This Is My Flesh: John’s Eucharist and the Dionysus Cult

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In John 6:51-59, John describes the Eucharist of Jesus by modeling Dionysus. In particular, John 6:53, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you is one of the most difficult verses found anywhere in the Bible. To explain this, a new approach is needed when one consistently contemplates why John uses flesh (

) instead of body (

), and This is my flesh, instead of This is my body. The Dionysiac ritual of eating and tearing raw flesh shows cannibalistic elements. Unlike other negative descriptions of cannibalism in ancient literature, Dionysus is described as both an eater and a giver of raw flesh. By reevaluating the negative term of cannibalism, John positively applies this Dionysiac cannibalism to the Eucharistic words in 6:51-59. Because emphatically and slightly ironically, scholars’ arguments show that John 6 is still a hard teaching of Jesus, Jesus’ hard saying (6:60) is a consequence of this cannibalistic language and the ambiguous features of Dionysus.