John Chapter 6:41-51

We pick up with Jesus still in conversation with “The Jews”. He has been attempting to explain his relationship to the Father, whom the Jews, of course, understood to be YHWH. And the Jews, of course, have taken exception to Jesus’ degree of familiarity with The Father, believing that he has decidedly overstepped the bounds of propriety. So far, the suggestion of blasphemy has not been raised, but one suspects Jesus is tap dancing in a mine field. Of course, this impression arises because we know how this all ends.

It bears mentioning that “the Jews” are never really identified. That is, we know that they are Jews, but really nothing beyond that. John does not label or classify them further; they are not, for example, Pharisees or Scribes or anything else. They are just Jews. Honestly, this strikes me as an unfortunate development. It’s one thing that a certain, self-selected wannabe elite is diffident and smugly superior and worthy of rebuke; it’s entirely another to disparage the crowd just because they are Jewish. This is one of the small initial steps of a long, dark tradition of anti-Semitism in Christian thought.

41 Ἐγόγγυζον οὖν οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι περὶ αὐτοῦ ὅτι εἶπεν, Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἄρτος ὁ καταβὰς ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ,

42 καὶ ἔλεγον, Οὐχ οὗτός ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς ὁ υἱὸς Ἰωσήφ, οὗ ἡμεῖς οἴδαμεν τὸν πατέρα καὶ τὴν μητέρα; πῶς νῦν λέγει ὅτι Ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καταβέβηκα;

So “the Jews” murmured about him, that he said, “I am the bread which has come down (lit = which having come down) from the sky”, (42) and they said, “Is this not Jesus, son of Joseph, the father and mother of whom we have known? How now does he say ‘From the sky I have come down”? (

Here we have a an anagram of the Prophet in his Own Land pericope. That actual expression was used back in Chapter 4:44, and the part here about knowing is ancestry is cribbed from all three Synoptics. What sticks out to me is that we get the name of Joseph, but not Mary, which is the opposite set of circumstances from Mark. Why no Mary?  In Mark we have Mary only plus siblings, in Matthew we get Mary and siblings and a reference to his father’s trade, but the father is not named; in Luke we get only Joseph and no siblings, and so it is here. We speculated in the commentary to Luke 4:22 that the siblings had been omitted because the nascent Church found the idea of siblings incompatible with the Virgin Birth. I know that, even after Vatican II, the nuns of Maple Grove St Micheal’s Catholic School was ambivalent (at best) about the siblings, usually telling us that the terms used could mean “cousins”, which is not entirely accurate. So there isn’t much need to wonder about why John omits them, too. But a little checking seems to indicate that John only uses the name Mary to refer to the sister of Martha and Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, and the sister of Jesus’ mother, Mary the wife of Cleophas, the latter three of whom stood at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25). That is remarkable. We will have to dwell on that more in the discussion of Chapter 19, so don’t want to go on too long at this point, but we have to say something. Mary the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who loomed so large in Luke is being written out of the picture here in John. Of course John has no birth narrative and so no virgin birth, but it looks like her first appearance in the gospel is at the foot of the cross. In fact, standing at the foot of the cross* might be her only appearance in John**, and she’s not named, but her sister is.

The crowd does acknowledge that he had a mother, and that she was known to them. This is an interesting development in its own right. After all, recall that these are the people who were at the Feeding of the 5,000, who followed him across the Sea of Galilee to Caphernaum, the location of the events described here. The crowd, seemingly, had come from Tiberias. But here, in Caphernaum, we have people who knew his parents. That is odd, since Jesus grew up in Galilee, which is not exactly close to Caphernaum. Yes, of course there could have been individuals who lived in Nazareth in the crowd, but that is not the plain meaning of the text. 

The passage would seem to provide a pretty solid example of something like editorial fatigue. Editorial fatigue occurs when one evangelist is plagerize–er, paraphrasing a previous gospel. Then, at some point in the passage, the editor sort of loses track of the main theme, lapsing from the plural subject (e.g.) he was using into the singular subject of the original. Here, John was rewriting the Feeding and mixing in the Prophet without Honour story, but at some point he forgot that this was taking place in Caphernaum rather than Nazareth which makes the audience’s familiarity with Jesus’ parents out-of-place. I bring this up because I have run across disclaimers that the evangelists did not work with a scroll of a previous gospel open before them as they were writing. Based on passages like this, it would seem that was exactly what John was doing here, although it’s hard to say which one. Perhaps he had all three, and did an early version of cut-and-paste to incorporate the salient elements from each one. Now, since John follows Luke by naming Joseph and not the siblings, at first glance we would surmise that John was using Luke. The problem there, however, is that Luke is the only one of the Synoptic Gospels that specifically tells us this took place in Nazareth. The other two simply say Jesus was in his own country/home town. This means that only John situates this in Caphernaum. Now I have argued several times that Jesus was not from Nazareth, that he was from Caphernaum. Mark told us early in Chapter 2 that Jesus was in Caphernaum and word got out that he was at home. Matthew specifically told us that Jesus moved to Caphernaum. Here we are told that people in Caphernaum knew Jesus’ parents, and seemingly fairly well. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to spin this: while Caphernaum and Nazareth aren’t exactly close, they aren’t far enough apart that interaction between the towns was possible even at something like regular (if not frequent) intervals. But that’s not how the text reads. The comment implies that a significant portion of the crowd was familiar with Joseph and Jesus’ mother. John, of course, was simply repeating what he had read elsewhere, but then he situates the action in Caphernaum. I believe this is one more bit of evidence that Matthew introduced Nazareth as a means of using the quote, “He shall be called a Nazarene”. 

*Stabat Mater, “The Mother Stands” in the words of so many beautiful pieces of classical music.

**As always, I reserve the right to recant this pronouncement upon being confronted by contrary evidence later in the Gospel.

41 Murmurabant ergo Iudaei de illo, quia dixisset: “Ego sum panis, qui de caelo descendi”,

42 et dicebant: “Nonne hic est Iesus filius Ioseph, cuius nos novimus patrem et matrem? Quomodo dicit nunc: “De caelo descendi”? ”.

43 ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Μὴ γογγύζετε μετ’ ἀλλήλων.

44 οὐδεὶς δύναται ἐλθεῖν πρός με ἐὰν μὴ ὁ πατὴρ ὁ πέμψας με ἑλκύσῃ αὐτόν, κἀγὼ ἀναστήσω αὐτὸν ἐν τῇ ἐσχάτῃ ἡμέρᾳ.

45 ἔστιν γεγραμμένον ἐν τοῖς προφήταις, Καὶ ἔσονται πάντες διδακτοὶ θεοῦ: πᾶς ὁ ἀκούσας παρὰ τοῦ πατρὸς καὶ μαθὼν ἔρχεται πρὸς ἐμέ.

46 οὐχ ὅτι τὸν πατέρα ἑώρακέν τις εἰ μὴ ὁ ὢν παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ, οὗτος ἑώρακεν τὸν πατέρα.

47 ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ὁ πιστεύων ἔχει ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

48 ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἄρτος τῆς ζωῆς.

49 οἱ πατέρες ὑμῶν ἔφαγον ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ τὸ μάννα καὶ ἀπέθανον:

50 οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ ἄρτος ὁ ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καταβαίνων ἵνα τις ἐξ αὐτοῦ φάγῃ καὶ μὴ ἀποθάνῃ.

51 ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἄρτος ὁ ζῶν ὁ ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καταβάς: ἐάν τις φάγῃ ἐκ τούτου τοῦ ἄρτου ζήσει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα: καὶ ὁ ἄρτος δὲ ὃν ἐγὼ δώσω ἡ σάρξ μού ἐστιν ὑπὲρ τῆς τοῦ κόσμου ζωῆς.

Jesus answered and said to them, “Do not murmur with each other (or, stop grousing!). (44) No one is able to come to me unless the Father who sent me should pull him along, and I will stand him up on the last day. (45) For it is written in the prophets, ‘And they will all having been taught by God (lit = learners of God); All who having heard from the father and having learned come to me. (46) No one has not (double negative = emphasis) seen the father except the one being issued from God, that one has seen the father. (47) Amen, amen, I say to you, the one believing has eternal life. (48) I am the bread of life. (49) Your fathers ate in the desert the manna and died. (50) This is the bread which from the sky having descended so that someone who may eat from the bread shall not die. (51) I am the bread which lives which has descended from the sky. If one eats from the bread he will live forever; and the bread which I will give is my body, above all the life of the kosmos.

That’s a very literal translation; it seems important that it be so, but I hope it’s not just confusing. Remember, one of the goals of this blog is to assist those who may be trying to learn a bit of Greek, so we often proffer a literal, if stilted, translation to assist in sorting out the grammar. From there, the onus is on the reader to figure out how the Greek was twisted to make it into English, and then decide whether the twisting has simply become distortion and, in extreme cases, just wrong. We’ve run across a few of the latter. While we’re talking about literal, no doubt the persistent use of “the sky” where one might expect “heaven”, or “the heavens” (despite being singular), or even “Heaven”. The intent of using “the sky” is to be a bit jarring; so much “NT Greek”, so many of the translations simply render things in a manner that presupposes how the words have been translated since the first translations were made. “Angel” is my standard example, although “apostle” is another example of a slightly different twist on this. So I use “the sky” to remind you that the English word “heaven” has a distinctly different linguistic field than the Greek word ourania. In English, “heaven” in the singular does not have the implication of “the sky”. That is the base meaning in Greek, with the concept of “heaven” as the abode of the gods coming into use later.

I find the emphasis, or even the bare mention, of learning from God to be curious. While Jesus’ disciples are, literally, “the learners” (which was how the word was rendered in the commentary on Mark), the emphasis throughout the Synoptics, Paul, and what we’ve read so far in John has been on faith. There has been little-to-nothing about learning, whether from God or about God. This idea of learning, as in a rational, intellectual activity of the rational mind is much more of a Greek idea. Of course, the idea of learning to approach God perhaps reached its acme with the Gnostics. That is what the word means: “knowledge”, or ‘knowing”. Is it coincidental that the Gnostics came to something approaching full florescence around about the time John was writing this gospel? And the later the date for this gospel, say 120 rather than the more traditional 100 CE for the date of John, the more influential of Gnosticism on the religious mind would have been. This is not to say that John was influenced by Gnosticism; rather, it is simply to point out that religious thinkers were more apt to run into Gnostics and their concepts as the year 100 CE receded in the rear-view mirror. Be that as it may, we quickly revert to the emphasis on believing to which we are more accustomed. Verse 47 tells us it is the one believing who has eternal life.

One interesting note: Jesus says that your fathers, not our fathers, ate the manna in the desert. Jesus was a Jew. The manna was given to the Jews during the Exodus, which was a defining moment in the cultural belief of Judaism. So why does he say “your fathers”? This sounds like he’s separating himself from his audience, and that he would do so at this point in history is grossly anachronistic. The separation between Jews and the followers of Jesus would not start to occur until a decade or more after Jesus’ death. That was the situation taking place in real time in Galatians, written close to twenty years after the events described here would have happened. So what then? People who study journalism have to learn how to report the story without slipping into editorializing, giving an opinion rather than “just the facts”. Above we had editorial fatigue; here, IMO, we get “editorial slippage”. My suggestion would be that the use of “your” fathers represents the manifestation of John’s desire to separate himself from the Jews. Was John Jewish? Was he raised practicing Judaism? Of course the “correct” answer is “yes”. After all, John the Evangelist was John the Apostle, brother of James Maior, one of the Sons of Thunder and one of the so-called pillars that Paul met with in Jerusalem, as described in Galatians. So of course the Evangelist was Jewish. But what if John the Evangelist was not John the Apostle? In that case, all bets are off and there is no reason that the Evangelist had to be Jewish. Of course, by tradition Luke was  pagan, and others before me have speculated that Matthew may have been a pagan, but the background of Mark and John have not been called into question the way even Matthew has been. This could be a lapsus lingui, a slip of the tongue that gives away the game. Granted it’s a slender reed to use as support for what would be a colossal change of orthodox opinion of the Evangelist’s background; on its own, it’s a hint and nothing more. Perhaps this is another question that we should follow as we proceed. If I don’t bring it up again, that would be pretty good indication that the Evangelist most likely was Jewish.

That leaves us with the rest of it. In Mark, we had the Messianic Secret; here we get the Messianic Proclamation. Or something such. The bread is my body. Come to the father through me. I am the bread of life. I mean, could the message be any more obvious? He all-but says, ‘Dudes! I’m the anointed one!’ But then we have to ask, well, if he’s being so obvious, why doesn’t he just come out and say it? Here is where we get into the residual of the Secret. The plain fact is that by the time of the destruction of the Temple, most new converts were from pagan rather than Jewish backgrounds. The Jews had, plainly, rejected Jesus’ message. The gospels do try to get across the message that Jesus’ identity was blindingly obvious, but that is obviously contradicted by the course of events. Here what we are getting is not any kind of attempt to provide an account (= logos) that is intended in any way to resemble factual reality. What we have is not an account of Jesus teaching the Jewish audience, but of John telling his pagan audience that the Jews were just too thick-headed to get it. I mean, how much more blatant could the message have been? And they still didn’t get it? Sheesh.

Aside from that, we also have an all-out blitz to tie Jesus to Moses. We have said right along that, unlike modern Americans, denizens of the ancient world were not impressed by novelty and innovation. They were not interested in finding the next big thing; rather, they were interested in the First Big Thing. Antiquity mattered, and the older the better. Later in the history of the Church, ecclesiastical leaders would argue about the relative age of Moses and Homer, and usually come out in favor of the former. That is the sort of question, this sense of competition, is the background to this passage. One does perhaps get the impression that this may have been directed at the so-called God-Fearers, pagans who attached themselves to synagogues to steep themselves in the culture and moral precepts of Judaism. This appeal that Moses was actually pointing to Jesus would have been appealing to them. The numbers of these God-Fearers is impossible to estimate, but it would make sense that they would be recognized as individuals likely to be open to the message about Jesus. Kinda sounds like a marketing assessment, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

43 Respondit Iesus et dixit eis: “Nolite murmurare in invicem.

44 Nemo potest venire ad me, nisi Pater, qui misit me, traxerit eum; et ego resuscitabo eum in novissimo die.

45 Est scriptum in Prophetis: “Et erunt omnes docibiles Dei”. Omnis, qui audivit a Patre et didicit, venit ad me.

46 Non quia Patrem vidit quisquam, nisi is qui est a Deo, hic vidit Patrem.

47 Amen, amen dico vobis: Qui credit, habet vitam aeternam.

48 Ego sum panis vitae.

49 Patres vestri manducaverunt in deserto manna et mortui sunt.

50 Hic est panis de caelo descendens, ut, si quis ex ipso manducaverit, non moriatur.

51 Ego sum panis vivus, qui de caelo descendi. Si quis manducaverit ex hoc pane, vivet in aeternum; panis autem, quem ego dabo, caro mea est pro mundi vita ”.