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

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 eucharistic 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.