The next explicit use of σάρξ in the John’s Gospel is in chapter 6 in Jesus’s discourse on the bread of life. The larger context connects Jesus’s speech to his miraculous feeding of five thousand people (6:1–15). In that miracle, Jesus takes a meager offering from a little boy of a few loaves and a couple fishes and somehow Jesus is able to distribute a large enough quantity to the crowd that the people were not only satisfied but the disciples gathered up twelve baskets full of left-over bread (6:13).
155 See the entry for ἄνωθεν in Frederick W. Danker, Walter Bauer, and William Arndt, A Greek-
English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University
The story is rich with allusion: the time of the feeding is near the Passover (6:4) but the people do not go to Jerusalem, but to Jesus, foreshadowing a shift in the locus of worship from the temple to Jesus.156 The place is on a mountain (6:3, 15), bringing to mind the various stories taking place on mountains such as Moses and the burning bush (Exod 3:1–4:17), the Mount Sinai theophany (Exod 24:15–18; 32:15–16), Elijah’s
theophany where God comes in a silence or quiet wind (1 Kgs 19:8–18), and Elijah being fed bread by ravens (1 Kgs 17:89). The food calls to mind the bread from heaven in Exodus 16–17 but also a Jewish eschatological banquet in which the elect would “eat and rest and rest with that Son of Man forever and ever” (1 Enoch 62:12–14). The Messiah would gather “from the four quarters of the world” the kingdom of Israel to eat with him (1 Enoch 48:10). The food at this eschatological banquet is often bread, which they refer to as manna or “heavenly food” (2 Bar 29:8).
While the meals seem to be largely vegetarian (bread and grapes), 2 Baruch thinks that the elect will also eat the great sea monsters of chaos, Leviathan and Behemoth (2 Bar 29:4–5, see also Psalm 74:13 where God gives the sea monsters as food for wild animals but not for humans). The fish, then, are part of the traditional imagery of an eschatological banquet that is otherwise plant-based.157 But the fish in John’s telling play a minor part and disappear entirely once Jesus speaks. The bread (ἄρτος) plays the most important role. Both in the leftovers and in the later telling about why the crowds have followed Jesus, the evangelist emphasizes the bread alone (John 6:23, 26).
156 On the chronological problems with the Passover in the Gospel of John see Michael Daise,
Feasts in John (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 104–52. Lining up John’s Gospel with actual historical
events is difficult. But my analysis is not dependent upon any historical reconstruction of Jesus’s life from the Gospel of John. I am more interested in how the Johannine community used the word σάρξ in an expansive manner that is not anthropocentric, thus opening up the possibilities for seeing the Incarnation more broadly than many theologians have.
157 Perhaps this eschatological image is one reason we find Jesus using fish to feed others and even
After this miracle, Jesus retreats in solitude so the crowd cannot “take him by force and make him king” (6:15). After walking on water to find the disciples, according to John’s Gospel, Jesus and the disciples go to the other side of the lake, but the crowd followed them in boats. Jesus accuses the crowd of following him only because he gave them bread (6:26). The crowd responds by asking for more bread, this time explicitly calling upon the manna story from Exodus 16 (John 6:31). At this point Jesus gives the famous bread of life speech.
Jesus tells the crowd that he is “the bread of life” and that the manna people ate in the wilderness did not keep them from dying. But Jesus is the bread of life that can keep people alive forever: “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh (ἡ σάρξ µου)” (6:48–51). This confuses the crowd: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (6:52). Undeterred, Jesus declares the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood (6:52–58).158 In the discourse, the word σάρξ comes up six times, the word αἷµα (blood) four times, and each time that Jesus speaks the words have the pronoun “my” attached, making it clear that the “flesh and blood” the people must consume is Jesus himself.159 Jesus’s flesh dies and rises again. It gives and sustains life. But Jesus does not mean that his flesh and blood only give and sustain our physical lives in the present, but that his flesh gives us an eschatological life (eternal life). Jesus’s flesh becomes “meat.”
158 Bultmann sees John 6:51–58 as a later insertion that we can delete from the text without taking
anything away from the narrative flow. Instead of ἐσθίω, this section uses τρώγω for “eating” and connects Jesus’s flesh with the Eucharist like other New Testament passages (Mark 14:23; Matt 26:27; Luke 22:17; and 1 Cor 11:24). So the discourse is a patchwork of redaction rather than a unity. See Bultmann, The
Gospel of John, 234–37. Other commentators, however, resist Bultmann’s suggestion seeing the entire
discourse as an increasing disclosure with repetition. Peder Borgen, for example, sees the entire discourse as a commentary on Exodus 16:15, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.” See Peder Borgen,
Bread from Heaven: An Exegetical Study of the Concept of Manna in the Gospel of John and the Writings of Philo (Leiden: Brill, 1965), 40–42.
159 In particular, the idea of “drinking blood” would have been offensive to Jewish hearers.
Leviticus 17:10–14 explicitly forbids drinking blood. The covenant between God and Noah forbids Noah and his family to consume an animal’s blood (Gen 9:4–5). See Charles Kingsley Barrett, The Gospel
The Word becomes “meat.” This meat replaces the paschal lamb. This grotesque imagery begins to problematize the divisions between human flesh and nonhuman animal “meat.”
Here in John 6, σάρξ has a broad significance as Jesus speaks about himself as “bread.” Jesus, the risen Christ, becomes present to the community as they partake in the Eucharist.160 John does not associate the Eucharist with the Last Supper as do the
Synoptic Gospels (see Mark 14:12–21; Matt 26:17–25; Luke 22:14–23). Instead John’s Gospel associates the Eucharist with the feeding of the five thousand and the subsequent bread of life discourse. In John 6:11 we read, “Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted” (ἔλαβεν οὖν τοὺς ἄρτους ὁ Ἰησοῦς καὶ εὐχαριστήσας διέδωκεν τοῖς ἀνακειµένοις ὁµοίως καὶ ἐκ τῶν ὀψαρίων ὅσον ἤθελον). Key words from this verse appear in the Synoptic accounts: ἔλαβεν . . . τοὺς ἄρτους and εὐχαριστήσας. All three Synoptic Gospels use εὐχαριστήσας (Matt 26:27; Mark 14:23; Luke 22:17; see also 1 Cor 11:24). The Synoptics and 1 Corinthians 11 depict Jesus as claiming the bread is his body and the wine is his blood, while John 6 parallels the idea about bread saying that his “flesh” is the bread of life.161
The most important point is that σάρξ in the Gospel of John can readily be
interpreted in a way that severely problematizes any attempt to focus on Jesus’s humanity as set apart from other types of creatures. In this case, Jesus’s flesh becomes the plant- based diet that sustained Israel during a trying time of sojourn through a hostile
160 On the Eucharistic undertones see ibid., 84–85; Brown, The Gospel according to John, I–XII,
248; R. Alan Culpepper, The Gospel and Letters of John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 163 and Craig Koester, Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 99–100.
161 In the Synoptics, Jesus tells the disciples to eat (ἐσθίω) his body (σῶµα) while John heightens
the language by saying that followers must “crunch” (τρώγω) his “flesh” (σάρξ). On τρώγω see the entry in Danker, Bauer, and Arndt, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian
environment. In the Exodus story as well, God sends some quail at one point, and in the evening God sends “manna” which the Israelites ate for forty years (Exod 16:35). The narrative emphasizes the bread. The quail barely get a mention and have no real importance in the story since it is the heavenly bread that sustains the Israelites. It is important to note that Jesus does not compare his flesh to the fish or the quail, a natural thing to do with the word σάρξ given how it is used in Hebrew scriptures to refer to nonhuman animals. Instead, Jesus speaks about his flesh as bread that does not require the disciples to intentionally kill other animal creatures for human spiritual survival.
Jesus, in the Gospel of John’s telling, uses σάρξ in a very different way than the Hebrew Bible normally used it for human and nonhuman animal life. But this does not mean that σάρξ in this context has no bearing on nonhuman animal life. It is noteworthy that Jesus does not compare his flesh to dead animal flesh that people might have eaten as well. His flesh, in some sense, saves nonhuman animals from becoming ritual victims in the worship life of the community and re-establishes “bread” from Exodus 16 and the plant-based diet from Genesis 1 as the important element for sustaining life.162 I will return to this theme in later chapters.