Coincidence 4: “Unless You Eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and Drink His Blood”
The Alleged Coincidence
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus tells a crowd:
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. (John 6:53–56) 1
This passage is part of what is known as the Bread of Life Discourse, and it’s found only in John’s Gospel. McGrew thinks this passage is problematic. She asks, “Why did Jesus talk to the people about such an odd thing as eating his flesh and drinking his blood?” 2
The answer, according to McGrew, is found in the Synoptics. Specifically in the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist. In Luke’s version of the event, we read:
Then he [Jesus] took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” (Luke 22:19–20)
McGrew explains that Jesus “spoke this way in John 6 in anticipation of instituting the Lord’s Supper at the end of his ministry, expecting his followers to put it all together later if they persevered in discipleship”.
Thus, the Lord’s Supper, found in the Synoptics but not in John, coincides with the Bread of Life Discourse, found in John but not in the Synoptics, because the former explains why Jesus spoke about his flesh and blood in the latter.
First Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
I agree with McGrew that the Lord’s Supper can explain why Jesus speaks of eating his flesh and drinking blood in John 6, and in that sense there is a coincidence. But this coincidence is not evidence that Jesus really said what is attributed to him at the Lord’s Supper in the Synoptics or the Bread of Life Discourse in John. And that’s because the coincidence can be explained whether Jesus’s speeches are historical or not.
Let’s say the Lord’s Supper really did happen. His disciples and their converts spread the tradition. It enters oral and literary traditions about Jesus. By the time John’s Gospel is written, in the 90s CE, thousands of people know about Jesus’s words at the Lord’s Supper. And sometime during those sixty years a storyteller invents the Bread of Life Discourse and purposefully uses eucharistic language. The author of John’s Gospel learns of it and includes it in his Gospel. (Or John invented the Discourse himself.)
Now let’s say the Lord’s Supper was invented. Essentially the same process as above could have occurred: the tradition spreads among Christians, it enters oral and literary traditions about Jesus, and its language is used by a storyteller who invents the Bread of Life Discourse. 3
The coincidence, then, is not evidence for reliability. The Bread of Life Discourse could have been an invention based on Jesus’s words at the Lord’s Supper, which, whether historical or not, were widely known.
Second Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
According to McGrew, it’s implausible that the Bread of Life Discourse was invented because John has omitted the Lord’s Supper. She writes:
A critic who denies the authenticity of the discourse in John 6 faces a conundrum. Why did John not include the institution of the Communion in his own Gospel? Why does he leave the odd and difficult bread of life discourse dangling, using eucharistic-sounding language but without making any connection to the very passage from which he borrowed that language? . . . Including the words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood without any connection to the Supper or to any other passage on the same theme does little to serve a theological agenda.
This objection quickly crumbles like a sandcastle.
First, McGrew and I can both agree that John expected his readers to know already about the Lord’s Supper and to catch the allusions to it in the Discourse (similar to McGrew’s hypothesis that Jesus “expect[ed] his followers to put it all together later”). Therefore, the Discourse and the eucharistic language it contains still serve a theological agenda—that Jesus is “the living bread that came down from heaven”, and that “whoever eats of this bread will live forever” (John 6:51).
Second, McGrew’s objection has teeth only if she can explain why John omitted the Lord’s Supper in a way that my hypothesis cannot. But she cannot. Her explanation is that John didn’t include the Eucharist “because he has other things he wants to include at that point in his Gospel instead that are not found in the Synoptic Gospels”. These things include “Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet (John 13), the high priestly prayer (John 17), and several chapters of additional teachings of Jesus found only in John’s account”. Obviously, however, an author who included the Bread of Life Discourse could have omitted the Lord’s Supper for the same reasons. Indeed, having decided to omit the Lord’s Supper in his account, John might have included the Bread of Life Discourse in order to have eucharistic language somewhere in his Gospel.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
This coincidence fails to be evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony. There’s no doubt that the Lord’s Supper, whether historical or not, was an early and widespread tradition, and a Christian storyteller could easily have used it to come up with the Bread of Life Discourse. And because a storyteller and an eyewitness could have omitted the Lord’s Supper for the same reasons, it’s absence from John does not make the Bread of Life Discourse more likely to be historical.
- Unless otherwise noted, I use the NRSVue for all biblical translations. ↩
- I’m using the Kindle version of McGrew’s book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017), making page number useless. Unless otherwise noted, all the quotations from McGrew in this post come from Chapter I, section “4. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood . . .”. ↩
- In her discussion of this coincidence McGrew is cognizant of and concerned about the fact that not all Christians think Jesus’s words in the Bread of Life Discourse are connected to the Lord’s Supper. She therefore presents the coincidence from two perspectives: (1) the Bread of Life Discourse is alluding to the Lord’s Supper, and (2) the Discourse is not alluding to the Lord’s Supper. I’ve been presuming perspective (1) in the main text. According to (2), the Lord’s Supper still explains the Discourse because it reveals “Jesus’ preference for that particular metaphor [eating his body and drinking his blood], which he used in both places as a way of teaching about believing in him in various contexts”. My criticism of the coincidence apply to this perspective as well: A storyteller could have borrowed the “metaphor” from the Lord’s Supper and used it in his Discourse. ↩