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

J. ALBERT HARRILL jharrill@indiana.edu Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) This essay names the elephant in the room around which scholarly interpreters of John 6:52-66 have long been tiptoeing with their overly circumspect discussions of the eucharistie imagery in the passage. That elephant is cannibalism, of course, and ignoring it leaves fundamental exegetical questions about this famous crux interpretum unanswered and even unasked. What specific connotations did the idiom of cannibalism have in the ancient Mediterranean world? Why did the Johannine author (or redactor) ascribe cannibalistic language to Jesus in a specific scene of factionalism? Did it draw on a recognizable topos familiar from the wider Greek and Roman culture and not just from the 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 the kinds of questions previous commentators have brought to John 6, a preoccupation that has often been concerned more about the theological controversies between Protestants and Catholics than about the text itself.2 Exegetes have debated the "sacramental tradition" of the Lord's Supper in John 6, and many have repeated the standby interpolation hypothesis of Rudolf Bultmann's "ecclesiastical redactor," to "solve" the crux.3 One view holds that the cannibalistic language has antidocetic intent.4 But, as is well known, John's narrative departs from the Synoptic Gospels on, among other things, precisely this point: the Lord's Supper is never instituted in the 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 the sterility of current debates on the redaction-critical issues and on the place of the sacraments in the Fourth Gospel. The passage deserves reexamination. It provides the strangest exchange between Jesus and his Jewish interlocutors in the Fourth Gospel. In a series of dialogues that collapse into monologues, the Johannine Jesus provides warrants for his midrash on the Bread from Heaven that turn the factionalism of bewildered grumbling (...) among "the Jews" (John 6:41-43) into an open fight (...) (6:52) in the synagogue at Capernaum (6:59).6 The speech culminates in a pronouncement bewildering to the audience: So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh [...] of the 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 the 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 the divisive fray. Jesus asks his disciples whether "this saying" (...) offends them too (6:60-61). The reaction of the respondents could imply that they may simply not comprehend what Jesus is requiring, but the context makes clear that they hear Jesus saying something literally obscene (disgusting to the senses): to indulge in cannibalism by consuming his flesh and blood. The offense of the saying triggers the decision by "the Jews" to kill Jesus (cf. 7:1; 5:18) and the desertion of "many disciples" (6:66). This scene is one of factionalism. In this context, the forms of speech that would normally provide warrants for a particular kind of instruction (midrash) serve solely to emphasize Jesus' strangeness as the Other. …