Corpus-Paul

[Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>]

Hyam Maccoby wrote:

>As for sacrificial blood, this was poured out on
>the altar as an offering to God and the idea of
>imbibing any of it by a human being would
>have been regarded as abhorrent and even blasphemous
>by Jews...

>...so I do not believe that Jesus ever announced
>a doctrine of salvation through drinking his blood,
>whether literally or metaphorically.

>If you are looking for precedents to the Johannine
>and Pauline idea of drinking the divine blood, I
>believe you will find them in the mystery
>religions, but not in Judaism.

Like Bob, I don't want to steer too off-topic, but
there is another option which needs to be taken
seriously here, and it has consequences for
understanding the continuities/discontinuities between
Jesus and Paul. What if, by saying, "This is my flesh,
this is my blood," Jesus had been pointing neither to
a literal nor symbolic ingesting of his own flesh and
blood (contra John)? As Hyam rightly notes, whether
understood literally or symbolicly, the doctrine of Jn
6 would have been morally repugnant to any sane Jew.
Bruce Chilton has suggested that the eucharist is
actually to be understood literally, but in a way
which could have possibly made sense to pre-70
Judeans/Galileans/Pereans. See his _Pure Kingdom_ (pp
124-126), where he argues that, "This is my flesh,
this is my blood" meant, "This bread is my 'flesh' of
sacrifice to Yahweh, and this wine is my 'blood' of
sacrifice to Yahweh." In other words, bread was better
"flesh" and wine better "blood" than any of the
sacrifices associated with the Judean temple.

I know you won't accept this, Hyam (in the past we've
discussed this off-list), because you see no conflict
between Jesus and the temple to begin with.

But if Jesus had been setting up a "rival altar" in
place of the Judean temple, with bread and wine
offered as sacfrices in place of the flesh and blood
of animals, then he was not advocating eating flesh or
blood, literally or symbolically. The question then
presses: What about someone like Paul, standing in
between Jesus and the Johannine tradition? Does I Cor
11 preserve more affinities with the former (an
alternate Jewish view of sacrifice) or the latter (the
pagan ingesting of the flesh and blood of the adored)?
I would like to hear what others have to say about
this. 

Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com

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