Below is a summary by Claude.ai on 7/28/2026 of a paper by SBA member Marcus Blue titled I’ll Have the Eucharist, Hold the Body and Blood, The Jewish Table of Blessing, the Pauline Alteration, and the Recovery of the Original Meal. The paper is in his directory in DropBox. Marcus is a DDS and independent researcher of the ANE and biblical matters. This paper provides good ideas and observations with good sources.
Prompt: Summarize the attached paper providing concise statements of the arguments related to the blood and body issue. I want statements to be used as talking points that make the case without getting into the weeds. References to his sources in line would be good.
Response
Here are concise, source-tagged talking points making the case on the body-and-blood question — stripped down for use in conversation, not deep argument:
The earliest Jesus-tradition has no blood-and-body language.
- The most repeated meal scene in the Gospels — the feeding of the multitudes, present in all four — shows bread, blessing, and abundance, with no cup of blood and no memorial words.
- Even the words attached to the Last Supper across every strand of tradition are forward-looking (“I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until… in the kingdom of God”), not sacrificial.
Luke’s own text shows the seam where the blood-language was added.
- Luke’s fuller version runs cup → bread → cup: a first kingdom-oriented cup (22:17–18), then bread (22:19), then a second “blood of the covenant” cup appended afterward (22:20).
- That second cup is missing entirely in Codex Bezae and the Old Latin — and its wording matches 1 Corinthians 11 almost verbatim, suggesting a later insertion rather than an original unity.
Paul is the earliest source for “this is my body/blood” — and he says he got it by revelation, not from eyewitnesses.
- Paul states plainly, “I received from the Lord” (1 Cor 11:23) — not from Peter, James, or anyone who sat at the table.
- Paul elsewhere insists his gospel came by revelation, not from other apostles (Gal 1:12), and shows almost no interest anywhere else in the teachings of the earthly Jesus.
Drinking blood was the deepest taboo in Judaism, making the saying historically jarring.
- Leviticus 17 makes blood-consumption a capital offense in Torah; nothing in Jewish literature treats drinking blood as anything but monstrous.
- Scholars Geza Vermes and Hyam Maccoby both judged the “drink my blood” saying too foreign to Jewish sensibility to be authentic to Jesus himself.
John’s Gospel preserves the “flinch” the Synoptics smooth over.
- John has no institution narrative at the Last Supper at all — footwashing and farewell discourse instead.
- Instead, John places flesh-and-blood language in Capernaum (John 6:53), where it causes mass desertion (6:60–66) — the only place in the Gospels where disciples leave over a teaching, which reads as the evangelist’s community remembering how shocking this language actually was.
The oldest surviving eucharistic prayers know nothing of body and blood.
- The Didache (c. 50–120 AD) is structurally the Jewish Birkat ha-Mazon with Jesus inserted, and contains no institution narrative and no trace of Pauline vocabulary.
- Communities like the Acts of John, Acts of Paul, and Acts of Peter show bread-only or wineless thanksgiving meals well into the early centuries; Cyprian (Ep. 63) admits “very many bishops” still didn’t use wine as late as 253 AD.
Even Rome has effectively conceded the point.
- The ancient Anaphora of Addai and Mari, still used today by the Assyrian Church of the East, has no words of institution in its oldest manuscripts — a fact confirmed by liturgical scholars Botte, Macomber, and Spinks.
- In 2001, the Vatican’s CDF (under Cardinal Ratzinger, with John Paul II’s approval) formally ruled this eucharist valid anyway, since consecration happens “in a dispersed euchological way” through thanksgiving itself — conceding that thanksgiving, not the body-and-blood formula, is what makes the rite work.
Worth noting for balance: the paper itself flags that not all of this is equally certain — that a complete, blood-free thanksgiving Eucharist existed early is well-established; that the institution words originated with Paul rather than Jesus is a minority scholarly position (against a majority that reads 1 Cor 11:23 as an earlier tradition Paul is passing along).
