Episode 234: Meredith J. C. Warren - Meredith Warren Ruins John 6
Hold onto your communion wafers, folks! In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Meredith J. C. Warren guides Pete and Jared through eight weird verses in John 6:51-58, exploring whether or not the passage refers to the Eucharist, and how Hellenistic hero literature could have influenced John’s storytelling arc. Join them in their noble quest to answer the following questions:
How did Meredith get interested in the ways food acts within ancient narratives?
What is “hierophagy” and what does it have to do with John 6?
What is the Eucharist?
What texts do people read the Eucharist into? What examples exist in which Christian theology is read backwards in time and put into earlier texts?
When interpreting John 6:51-58, what do scholars say? What are the disagreements?
What passages include references to the last supper and how do they differ?
Why might John have not included the Eucharist in his gospel?
If John 6 is not about the Eucharist…what is it about?
What other examples do we have in antiquity that we could use to understand the body/divinity tie better?
How do Hellenistic hero myths play into the storytelling we find in John’s gospel and particularly John 6?
What does Meredith make of the disciples’ reaction to Jesus’s suggestion to eat his flesh and drink his blood?
Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
John 6 is one of these strange passages that no one quite agrees what to do with. — @DrMJCWarren
The Eucharist is basically a ritual where a community participates in a ritual meal, which is a symbolic ingestion of Jesus's flesh and blood in the form of bread or a meal and some kind of drink. — @DrMJCWarren
Jesus is making a comparison between the manna that was provided during the Exodus story, and the bread which Jesus provides. And he's making this comparison to show that the bread that Jesus provides is superior. — @DrMJCWarren
We shouldn't read back something that does become the central ritual in Christianity into earlier texts, because [the authors] just might not have thought they were important. — @DrMJCWarren
We have this sort of post-Enlightenment, Protestant idea that unless it's in something that's written down on paper, then it can't possibly be important. But there's tons of stuff that's important for people that has never been written down. — @DrMJCWarren
Christian tradition develops, and it chooses what things are important and what things we need to fill in, because the Bible actually doesn't have everything in it. And that's okay. — @DrMJCWarren
All religions change and shift and develop and grow over time. And so this anxiety about “the text is the only thing we can look to” actually ignores a lot of what's important. — @DrMJCWarren
There's a real strong connection between Jesus's body and his divinity. If this gospel likes to think about Jesus's divinity using Jesus's body, when we have in John 6 a conversation about what it means to eat this body, we have to think about it in that context. — @DrMJCWarren
In antiquity, gods are everywhere. The boundary line between the human realm or the mortal realm and the divine realm, it wasn't as firm as later Christianity wanted it to be or as we assume it to be today. — @DrMJCWarren
John 6’s sacrificial encouragement to take part in this sacrificial feast—to drink Jesus's blood and eat his flesh—in doing so, is an identification with him as the scapegoat sacrifice and with the god who kills him. — @DrMJCWarren
Mentioned in This Episode
Books:
My Flesh is Meat Indeed: A Non-Sacramental Reading of John 6: 51–58 by Meredith J. C. Warren
Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature by Meredith J. C. Warren
Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Mealsby Andrew McGowan
Join: The Society of Normal People community
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Pete
You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared
And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music]
Pete
Well, hello, wonderful listeners. Welcome to this episode of the podcast, and our topic today is Meredith Warren Ruins John 6. And our guest is Meredith JC Warren. She is a senior lecturer in biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield, and the director of the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Jared
Yeah, and she wrote a couple of books—and you may want to go back after you listen to this and write these down because we cover so much—And the book that is most directly related to what we talked about today is called "My Flesh is Meat Indeed," from 2015. But she also has a book she mentions from 2019 called "Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature," which I think would paint a broader picture—if you want to get real nerdy about it—of what we talk about today. So we are doing a deep dive today into John chapter 6:51-58. So we thought, rather than perhaps causing some wrecks, and a lot of other things where people are trying to open their Bibles before they listen, even though they're driving, which we always say don't do—but you know, people do it anyway—So anyway, we're gonna read this passage here as we get started, just so everyone starts with an understanding of what we're gonna talk about, because then we jump into the weeds pretty quickly.
Pete
I don't know, Jared, I feel like we're in church.
Jared
Yeah, that's okay. So, all right, John chapter 6.
Pete
Should we just start with saying “the word of the Lord” and then read it? And then say "Thanks be to God” at the end?
Jared
No! We're not doing that.
Pete
Okay, just read it.
Jared
[Laughing]
Pete
Go ahead.
Jared
All right, John 6:51-58 says, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?' And 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. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever."
Alright, let's get into it.
[Jaunty music plays]
Meredith
[Teaser clip of Meredith speaking plays over intro music] “This text needs to be read in the context of other discussions about Jesus's body and what Jesus's body does in John's gospel. And I think the gospel kind of sets us up at the outset to think about the relationship between the divine world and the mortal world when it outlines the concept of ‘the Word made flesh.’”
[Music plays]
Jared
Welcome to the podcast, Meredith! It's great to have you.
Meredith
Thanks for having me.
Jared
Okay. So, today, we're talking about eight weird verses in John 6—which is going to be specific, but also broad—But can you tell us what led you to writing your doctoral dissertation on this one passage? Why were you interested in it?
Meredith
So I was really interested in food and the ways that food worked in literature. I'm primarily not interested in sociological or sort of on the ground ritual performances of meals, although I am interested in that as well, but not for the work that I've been doing so far. So I was at McGill University, I was studying with the late Ellen Aitken, and she was a scholar who worked a lot with early Christian texts, but also with Hellenistic texts, and she was writing and had just published, or was publishing, a book on Philostratus' Heroikos, which is "about the hero." And I had been writing my master's thesis on a text called "Joseph and Aseneth," which is a Jewish romance novel from probably Egypt, there's a lot of debate in it. And I was interested in it because there's this really weird scene in the middle of it, where Aseneth—who is this female protagonist—gets this weird visit by this heavenly guy who's all shiny, and he gives her this honeycomb to eat and she eats it and she's just transformed. She has all this knowledge. And I noticed how scholars who looked at the scene tended to just assume that it was a Eucharist. They tended to see Eucharists everywhere that there was some kind of ritual eating and so I wanted to kind of take a step back when I was looking at that text and see what other options there were. And that ended up being my Masters on "Joesph and Aseneth," which I then expanded into a book called "Transformational Eating in Ancient Mediterranean Literature," which I published in 2019, where I articulated the sort of narrative level literary trope which I called "hierophegi", so it's when someone eats something given by an otherworldly creature that transforms them in a couple of different ways.
Pete
Meredith, could you break down that word first? Yeah.
Meredith
Yeah, hierophagy. So it's basically the eating of holy or sacred things. So "hiero" is the sacred or holy bit, and "phagy" is the eating bit. It's actually the same ending in the word "sarcophagus" which is like the “flesh eating box.” So that's kind of a fun thing.
Pete
Okay. Yeah, that's very fun. And you just ruined things...
[Laughs]
Meredith
I like to ruin things. I like to ruin sarcophagus, and you'll never look at one the same way again. But also, it's like, "sarcophagus" is like the worst word to describe what Egyptian sarcophagi do, because they don't break down the flesh, they're supposed to preserve the flesh. So it's like the opposite. Anyway, pet peeve, I'll write to the British Museum. But hierophagy is this eating of sacred things where a heavenly being gives something from heaven, or from another world, for a mortal to eat. And an example that I like to use is Alice in Wonderland, where she's sort of stuck in this liminal space. And she can't enter Wonderland until she eats the little box of Eat Me Cakes and drinks the little vial of Drink Me Liquid, and then she's able to access that other world.
So that's the idea of that book, and so I started thinking about what other texts are people sort of reading the Eucharist into? What examples can I find where sort of later Christian theology is sort of read backwards in time into these earlier texts? And I'm really interested in the ways that ancient texts preserve the diversity of ways of thinking about God, and the relationship between the divine and moral realm. And I think when you have these earlier texts, like the "Gospel of John," like "Joseph and Aseneth," you have a lot of diversity, right? Things aren't nailed down yet, we're not yet at the time of councils, we still have a lot of diversity and thinking. But in the first and second centuries, there's a lot of that going around, and so it can be tricky for us to interpret them, because we don't have the sort of stable, or more stable, sort of lines that are drawn theologically in like, the later second, third, fourth, and beyond centuries.
So yeah, John 6 is one of these strange passages that no one quite agrees what to do with. And I think when you have texts where there is such profound disagreement and scholarship, then that to me is like a clue that that's a place where you can find evidence for that diversity of thinking, where you're not just going to find the same thing said in a different way, necessarily, you're going to find something that's pointing somewhere else.
Jared
Okay. So, that's a great segue into trying to understand what the Eucharist is. You've given us this broader picture that may be in the background, and I want to get back to that, but I think it's helpful to kind of talk about how Bible scholars think about Eucharist. And what that is. And then how John 6 does or doesn't fit into that—you mentioned scholarly debate. So let's lay out the playing field here of the different players and the different ways we could take this passage.
Meredith
Sure. So, I guess first is to sort of unpack what the Eucharist is, and what that might look like in the context of when the gospels were written. And then the second part would be to think about how—or whether—John 6 is aware of any of that conversation in the first and second century. So I mean, the Eucharist is basically a ritual where a community participates in a ritual meal, which is a symbolic ingestion of Jesus's flesh and blood in the form of bread or a meal and some kind of drink. And so I'm not saying wine explicitly, because in the early centuries of the development of this ritual, there was quite a lot of debate about what the Eucharist should consist of, in terms of food and drink. So Andrew McGowan has written a book called "Ascetic Eucharist," where he outlines the diversity of Eucharistic practice in the early centuries of Christian history. So there's things like honey, and milk, and fish, and water, and bread, and cheese, and all these different ways of doing the Eucharist.
Pete
[Hums]
Meredith
So the Eucharist is in a couple of texts in the New Testament, which are also suitably vague—although they might not look that way at a sort of first glance—so I'll just kind of list where they are, and then we can kind of talk through them. If that's okay?
JaredYeah!
Meredith
So, it's in the Synoptic Gospels. So it's in Mark 14:22-25-ish, Matthew 26:26-29-ish, and Luke 22:15-20-ish. And then it's also in First Corinthians 11:23-26. So it's kind of fun that we've got some Paul in there, too. But this is all like, the context is the Last Supper, Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples. And they're hanging out and having some dinner, and there's this sort of performance where, you know, they're having their meal and Jesus takes some bread and he blesses it and he breaks it, and that's like a normal thing to do, and then he distributes it, and then he says this astonishing thing, which is like "This is my body." And then it says he took a cup, and they all had a drink right after blessing it. And he says, "This is my blood of the covenant." Depending on what version you're looking at, it looks a little bit different. So for instance, Luke puts the cup first and then the bread. The other examples do bread first, and then cup. And it's kind of ambiguous what is in the cup, so the gospel texts don't say wine, they say “fruit of the vine”—which you can make of that what you will, could be wine, it's pretty unlikely to be grape juice given how yeast sort of freely exists in the world and ferments things, whether you like it or not. But the Pauline text doesn't say what's in the cup at all. And so that part of McGowan's argument is that the text sort of creates space for these other fluids to be in the cup. So that's kind of where the Eucharist takes its form.
And obviously the early church and later like, went and ran with that, and like, it's a very elaborate ritual in some cases now and other cases it's just, you know, sharing bread. The bread of course can stand in—it's like a metonymy, right?—Like it stands in for other things. So, when we say like, "Oh, I'm just having a bite of bread." In antiquity, that would mean like bread and also like all the side dishes that went with that, and maybe some fish as well, and maybe some like beans and dips, and you know, all sorts of things like that. So, there's a lot of space in there for interpretation in the first centuries, even though these days, it tends to just be bread, or wafer, and wine or grape juice or something like that.
Jared
So there's this connection. I mean, those sound like they're all—The Synoptic Gospels, they're talking specifically about an event where Jesus is having this last dinner with his disciples and then the Paul passage is reflecting on that. So can you set up John 6? Because I think a lot of folks will make assumptions—I think probably I would have too—that it's all part of the same complex of events.
Meredith
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of remarkable. When you read John's version of The Last Supper, there isn't a heck of a lot of eating going on. There's a lot of talking. Like this is where Jesus gets really chatty and goes on like long speeches about things, the farewell discourse is in there, right? And then the only other thing that happens of sort of a ritual note is this footwashing. So there isn't actually any indication of bread or wine or any other beverage being consumed in the Johannine Last Supper. So this passage, where Jesus says, "Eat my flesh and drink my blood" is like a total left field statement that happens in what's called the Bread of Life discourse, which happens after the miracle of the feeding. And he's standing in Capernaum, at the synagogue, it says, and he says these really controversial things. And there's like some people around him, some of whom are what the gospel, a group that the gospel identifies as Jews and some of whom are His disciples. So it's not in a meal context at all, really, they're done with that feeding miracle, they've moved on somewhere else. And now we have this statement that's really in the context of Jesus comparing himself to Moses, right? Because in this passage, Jesus is making a comparison between the manna that was provided during the Exodus story, and the bread which Jesus provides. And he's making this comparison to show that the bread that Jesus provides is superior.
Pete
So just a question. I think you were sort of saying it, but I didn't hear it so clearly, and I'm not sure if I'm right or not. But the passage we're discussing here, John 6, is just simply put—just too darn early. Yeah, it just, it doesn't fit like, "Hey, let's do this Eucharist thing,” when it's not even relevant for about another 10 chapters.
Meredith
Yeah. And this is kind of part of the problem that I have with this idea that like, some ecclesiastical redactor was like, "Oh, no, there's no Eucharist, I better go back and put one in." It's like, if you were going to fix the gospel, why would you fix it in such a peculiar way, right? Like, it doesn't actually solve any problems to be like, "I'm gonna put a really cryptic reference to Jesus's flesh and blood. And I'm not actually going to talk about wine at all. And I'm gonna, like, stick it in some random place earlier in the gospel."
Jared
But that is…I think it's important to set up that that is, or has been, what a lot of scholars would have thought. That this would have been an insertion from later communities to find a place to put this ritualistic Eucharist into John's text, right?
Meredith
Yeah. And so I mean, that was Rudolf Bultmann’s—big name, New Testament scholar from a couple of generations ago—that was his big thing, right? Is this ecclesiastical redactor who goes back and sort of inserts these important rituals and sort of reorganizes John's text. And that's also because John is pretty careful to make clear that Jesus isn't actually baptized in the gospel either. So we're missing those two like core sacraments of baptism and Eucharist in the gospel. And that made people who were trying to find biblical justification for the sacraments a little bit uncomfortable, right? If like this really important gospel doesn't include them, like what do we do?
[Ad break]
Pete
Meredith, why—I mean, just slightly side detour here—But why would John not be a good boy and include the Eucharist scene like the other gospels?
Meredith
It might not just be important to his community, right? Like Christianity is still developing at this point. It's not even really such a thing as Christianity yet by the time that John and the other gospel writers are writing. That doesn't come until later. And it might just not be part of something that was important to whoever was around him, right? Like it does become important later. But we shouldn't read back something that does become like, the central ritual in Christianity into earlier texts, because they just might not have thought they were important.
Pete
[Hums in agreement]
Meredith
Right? This is what I'm talking about with the diversity, right? We have such diversity and what people thought were—maybe for John's group, it was footwashing. Footwashing was "the" thing, right? Which is still really important in a lot of communities today, but it doesn't have that central place that the Eucharist does.
Pete
Right, I mean, it's worth drawing out that a lot of Christians are sort of mentally prepared to be able to find, in the biblical tradition, later theology.
Meredith
Absolutely. Like the Trinity.
Pete
Exactly, right. And if you don't find it, like, you have a problem that you can't see, because there were apologists who proved these things. But just respecting, you know, this sort of this inchoate time here, where it's not really settled how people process this whole Jesus business. And, yeah, as you know, that's a threat for people, but it's also quite liberating to just let the text be the text, and not force them into some sort of a model or structure.
Meredith
Yeah, and I think, I mean, there's so many examples of that kind of thing, and I think this is part of a tendency to diminish cultural tradition around what people's beliefs are. And I think that is just as important as the text. We have this sort of post-Enlightenment, Protestant idea that like, unless it's in something that's written down on paper, then it can't possibly be important. But there's tons of stuff that's important for people that has never been written down. So, like a great example is the nativity story, right? Like people, like ask any child who has been in a nativity play and like, "There's tons of animals hanging out when Jesus is born." Is that in the text? No. Does Mary write a donkey? Well, of course she does. But she doesn't in the text, right? Like,we—
Pete
I mean, she'd be dumb not to.
Meredith
[Laughs] I mean, if she had a donkey, she should definitely ride it. But it's not there. Right? And so it's like, we could be really anxious about that and be like, "Well, I guess we can't have nativity plays, or there can only be like three children in them at any given time. And like, definitely no donkeys." Or we could just be like, "You know, what? Christian tradition develops, and it chooses what things are important and what things we need to fill in, because the Bible actually doesn't have everything in it. And that's okay. Because we are like... the Christians are a community who, you know, grow and develop, and they're not identical to whatever first century ideas were there.” Right?
Pete
It's a living tradition.
Meredith
Yeah, like all religions; they change, and shift, and develop, and grow over time. And so this anxiety about, you know, “the text is the only thing we can look to” actually ignores a lot of what's important.
Jared
I think that's a great point to make around kind of this larger tradition. And I think we'll get back there at the end of the episode, I hope. But I want to make, I don't want to leave people hanging in terms of a cliffhanger, because I'm sure everyone is just bated breath—what is John 6 doing? So maybe if it's not Eucharistic, maybe it's not appropriate to bring that tradition back into John 6. What is it about?
Meredith
So, I mean, I think we have to kind of step back and think about how John's gospel works on its own. So there's a lot of tendency to try and sort of harmonize and make it fit with the gospels, and I think we're better off kind of putting the other gospels to the side for now—although I might come back to them in a minute—instead of looking at what John is doing. And I think this text needs to be read in the context of other discussions about Jesus's body and what Jesus's body does in John's gospel. So John is considered this sort of elevated Christology and it's all about the glory, and it's all about the divinity. But it has a surprising amount of like body stuff in it. And I think the gospel kind of sets us up at the outset, to think about the relationship between the divine world and the mortal world when it outlines the concept of “the Word made flesh," right? So John 1:14 is a really important verse for us to use to understand the gospel as a whole, in its form as it currently stands.
And we see this kind of idea of this—almost a dialectic—between "the Word" and "the flesh." So for example we see in John 3, Jesus saying that he's the one who's coming down from heaven, and whose body will be lifted up on the cross, right? So there's a very physical idea of lifting this body up on the cross, but also this origin in heaven. So Jesus is highlighting that his identification with God depends on the lifting up on the cross of his physical body, which I would suggest implies that Jesus's glorification—whatever that means—is somehow connected to his physical being. And we can see this again in John 8:28, when Jesus says, "When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He." And these "I am" statements throughout John are constantly taken to be these sort of divine statements like "I am" when God says that to Moses in Exodus, right?
So there's an identification happening throughout the gospel between whatever it is about Jesus's physical body, the lifting up, the death, the suffering on the cross, and the identification with God, "I am He" right? You can also see it in the signs in John. And I think it's important to also note here that John calls these "signs" and not "miracles." In the Synoptic Gospels, when Jesus heals people or does, you know, fantastic things, they're called miracles or powers. It's a different word. In John, it's clear that they are signs in the sense that they point to something else, and it's a different Greek word. And what these signs do, is point to Jesus's identity as divine. Interestingly, Jesus must use his physical body in John to enable these healings.
So we have the example of this sort of really visceral description of Jesus using his own saliva to make a mud self to heal someone's eyes, which is just like, "Oh, my God, this is so gross." But it's such an explicit description of Jesus, you know, using his own spit. And interestingly, ioudaioi—what is often translated the Jews in the Gospel—recognize how Jesus’s use of his body in that healing, corresponds to a claim about divinity. Right? After that scene in John 9, they react to these really physical signs where Jesus uses his body to heal people by saying that Jesus is claiming to be God when he's doing this. So there's a real strong connection between Jesus's body and his divinity. And so from that point, we can take a look and say, "Okay, if this gospel likes to think about Jesus's divinity using Jesus's body, when we have in John 6 a conversation about what it means to eat this body, we have to think about it in that context."
Pete
Okay, so tying the body to divinity.
Meredith
Tying the body to divinity. Yeah. That's sort of the entry point into this conversation. So once we get to that, we can talk about, "Okay, now, what other examples do we have in antiquity that we could use to understand this better?" And so that's how I got on to the idea of "the hero," the sort of Hellenistic hero. And in antiquity, right, gods are everywhere, and the boundary line between the human realm or the mortal realm and the divine realm, it wasn't as firm as later Christianity sort of wanted it to be or as we assume it to be today. So the sort of shifting or maybe a sliding scale of divinity is something that's really important to keep in mind—that it was possible for humans to sort of shift into the divine realm relatively easily.
So a key element of the life of the hero is an antagonistic relationship between a god and this hero. So we're just talking about sort of Greek and Hellenistic hero cults right now. In myth, the god kills the hero or is responsible for the hero's death. And this is the case with Aesop as well as [unintelligible]. In real life in antiquity, when people went to worship that hero—Aesop, in this case—they would do so alongside whatever patron god that was who had killed him—Apollo in this case. So Gregory [?] articulated that relationship as antagonism between hero and God in myth corresponds to the ritual requirements of symbiosis between hero and God in cult. But all that means is, god kills hero in story. When you actually go to worship that hero, you do so alongside the god. They're related to each other, they're really closely knit. So that's something that I think happens in the Gospel of John. And we can sort of trace that through if you'd like.
Jared
Trace this connection? Let me make sure I'm hearing you, and then yeah, I think that would be great. This theme that we might find in the Gospel of John that we find in these Hellenistic myths as well. And that is, there's an antagonism between the god and the hero in the myth. But then there's this cultic, ritualistic connection between them because of that antagonistic relationship doesn't mean, in practical reality, you know, those are, there's not the cult of Apollo and the cult of Aesop. And now they're at war with each other, because in the myth, they were antagonistic. It actually is the opposite, where they come together, and to worship, to practice, you know, ritually within the bounds of the one is within the bounds of the other.
Meredith
Exactly.
Jared
And we see this in John, you're saying?
Meredith
Yes, exactly. And so, sort of, I'm building on the work by Jo-Ann Brant and Jennifer Berenson MacLean, on sort of the presence of the hero and the importance of the figure of the hero. I should say, we don't have any evidence that Jesus was worshipped in real life as a Greco-Roman hero. And we don't have evidence of the protagonist of these romance novels that I look at in my book being worshipped that way either. And I think that's actually really important, because I think what's happened is that everything is now taking place at the level of narrative. We've moved away from the real world entirely, and everything is taking place at the level of narrative. So the association and the antagonism are all in the narrative together. And you see that in the Hellenistic novels as well, which I'll get to.
But I mean, you can see that God is ultimately responsible for Jesus's death. Right? Jesus says, you know, he can do nothing without the will of the Father, right? He does God's will. But he makes it clear every time that even his presence on Earth makes him vulnerable to death, which is something that God does. Right? So the gospel continually places responsibility for Jesus's death in God's hands. And the gospel appears to defend itself against pointing the finger at God by making villains out of those who misinterpret Jesus's signs. We see an example of that in John 6 where the Jewish hearers say like, "How can we do this? This is a hard thing" and the disciples who after they hear it are like, "No, I'm out of here. This is a weird one, and I'm leaving now." So everything that Jesus does is at the behest of his father God, including his death. So there's a clear line between God's will and Jesus's death, which is the antagonism. And antagonism doesn't mean they hate each other, or they're angry, or anything like that. It's just about this relationship and myth between whoever's responsible for the death.
There's a whole bunch of Hellenistic romance novels, I looked at four of them. I don't think there's like a literary relationship between John's gospel and these texts, I don't even think he probably read them. But I do think that they preserve a kind of cultural attitude about the relationship between sacrifice, bodies, and divinity. So in all of these novels, we do have that same conjunction of a main character whose life is controlled by the divine realm in some way, who's continually almost killed by that deity and interestingly, who is continually mistaken for that deity in their sort of travels.
[Ad break]
Pete
Okay, that is tremendously interesting. I'm thinking now like really getting to John 6, you know, and tying this together because, you know, obviously the background is so crucial to coming to a more pleasing interpretation of this passage. If it's not Eucharist, and it doesn't seem like it is, right? So how is that functioning? Then what is John 6 doing?
Meredith
So I think John 6 is essentially a nod to a heroic cult meal with sacrifice. Because in The Life of Aesop, and in these other Hellenistic novels that I mentioned, the sacrifice of the main character is really important. And in Aesop, for example, it's expiatory right? Aesop was like a scapegoat, the god Apollo kills him and he dies for the many. So we've got that kind of echo of a scapegoat, of an expiation. So I really think that John 6 is pointing to a heroic cult meal with the sacrifice, but one that only takes place at the level of narrative. So the establishment of the cult with a sacrifice and a banquet, which was completely ordinary in the ancient world, is the moment at which the hero and the god established their symbiotic relationship, a relationship that can only exist because of the antagonism that takes place in myth, which, you know, in John is happening all at the same level in narrative. So John 6’s sacrificial encouragement, to take part in this sacrificial feast to drink Jesus's blood and eat his flesh, in doing so, is an identification with him as the scapegoat sacrifice and with the god who kills him.
Jared
And is it fair to say, I'm just thinking of timing too. In my mind, it goes to John probably being written a little later, like, it just seems like there's more development time, which would allow for a little bit more of this Hellenistic influence and understanding. Is that appropriate to think?
Meredith
I mean, you know, Mark is quite a bit earlier than John. So if it's in Mark, it's probably pretty well established. I think we have to think of Judaism in this time period as like, there is no such thing as non-Hellenized Judaism, right? Like it's all Hellenistic.
Jared
Okay. Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. All right.
Meredith
Yeah.
Jared
It's almost as if, when you're a part of a culture, and you're trying to convey ideas, you're just going to use the tools you have available to you, which are your culture.
Meredith
Yeah, exactly. It is his culture. So he's, he's just like, using what comes naturally to him. It's not necessarily like he's leafing through the “How to Write a Gospel” handbook and picking something. It's just part of how he thinks about the relationship between the divine world and the human world.
Jared
Well, before we come to the end of our time, I mean, I feel like I want to—I have a lot more questions. I'm still like processing things. But what do we make of, because I think it's important maybe to kind of wrap it up with—what do we make of the disciples’ reaction to this? Because I couldn't help but you know, reading through parts of your dissertation, I kept thinking about that reaction, where you say, “this is a hard saying, this is a hard teaching.” And I think for us as readers, many centuries later, who don't share that hero culture in some ways, but maybe we still do in other ways. It may be relevant. I just kept wondering, you know, what do you think of the disciples’ reaction? And how is that functioning here in the narrative?
Meredith
I kind of love their reaction, because to me, it kind of reflects how we, as scholars, and readers of this text have reacted to John 6. Like we don't really know what to make of this. And we're kind of a little bit afraid of it, right? Like we're kind of uncomfortable with what it says. And so I think you know, this, a similar thing is going on where like an ancient people, the disciples may have missed some key context, right? They're not understanding what's going on. And they struggle with it. And I actually kind of have an inkling, although I haven't written about this, and I haven't even looked into it. But it sort of exists in my brain—that John is kind of writing against Luke and disagrees with the Synoptic Gospels eucharistic discourse. And so I think it's kind of a reaction. I think the reaction is a pointed comment about the other authors and the other community’s perceived misunderstanding about what it means to narratively consume Jesus's flesh and blood. So I think it's kind of a jab at the other gospels, but I can't prove that.
Jared
That this whole, this whole strand of thinking is difficult to grasp.
Meredith
But I think John likes to be difficult. Like John likes to be difficult to understand! And I mean, other gospels like to be difficult to understand, too, right? There's the whole misunderstanding motif of the disciples just like not getting it over and over again.
Pete
I mean, the disciples there was a gold reaction to this. It's not like Jesus's answer clarifies anything.
Meredith
He doesn’t like to do that either!
Pete
I'm just, I'm just thinking of, you know, the whole rhetoric of the plain meaning of Scripture and all that keeps coming to me. And it's, it's more it's like, you struggle with the text. And hey, it's even possible some authors want you to struggle a little bit! It's not supposed to be straightforward. It's, you know, there's a mystery here going on, I guess, with John and yeah.
Jared
I think yeah, and I think that does, it highlights—and I think we have to sort of bring that to the fore here, as, as we wrap up, it highlights just how important context can be to understanding our Bible. And it's interesting because on the one hand, we did two things here in this conversation, which is to say, well, there is the context of: we have to pay attention to the context of John as a literary work within the confines of John. Where I feel like sometimes it's easy to bias a reading, to make it kind of say what we want it to say, if we have other, like we have the synoptics to go off of. And so it's so easy to just jump over seeing John in its own context, because it's like, well, we have all these other Eucharistic things. And that is more comfortable to me. And it makes sense. And we can fit in this box. And so we do that.
But there's something to reading closely within just the literary work itself. But then if we kind of leapfrog and go even broader to say how important it is to understand that Greco-Roman context, and the other works that would be written outside the Bible at the time, and all of that goes into understanding one passage in our Bible. It just for me, it problematizes it all and says, this is complex stuff. And it's not plain. It's not simple. It takes a lot of work.
Meredith
Yeah, absolutely. It takes a lot of work, I think. And I think I mean, I think that's something that's really important about what you guys are doing, as well is like, it takes a lot of work to do this. But I think as scholars part of our job is to try and make that as accessible as possible. So, you know, podcasts like yours where we get to talk about this stuff and talk about these hard questions and these hard passages and sort of provide a taster of some of this other literature that's out there. You know, I think that's really important.
Pete
Yeah. And then providing a paradigm to for, you know, one of our operating questions here is, you know, what is the Bible? And it's not just something that concurs with later tradition. Those are, those are attempts to systematize or in some cases smooth over or just contextualize for later times. But to pin all that onto the sacred text, which is itself a developing tradition, it raises questions for people. And that's fine, right? I mean, we like raising questions, don't we Jared?
Jared
I definitely ended this conversation with more questions than answers. For sure.
Pete
Yeah. And that makes me very happy.
Jared
Excellent. So thank you so much, Meredith, for coming on, and raising a lot of questions. We really appreciate it.
Meredith
Well, thanks so much for having me!
Jared
Well thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
Pete
And if you want to support us and want community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared
And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just want to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.
Outro
You've just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, Faith for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao!
