This is a repository copy of My Flesh Is Meat Indeed A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51-58. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/96065/ Version: Accepted Version Book: Warren, M.J.C. (2015) My Flesh Is Meat Indeed A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51-58. Fortress Press , Minneapolis, MN , (304pp). ISBN 9781451490244 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ My Flesh Is Meat Indeed My Flesh Is Meat Indeed A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51-58 Meredith J. C. Warren Fortress Press Minneapolis MY FLESH IS MEAT INDEED A Nonsacramental Reading of John 6:51-58 Copyright © 2015 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Visit http://www.augsburgfortress.org/copyrights/ or write to Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440. Cover design: Joe Reinke Cover image: Christ Pantocrator of the Deesis mosaic from Hagia Sophia Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Print ISBN: 978-1-4514-9024-4 eBook ISBN: 978-1-4514-9669-7 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Ñ Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984. Manufactured in the U.S.A. This book was produced using PressBooks.com, and PDF rendering was done by PrinceXML. With gratitude to my loving grandparents, Joan and Ed Neale, and in memory of Ellen Aitken. Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1. “The Word Was Made Flesh” (John 1:14) 19 2. “Second Only To Artemis” (Leucippe and 63 Clitophon 7.15) 3. “Her Viscera Leapt Out” (Leucippe and 117 Clitophon 3.15) 4. “My Flesh is Meat Indeed” (John 6:55, KJV) 187 Conclusion: “Equal to God” 245 (John 5:18; Iliad 20.447) Bibliography 257 Index of Subjects 289 Index of Names 295 Preface This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, which was prepared for McGill University (2013) under the supervision of the late Professor Ellen Bradshaw Aitken. Based on the advice from my committee, the section analyzing in detail many specic instances of epiphany in the romance novels has been removed and will be published as a separate paper. New to this version is the analysis of antagonism in John (chapter four), which was rst presented as “The Cup Which the Father has Given: Divine-Mortal Antagonism and the Christological Implications of Genre” at The Gospel of John as Genre Mosaic Conference, June 23–26, 2014, in Aarhus, Denmark, and takes into account some of the feedback I received during that presentation. I could not have completed this book without the careful eyes and the warm friendship of my Writing Group. Sara Parks and Shayna Sheinfeld have read this work almost as many times as I have and were invaluable to me, not only in pointing out aws in logic or spelling, but also in being my constant cheerleaders and bosom friends. I owe considerable appreciation to many teachers and colleagues for their help. Among them, Lawrence Wills made his careful and insightful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Ian ix MY FLESH IS MEAT INDEED Henderson, Gerbern Oegema, and Patricia Kirkpatrick provided helpful feedback on the content. Lynn Kozak was also generous in her evaluation of my sources and argument. Of course, the mistakes that remain in this book are wholly mine. I am especially grateful for the insights I received from Ellen Aitken, who was a font of support and wisdom for the many years leading up to this project, and I am grateful that I was able to share the news of this book with her before her untimely passing. Her encouragement, criticism, and expertise have been incredibly valuable in all of my scholarship. Words cannot express my gratitude for her mentorship or the scope of my grief at her recent loss. I count myself as fortunate to have been her friend and student. To my husband Mike goes the nal expression of gratitude. I thank him for his patience and his love, which he could not help but give. x Introduction Aim The aim of the present study is to argue that Jesus’ divinity is made explicit in John 6:51c-581 and thereby to present this scene as christological rather than eucharistic. I propose that this pericope makes claims about Jesus’ divinity because of the ways in which the Gospel of John participates in the literary world of the ancient Mediterranean: the author’s use of genres and his characteristic manipulation of common tropes makes nding anities between John and other Hellenistic literature useful for understanding the multivalency of John’s Gospel. In particular, I show how John’s Gospel makes use of the established trope of the relationship between an extraordinary mortal and an antagonistic deity, which is most readily seen in the Homeric epics but is also preserved in the Greek 1. Unless otherwise indicated, Greek text from the New Testament comes from the Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland, 27th ed.; English is from the Revised Standard Version. 1 MY FLESH IS MEAT INDEED romance novels2 from around John’s era—that is, from the rst to the fourth centuries c.3 This project emerges from previous debates about the nature of John 6:51c-58 and its relationship to the rest of the Gospel. As I discuss in chapter one, scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann have isolated the pericope as a late addition that attempts to interject sacramentalism into what is frequently considered an anti- sacramental text; that is, Bultmann and others who agree with him see the scene as promoting the institution of the Eucharist within a text that otherwise carefully avoids any reference to such a rite. As such, Bultmann does not consider this section original to John. On the other hand, a christological interpretation of the section has recently been advanced. This view interprets John 6:51c-58 in light of the tension throughout the Gospel between the divinity and humanity of Jesus, an approach that I embrace. As I argue in chapter one, John 6 participates in John’s use elsewhere of physical, bodily signs to point to Jesus’ divinity. In alluding to Jesus’ sacricial death on the cross, John 6:51c-58 continues the Gospel’s preoccupation with Jesus’ divinity and does not address issues of community practice or sacrament. While an inclusion of the institution of the Eucharist would indeed seem strange in the context of the greater Gospel, 2. The four romances I will be examining in this project are Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus’s An Ephesian Tale, Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon, and Heliodorus’s An Ethiopian Story. Editions used will be as follows, unless otherwise indicated: Chariton, Callirhoe, trans. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1932); Xenophon of Ephesus, Anthia and Habrocomes, trans. Jerey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Achilles Tatius, trans. S. Gaselee, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921); Heliodorus, Les Éthiopiques (Théagene et Chariclée), ed. and trans. R. M. Rattenbury et al. (Paris: Société d’édition Les Belles Lettres, 1935) for Greek text; and Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, trans. J. R. Morgan, ed. Bryan P. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 349–588 for the English, as there is currently no Loeb edition of Heliodorus’s tale. 3. For convenience, I will refer to the author of the Fourth Gospel by the name John, as is customary. On John’s authorship, please see, among others, Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1990), 244–72. 2 INTRODUCTION interpreting this scene christologically ts John’s larger narrative concerns. In short, it is important not to succumb to a synoptic point of view. The use of bread, esh, and blood in John might seem to be used in the way that Mark, Matthew, and Luke use that combination, that is, with reference to the Eucharist or Last Supper, but in the context of John’s Gospel, the combination has a dierent signicance. I suggest that, given (1) John’s overarching concern with Jesus’ divine identity and his use of Jesus’ physical body as a sign to that end, and (2) the consistency in grammar, vocabulary, and style that this section shares with the rest of John, a christological interpretation of this scene resolves both its meaning and the question of Johannine unity. Where I diverge from previous christological interpretations of John 6 is in my use of Hellenistic literature to elucidate John’s meaning. This literature—and in particular the novels, whose preoccupation with right identity is parallel with John’s concerns in this area—preserves notions of divinity, sacrice, and consumption as they occur in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu.