holds that cannibalistic language has antidocetic intent.4 But, as is well known, John's narrative departs from Synoptic Gospels on, among other things, precisely point: Lord's Supper is never instituted in Gospel of John. The exegetical debate on John 6 goes, therefore, back and forth rehashing old proposals without a resolution in sight.5 We should recognize sterility of current debates on redaction-critical issues and on place of sacraments in Fourth Gospel. The passage deserves reexamination. It provides strangest exchange between Jesus and his Jewish interlocutors in Fourth Gospel. In a series of dialogues that collapse into monologues, Johannine Jesus provides warrants for his midrash on Bread from Heaven that turn factionalism of bewildered grumbling (...) among the Jews (John 6:41-43) into an open fight (...) (6:52) in synagogue at Capernaum (6:59).6 The speech culminates in a pronouncement bewildering to audience: So Jesus said to them, Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat flesh [...] of Son of Man and drink his blood [...], you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh [...] and drink my blood [...] have eternal life, and I will raise them up on last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat [...] my flesh and drink [...] my blood abide in me, and I in them. (6:53-56) The whole dialogue is a virtual parody of a revelation discourse: what is revealed is Jesus' utter incomprehensibility. Even Jesus' own followers fail to understand what their prophet-messiah is requiring of them, which escalates divisive fray. Jesus asks his whether this (...) offends them too (6:60-61). The reaction of respondents could imply that they may simply not comprehend what Jesus is requiring, but context makes clear that they hear Jesus saying something literally obscene (disgusting to senses): to indulge in cannibalism by consuming his flesh and blood. The offense of saying triggers decision by the Jews to kill Jesus (cf. 7:1; 5:18) and desertion of many disciples (6:66). This scene is one of factionalism. In context, forms of speech that would normally provide warrants for a particular kind of instruction (midrash) serve solely to emphasize Jesus' strangeness as Other. …