My Flesh Is Meat Indeed

Book excerpt: In My Flesh Is Meat Indeed, Meredith J. C. Warren shows that the "bread of life" discourse in John 6:51c-58 bears no Eucharistic overtones. Instead, John plays on Mediterranean cultural expectations about the nature of heroic sacrifice and the sacrificial meal that established the identification of a hero with a deity. Warren traces a literary trope in which a hero or heroine'’s antagonistic relationship with a deity is resolved through the hero's sacrifice. Against this milieu, Jesus' insistence that his flesh be eaten demonstrates the Christology of the Gospel.