*  I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 1999 AAR/SBL Conference in Boston as part of a panel discussion that I organized for the Comparative Religions section: “Crossing the Sacred-Profane Divide: Food and Boundaries in Heavenly Journeys, Earthly Descents, and Similar Excursions”. I especially want to thank panel respondent Lionel M. Jensen and fellow panelist Seth L. Sanders for their close readings of that earlier version and their bibliographical, organizational, and hermeneutical suggestions. I also want to thank the other panelists—Emma Jane Anderson, Eric H. Jarow, Rebecca Lesses, and Andrea Lieber—for their participation in what proved to be a very stimulating (if all-too-brief) encounter. Thanks are due as well to section organizer William R. Darrow and panel presider Kay Read. Finally, I wish to thank both the Australian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Golda Meir Foundation for my research year (1998–99) as a Golda Meir Fellow in Hebrew University’s Comparative Religions Department.

[1] Cf. Mary Douglas, “Sacred Contagion”, in Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas (Sheffield, 1996), edited by John F. A. Sawyer, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series 227, editors David J. A. Clines & John Jarick. Douglas notes that this universal (power-in-nature) model of sacred contagion was worked out by the 19th century French scholars in the Section V of the École Pratique des Hautes Études—termed “universal” because it was developed to serve as a basis for comparison of Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism: “The fixed parts of the universal model are two worlds, a secular one for the humans, and a sacred one, a source of unlimited power for good or ill; in between the two lies a dangerous liminal area, the interface with both worlds; the fourth element in the model is sacred contagion” (p. 91). Despite some limitations (noted above), I find this model useful for conceptualizing the relations between the sacred and the profane.

[2] On the category of “the gift”, cf. James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London/New York, Routledge: 1995): “‘Gift’ is likely to call up images of presents wrapped and tied with a bow, or more broadly of objects given from one person to another consciously and with some degree of ceremony as ‘a present’…. While almost all presents are gifts in the Maussian sense, ‘gift’ is much broader, for it includes all things transacted as part of social…relations, and it includes…immaterial things…as well as physical objects…. A few examples will illustrate the breadth of ‘gift’. If I invite friends to my house for a meal, I am giving them a gift of food and drink. I do not put the meal in a box, wrap it and tie it with a ribbon, but it is a gift none the less…. If a pair of office-mates stops for a drink after work and if one of them buys a round of drinks for both, then that one is giving a gift to the other…. The point of these examples is to show that it is not the form and ceremony of the giving and getting that make a transaction a gift. Instead, it is the relationship that exists between the transactors and the relationship between them and what is transacted” (pp. 18–19).

[3] For a helpful summary of some of what follows, see Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo, The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture (London, Sage Publications: 1992), especially the introduction (pp. 1–19), for its survey of the broad theoretical orientations of sociologists, and the conclusion (pp. 115–119), for its focus upon the “commensality” forged through eating and drinking.

[4] Douglas is not, of course, the only scholar who has noted that signifiers can be used to exclude or include. In itself, this is a banal fact about signifiers, which perforce both include and exclude. Important here is that the signified itself includes and excludes, such that we are not merely in the symbolic realm of signifiers; we are in the synecdochical realm, where the signifier is actually part of the signified.

[5] Mary Douglas, “A Distinctive Anthropological Perspective”, in Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology (Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press: 1987) edited by Mary Douglas, p. 8.

[6] Douglas, “Distinctive Anthropological Perspective”, p. 11.

[7] Douglas, “Standard Social Uses of Food: Introduction”, Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities, Russell Sage Foundation (New York, 1984), p. 12.

[8] W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (New York, Schocken Books: 1972 [1889]), p. 269. Further on nourishment’s role in bonding, cf. Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food (London and New York, Routledge: 1996), who notes that “giving, receiving and sharing food is a symbol of the bond of trust and interdependency set up between host and guest. In some cultures this bond is a permanent one: for example, traditional Bedouin will not fight anyone with whom they have eaten salt” (p. 83). (On this custom of Bedouin, cf. again Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 268–269.) Similarly, Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, notes: “Sharing bread in the course of ceremonies or simply at ordinary meals forges bonds which, in principle, will never be loosed or forgotten” (p. 231).

[9] Cf. Telfer, Food for Thought, “[G]iving food is a gesture of friendliness. Any gift can have this role, but several things distinguish food as a gift. One is that its literally vital importance gives it a special symbolic significance” (p. 84).

[10] I have some sympathy for the views of Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, DATE?) in wishing to dismantle and disgard the term “Gnosticism” because of the overly broad construal of this term to include everything from Neoplatonism to Communism (cf. pp. 3–4). Yet, Williams himself agrees that as for the late-antique religious groups generally called
Gnostic”, there are “striking resemblances or patterns … justify[ing] the creation of common categories” (p. 3). I would argue that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “family resemblance” is helpful here, for it allows for some flexibility in assigning the label “Gnosticism” to various religious movements in late antiquity. A particular religious group could be termed a variety of “Gnosticism” even without exhibiting all of the characteristics generally understood to be the case for “Gnosticism”. Some characteristics, naturally, would be more significant than others. I would suggest that Williams’s category “biblical demiurgy”—i.e., “a distinction between the creator(s) and controllers of the material world and the most transcendent divine being” as elaborated through making “use of Jewish or Christian scriptural traditions”—is a “genuinely defining feature of ‘gnosticism’” (p. 265). Two other genuinely defining features would be the following: (1) a radically dualistic exaltation of spirit and denigration of matter and (2) the soteriological value of the knowledge of one’s essence. My focus in this article will be upon the Gnostics’ radical dualism and its implications for the sacred and the profane.

[11] Some Gnostic groups allowed for a third category, “soul”, but its use in Gnostic texts suggests that Gnostics understood it as a subcategory of either “matter” or “spirit”, depending upon the cosmic or extracosmic source of the particular soul in question and the negative or positive valence, respectively, placed upon it.

[12] The terminology comes from Bently Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (Garden City, Doubleday & Company, Inc.: 1987), and refers to what Layton understands a Sethan Gnosticism (p. xv).

[13] Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 16. Although the chief ruler (Ialdabaoth) of the material realm has great spiritual power that he has stolen (The Secret Book According to John 10,20 and 13,21, in Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, pp. 36 and 38), he also has a power inherent to matter, which accounts for the fact that even purely material lesser rulers possess power, a power perhaps signified by the “fire” that the chief ruler shares with them (Secret Book According to John [=Apocryphon of John] 11,8, in Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 36).

[14] Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 18.

[15] Cf. Secret Book According to John 9,25ff., in Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 35. Also on Sophia, cf. Pistis Sophia, Books I and II; The Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex, Chapter 22; The Hypostasis of the Archons 87ff. (in James M. Robinson, editor, The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden, Brill: 1988), pp. 162–163); On the Origin of the World 100 etc. (in Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 173ff.); and Eugnostos the Blessed 81ff. (in Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, pp. 232ff.).

[16] Secret Book According to John 21,16–22,2, in Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 45.

[17] For instance, Gnostic myth often describes the material realm coming into existence due to an absence rather than to a fullness. Cf. Secret Book According to John 9,25–10,6, in Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 35.

[18] Manichaeans believed that some foods were relatively pure due to the concentrated amounts of light/spirit contained within them; other foods had very little light and thus decreased the Gnostic’s consciousness of Gnostic truths.

[19] Kephalaia 215,13–17; with thanks to Professor Dr. Alexander Böhlig for help in translating.

[20] Pistis Sophia 251,4–10, my translation, following the translation by Carl Schmidt and Violet MacDermot, Pistis Sophia (Leiden, E. J. Brill: 1978), pp. 502–503.

[21] Mark Lidzbarski, tr., Ginza: Der Schatz, Oder Das Grosse Buch der Mandäer, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Göttingen, 1925), p. 161,1-8.

[22] My translation from Lidzbarski’s German.

[23] Although often called “The Hymn of the Soul,” the poem appears in the Acts of Saint Thomas as “The Hymn of Judas Thomas the Apostle in the Country of the Indians”; however, because the text says nothing explicitly about a ‘soul’ and because Judas Thomas actually had nothing to do with its composition, one could better call it “The Hymn of the Prince,” for its central figure, a “prince” descends to earth to carry out his father’s mission. This chapter, though, will refer to the poem as “The Hymn of the Pearl,” a title also often used of it—moreover, it does concern the recovery, from the world, of a “pearl” (which, incidentally, probably does represent a “soul”; but because some scholars interpret the “prince” in the poem as signifying a “soul,” it seems better to use the term “pearl” here).

[24] Perhaps one should also compare the fallen redeemer’s fate here with that of the fallen Sophia as described in the Pistis Sophia 50,2-5 and 54,22-23.

[25] Here, the Syriac text, though surely using the Greek term for food (trofÆ), reads as the Sryiac term Nwhyprwf—“their troubles, vexations”; perhaps it should read Nwhypwrf—“their foods,” but note also the possibilty of a wordplay here similar to the one often found in Greek: trofÆ/trufÆ [“food”/“luxury” {in the negative sense of ‘luxury’—‘indulgence’ or ‘revelling’}], for the context fits—their ‘food’ constitutes ‘trouble’—and such a pun would reinforce the synecdochical use of food one finds in Gnostic texts); cf. “Das Lied von der Erlösung,” in Zwei Gnostische Hymnen, E. Preuschen, J. Ricker’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung [Alfred Töpelmann (Giessen, 1904)], p. 35, n, 35a; for evidence that the primary reference refers to “food,” see also the Greek parallels to this in E codice parisino graeco 1516, collatis codicibus Collegii novi Oxoniensis C 149, Bibliothecae publicae leningradensis 95 et Athonense Pantocatoris 21, Hymn of the Pearl, O 73 v 45 (32)-—-S 197 v 50 (35), and in E codice Bibliothecae Vallicellanae Romanae B35, Hymn of the Pearl 124ra: 32-35, both of which use Greek words for “food,” the former using br«siw, the latter using trofÆ.

[26] Such an acceptance of earthly nourishment by a Gnostic revealor could only occur as a mistake on the part of the revealer. The Nag Hammadi tractate “Melchizedek”, often considered a Gnostic text, also has Jesus eating and drinking (in 5,2ff.), but the consistently Gnostic character of this tractate appears doubtful. Birger A. Pearson argues for the tractate’s originally having been a non-Gnostic text that underwent a degree of Gnostic editing (Birger A. Pearson, “Melchizedek”, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden, Brill: 1988), p.439).

[27] Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by Ian Cunnison (London, Cohen & West Ltd.: 1954), p. 1. In an interesting book, Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley, University of California Press: 1992), appears to derive this reciprocity from the inalienability of certain prized possessions: “What motivates reciprocity is its reverse—the desire to keep something back from the pressures of give and take. This something is a possession that speaks to and for an individual’s or a group’s social identity and, in so doing, affirms the difference between one person or group and another” (p. 43). Further on this, Weiner notes: “A possession like a feathered cloak or a jeweled crown can affirm rank, authority, power, and even divine rule because it stands symbolically as the representative of a group’s historical or mythical origins. The classicist Louis Gernet suggests this point when he notes that, among the ancient Greeks, it is in the association of certain objects with magical powers that we find ‘the earliest social understandings of the different aspects of authority’. The absolute value of an inalienable possession is this authenticity, its foundation in its sacred origins which pervades its unique existence in the present” (p. 51).

[28] Cf. Mauss, The Gift, pp. 58–62. This ambiguity is distinct from a related type of ambiguity in gift-giving, i.e., that gift-giving presents itself as disinterested generosity but always retains awareness of its expectation of reciprocity. On this, cf. Pierre Bourdieu, “Marginalia—Some  Additional Notes on the Gift”, in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York/London, Routledge: 1997), edited by Alan D. Schrift, p. 231.

[29] Cf. Marcel Mauss, “Gift, Gift” in The Logic of the Gift:  Mauss notes the etymology of the word for “gift” in a number of Indo-European languages, remarking upon the dual meaning of “present” and “poison” in the etymological development of several of these (pp. 30–31). One can find a residue of this ambiguity in standard Dutch, where “gift” means “present” and “gif” means “poison”—the latter term having the adjective form “giftig”, i.e., “poisonous”, thereby allowing for ironic wordplays. Additionally, colloquial Dutch has assimilated the German word “Gift”, such that “gift” in spoken Dutch can mean either “present” or “gift”—allowing for even better puns. (I am indebted to Piet van Veldhuizen for this information on the Dutch language.) English and German, on the other hand, have completely diverged, leaving “gift” to mean solely “present” in English and solely “poison” in German.

[30] Mauss, The Gift, citing Brahman reluctance to accept gifts: “The gift is…something that must be given, that must be received and that is, at the same time, dangerous to accept. The gift itself constitutes an irrevocable link especially when it is a gift of food” (p. 125).

[31] Cf. Pat Caplan, “Approaches to the Study of Food, Health, and Identity”,

in Food, Health and Identity, edited by Pat Caplan (London, Routledge: 1997), [citing Fischler (1998, p. 279)], p. 9.

[32] Indeed, as Mauss, “Gift, Gift”, notes, according to the ideology of gift-giving in many societies, the gift puts the recipient into the power of the giver: “[E]changes and gifts of objects…function on the basis of a common fund of ideas: the object received as a gift, the received object in general, engages, links magically, religiously, morally, juridically, the giver and the receiver. Coming from one person, made or appropriated by him, being from him, it gives him power over the other who accepts it. In the case where the prestation provided is not rendered in the prescribed juridical, economical, or ritual form, the giver obtains power over the person who has participated in the feast and has taken in its substances” (pp. 29–30). The poison gift thus acts as a special case of this.

[33] Cf. Kephalaia 26,18–20, which identifies matter with the “thought of death” that supplies the rulers of the material realm with their strength against the spiritual realm.

[34] Theodore bar Konai, Scholion mimra 11, apud H. Pognon, Inscriptions mandaites des coupes de Khouabir (Paris, 1898; reprinted, Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1970) 127 lines 24-27 (text) and/or Theodore bar Konai, Liber Scholiorum (CSCO scrip. syri, ser. II, t. 66; ed. A. Scher; Paris: Carolus Poussielgue, 1912) 314 lines 6-10 (text); translation taken from John C. Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of the Giants Traditions, (Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College Press: 1992), p. 190. Cf. also Ephrem, "Third Discourse to Hypatius Against the Heretics," in S. Ephraem's Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan (2 vols.; ed. C.W. Mitchell, et al.; London: Williams and Norgate, 1912-21) 1.81 line 43 - 82 line 7 (text); excerpted and translated by Reeves, “Citations from Ephrem”, in Emerging from Darkness: Studies in the Recovery of Manichaean Sources, edited by Paul Mirecki and Jason BeDuhn (Leiden, Brill: 1997), p. 275, n. 49. Cf. as well Abraham Yohanan, tr. “Theodore bar Khoni (c. 800 A.D.): On Mani’s Teachings Concerning the Beginning of the World”, in A. V. Williams Jackson, Researches in Manichaeism (New York, Columbia University Press: 1932), p. 226.

[35] Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China (Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr: 1992), notes that the evil, material rulers “had…become dependent on the life-giving Light Elements for their existence”, which suggests Lieu’s awareness of the implicit irony of life bringing death.

[36] This plays upon the stigma attached to one-sided gift-giving: “The lopsided gift loads the recipient’s status with demeaning signs. If no reciprocity is allowed, the gift is outright alms and the receiver is labeled a beggar”, Mary Douglas, “Standard Social Uses of Food: Introduction”, in Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities, Russell Sage Foundation (New York, 1984), edited by Mary Douglas (p. 10).

[37] Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, “Heliocentric Exchange” in The Logic of the Gift, p. 109.

[38] Cf. Mauss, The Gift, p. 8.

[39] John 3:6.

[40] John 3:12.

[41] John 3:19.

[42] John 5:24.

[43] John 8:23.

[44] John 1:14; cf. John 6:51c–58.

[45] John 1:32–33 and John 6:69.

[46] John 7:7.

[47] John 1:29 and 16:8–9.

[48] Note that John 13:10–11 refers to the purity of the disciples and that John 15:3 refers to Jesus as having purified the disciples, which implies that they previously existed in a state of impurity (presumably, the impurity characteristic of the world—a point elaborated upon later in this article). Only Judas remains in a state of impurity (John 13:10–11), an impurity stemming from his association with the devil/Satan (John 6:70–71 and John 13:2; cf. John 13:27). Note that the synoptic gospels explicitly refer to demons/devils/Satan as impure spirits: Matthew 10:1; 12:43; Mark 1:23, 26, 27; 3:11, 30; 5:2, 8, 13; 6:7; 7:25; 9:25; Luke 4:33, 36; 6:18; 8:29; 9:42; and 11:24.

[49] John 14:30 (which implies that the ruler of the world seeks power over Jesus even though this ruler does not actually have such power). Generally in John’s Gospel, “the world” acts as a character with agency—as can be seen by the manner in which the fourth evangelist plays upon the equivocation between “world” as the human realm and “world” as the physical cosmos. For rather clear references to “world” as meaning those opposed to God, cf. John 7:4, 7; 8:26; 12:19; 14:17, 19, 27, 31; 15:18–19; 16:20; 17:9, 14, 18, 21, 23, 25; and 18:20. Some of these references to “world” as those opposed to God occur in contexts where “world” also refers to the physical world. For rather clear references to the physical world, cf. John 1:9–10; 3:16–17, 19; 6:14; 8:23; 9:5, 39; 10:36; 11:9, 27; 12:25, 46; 13:1; 16:21, 28; 17:5, 15, 18, 24; and 18:37. Some of these references to the physical world occur in contexts where “world” also refers to unbelievers.

[50] John 1:5.

[51] Cf., e.g., John 5:16–18; 8:59; 10:39; and 11:57.

[52] My paraphrase of Deborah Lupton’s felicitous expression in Food, the Body and the Self (London, Sage Publications: 1966): “At the simplest, biological level, by the act of eating and absorption of food, we become what we eat. By taking food into the body, we take in the world (p. 16). Lupton, drawing upon Kristeva, also notes: “Food is potentially polluting because it passes through the oral boundary of the ‘clean and proper body’…. Julia Kristeva argues that ‘all food is liable to defile’, for it signifies the natural entering the cultured body” (p. 113). Replace “cultured” with “sacred”, and we have a statement perfectly applicable to Johannine Christology. “At the simplest, biological level, by the act of eating and absorption of food, we become what we eat. By taking food into the body, we take in the world

[53] Cf. a parallel in Hinduism, where the impurity of the one providing food taints the food with bad karma and thereby traps in the world the one eating this food. On this, see R. S. Khare, “Introduction”, in The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists (Albany, State University of New York Press: 1992), edited by R. S. Khare: “[The] close and intense relationship of food to self (and its spiritual welfare) makes food a subject of ‘heightened intersubjectivity’ among the Hindus, where they routinely take into account the moral backgrounds and powers of those who handle food. Food readily absorbs the qualities of its ‘carriers’ or ‘feeders’…. If a saint renders food auspicious and blessed, an ordinary person’s covetousness, accumulated karmas, ignorance, and moral lapses surely taint it.” (p. 7).

[54] On the role of the vinegar in effecting the Johannine Jesus’s death, see chapter 5 of my doctoral dissertation (unpublished, but available from UMI): Horace Jeffery Hodges, “Food as Synecdoche in John’s Gospel and Gnostic Texts” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995). I have also explored this theme in a paper read at the 1999 AAR/SBL Conference in Boston: Horace Jeffery Hodges, “‘Ethical’ Dualism of Food in The Gospel of John” (paper presented at the annual AAR/SBL meeting, Boston, Mass., 19­–23 November 1999).

[55] Again, see Hodges, “Food as Synecdoche” (chapter 5) and Hodges, “‘Ethical’ Dualism of Food”.

[56] I am currently working on an article (“Jesus as the Holy One of God: The Healing of the Zavah in Mark 5:24b–34”) that develops my views on the shift in early Christianity from a Jewish to Christian understanding of sacred-profane relations.

[57] The basis for this lies in Leviticus 10:10, a paradigmatic verse, which states that one should “distinguish between the holy and the common and between the impure and the pure” (i.e., holy [vdq] vs. common [lj] and impure [amf] vs. pure [rwhf]).

[58] This is my own interpretation, but I rely upon Jacob Milgrom’s astute analysis in his Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, (New York: Doubleday, 1991), especially p. 732.

[59] Cf. Milgrom, Leviticus, p. 732.

[60] Cf. L. E. Toombs, “Common”, Interpreter’s Dictionary, Vol. 1: “In OT priestly literature ‘common’ is the opposite of ‘holy’…the unconsecrated rather than the consecrated…. Although in the OT the common is ritually neutral, and may be either clean or unclean, in the NT koinÒw is synonymous with ‘unclean’” (p. 663b).  On this, cf. also Franz Georg Untergassmair, “koinÒw, ktl.”, in Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: 1991), p. 302b, who notes: “The adj. koinÒw appears in the NT 4 times with its basic meaning common/shared (Acts 2:44; 4:32; Titus 1:4; Jude 3) and 10 times with the derived meaning common/ordinary/profane/impure (Mark 7:2, 5; Acts 10:14, 28; 11:8; Rom 14:14a, b, c; Heb 10:29; Rev 21:27). The vb. koinÒv is used in all 14 occurrences in the sense of pollute/profane/desecrate”.

[61] This may have to do with the role of impure spirits, especially the primary impure spirit, Satan.

[62] John 10:36

[63] John 6:69

[64] For the fuller significance of this statement about Jesus’s extraordinary sacredness, see Hodges, “Food as Synecdoche” and Hodges, “‘Ethical’ Dualism of Food”. My article in progress, “Jesus as the Holy One of God: The Healing of the Zavah in Mark 5:24b–34”, also develops the fuller significance of this statement.

[65] Many scholars have argued that this passage largely stems from the hand of a redactor; many others, perhaps the majority, consider it original to the Johannine text. I agree with the latter scholars. First, as Eugen Ruckstuhl, Die Literarische Einheit des Johannesevangeliums (Freiburg in der Schweiz, 1951), pp. 243–245 and 266, has rigorously argued, this passage does not differ from the usual Johannine literary style. Second, those scholars who think that a later redactor inserted the passage need to find an explanation for why the redactor placed it in chapter 6 rather than in chapter 13, where it ‘belongs’. Third, the anti-docetic character of the passage fits both the incarnational theology presented in the Johannine prologue and Jesus’s acceptance of the vinegar in the crucifixion scene. Fourth, the passage’s emphasis upon eating and drinking coheres with the emphasis upon food throughout the Gospel and resolves a tension lingering due to the rigorous Johannine dualism by providing pure, holy nourishment in an impure world.

[66] Some scholars have seen a Dionysian influence on the portrayal of the Cana wine miracle in John 2:1­–11: cf., e.g., Rudolf Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht: 1950); Martin Hengel, “The Interpretation of the Wine Miracle at Cana: John 2:1–11”, The Glory of Christ in the New Testament, edited by L. D. Hurst and N. T. Wright (Oxford, Clarendon: 1987), pp. 84–112; and Edmund Little, Echoes of the Old Testament in the Wine at Cana in Galilee (John 2:1–11) and The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish (John 6:1–15): Towards an Appreciation (Paris: J. Gabalda et Cie Éditeurs: 1998). If there is a Dionysian influence upon the Cana wine miracle, then understanding Jesus as offering himself through the miraculous wine is a reasonable deduction, for Dionysius entered into his devotees in the wine that they drank ritually in his cult. Cf. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York, Vintage Books: 1983), both on the importance of wine as a symbol of eternal life and on its significance in the Dionysian myth. Hyde holds that in the myth of Dionysos, wine is a symbol of zoe, “the life that endures” (cf. John 6:27) (rather than bios, “limited life”), and that drinking the ritual wine enacts “the sacrament of reconstituting the god” (pp. 32–33). Cf. also Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food (Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers: 1992), who argues that ritual intoxication was often regarded by the ancient world “as an act of religion in the literal sense…, creating a bond between man and God…. The Greek term for ritual intoxication was enthousisamos, divine possession”. Toussaint-Samat then adds: “The veneration of Dionysus went hand in hand with a slyly indulgent attitude” towards intoxication (p. 253). Similarly, Jesus provided the guests at Cana with enormous quantities of wine—even after they had already drunk a great deal!—which thus implies that intoxication was no troubling issue here, thereby further suggesting a Dionysian connection. If the wine at Cana was sacramental, then the Johannine Jesus’s eucharistic reference in 6:53–56 to his blood as true drink surely refers back to the miraculous wine—the blood and the wine therefore both being symbols of the eternal life offered. On the general link between blood and wine as symbols of life, Toussaint-Samat notes: “[Wine’s] usual red colour suggests an association with blood; it is regarded as the blood of the vine. Like blood, it is a symbol of life…. Eternal life is the prerogative of the immortal gods; drinking wine makes man temporarily their equal” (p. 258). The Johannine Jesus, however, goes beyond this offering a drink of genuine immortality.

[67] John 6:27, 32–33, and 51 all speak of Jesus (and/or God) giving extraordinary nourishment that provides eternal life. These verses use the Greek verb d€dvmi for “giving”, but John 4:10 uses the noun form dvreån (“gift”) in the expression “gift of God” (dvreån toË yeoË) to refer to the living water that provides eternal life. Thus, one can justifiably understand the extraordinary food given by Jesus as a “gift”. In his insightful essay on gift-giving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Gifts”, in The Logic of the Gift, p. 26, notes that the only true gift is a portion of oneself. Mauss, The Gift, pp. 8–9, argues, more generally, that something of the giver remains in the gift, and he cites the Polynesian belief in hau (a kind of spiritual force) as an inalienable portion of the giver in the gift. Against this interpretation, Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London, Tanistock Publications: 1974), pp. 157–162, demythologizes the hau, arguing that it signifies not “spirit” but merely “return on” or “product of” (p. 157)—something like the “profit” (p. 160) that one might make by exchanging for some other article a gift that one has received. In Polynesian culture, keeping such a profit would be immoral and thus must be handed over to the giver of the gift (p. 162). Note, however, the Maori assumption here that the giver of the gift continues to have some claim to it. Moreover, Sahlins later notes that the hau does have a spiritual quality—it is the spiritual power of fecundity inhering in a gift and in what the gift produces, this latter of which must be handed over to the gift-giver (pp. 165–168). More recently, Weiner, Inalienable Possessions (1992), has argued for an understanding of hau that comes close to Mauss’s understanding: “The hau as a life force embedded in the person is transmitted to the person’s possessions…. The hau is permeable in that it must be replaced in people and things, instilling people with a creative force that creates a bond between them” (p. 63). Cf. Yunxiang Yan, The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford, Stanford University Press: 1996), who quotes Weiner on this point, noting that it “suggests Mauss is right about the Maorie hau”, and then paraphrases Weiner’s main point, i.e., that this “adds inalienable value to the objects” (p. 11). On the inalienable quality of gifts, cf. also James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London/New York, Routledge: 1995), p. 24. Further on the hau as a transmissible spiritual force, see Rodolphe Gasché, “Heliocentric Exchange” in The Logic of the Gift, pp. 109–110, who interprets Mauss’s argument in terms of mana: “[T]he donor, who is initially the receptacle of the mana proper to him, gives the donee an object laden with his mana. He separates himself from what is proper to him, his property [propriété] or propriety [propreté], to transfer it into the receptacle that the donee is” (pp. 109–110).

[68] The belief that a gift of food from the divine realm can impart immortality (see following footnote) extends across many cultures. For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: I (London, Jonathan Cape: 1964), recounts a myth of the Tucuna Indians of South America (M84. Tucuna. ‘The drink of immortality’): “An immortal god appeared…, carried off … [a] young girl, and married her. Much later she reappeared [to her family] .… with her husband. The latter brought with him a little of the drink of the immortals and offered a sip to each …. When they were all drunk, they went off with the young couple to take up their abode in the dwelling of the gods” (p. 159).

[69] The identification of certain foods with the body of gods and goddesses also extends across cultures and can therefore provide an external frame of reference for help in interpreting John 6:51–58. Cf. Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal (Toronto, McClelland: 1987), who relates the mythic origins of maize and rice, noting that they come from the divine bodies of gods/goddesses. According to the Ojibway Indians, maize came from a Spirit Guide who allowed himself to be defeated by a warrior and left lying upon the ground—his body disappeared, but his head dress of green feathers grew into plants that reached the height of a man (p. 35). According to the Indonesians, rice came from the slain body of Samyam Sri, the daughter of the minor god Anta (p. 166). In both cases, the food in question comes from the spirit world as mediated by the slain body of a god or goddess. The Johannine Jesus’s offer of his flesh as bread would seem to fit this paradigm, yet the offer goes futher by promising eternal life. This seems especially strongly connected to the Johannine Jesus’s offer of his flesh and blood as nourishment. In this respect, it is significant that another belief extending across cultures is that by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a being, one can obtain the qualities of that being. Cf. Frederick J. Simoons, Eat Not this Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press: 1994): “Flesh… [and] blood… of animals… may be deliberately consumed to obtain their desirable qualities. …[A]mong various groups in eastern Africa[,] people eat the flesh… or blood of a lion or leopard to make them strong and brave like those animals” (p. 306).( Simoons is citing James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion (New York, Macmillan: 1935), Volume 8, pp. 141–142.) One of the Johannine Jesus’s primary qualities is the possession of eternal life, which his flesh and blood convey to those accept them as food.

[70] Veronika E. Grimm, From Feasting to Fasting, The Evolution of a Sin: Attitudes to Food in Late Antiquity (London/New York, Routledge: 1996), notes that Jewish views on feasting during religious festivals presupposed the presence of God at the meal (cf. Deuteronomy 14:23–27), and she cites Philo of Alexandria, who, in “writing about the Temple cult in Jerusalem, observed that by eating their portion of the sacrificial feast the people shared in God’s own food and thus entered a holy ‘partnership’” (pp. 18–19). Cf. Philo, “On the Special Laws (De Specialibus Legibus)”, in Philo, with an English Translation by F. H. Colson (London, William Heinemann Ltd: 1937), in The Loeb Classical Library, “The Special Laws, I. 221”, p. 229: “[T]he sacrificial meals should not be hoarded, but be free and open to all who have need, for they are now the property not of him by whom but of Him to Whom the victim has been sacrificed, He the benefactor, the bountiful, Who has made the convivial company of those who carry out the sacrifices partners of the altar whose board they share. And he bids them not think of themselves as the entertainers, for they are the stewards of the good cheer, not the hosts. The Host is He to Whom the material provided for the feast has come to belong”.

[71] As Bordieu, “Selections from The Logic of Practice”, in The Logic of the Gift, p. 200, notes, even the giving of small, seemingly insignificant gifts acts (ideally) to “ensure the continuity of interpersonal relations” and to “bind in friendship”. Thus the small size of the morsel does not imply its insignificance as a gift. Indeed, the morsel’s very significance as a gift serves, by virtue of Judas’s inner rejection of its meaning (in the sense of interpersonal bonding) as a gift, to identify and condemn Judas as a traitor. Emerson, “Gifts”, writing about the more general difficulty of accepting gifts, implies that the rejection of a gift finds its origin in the “wish to be self-sustained” (p. 26). To this, Emerson adds, “The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten” (p. 26). The fourth evangelist may intend something like this as his theological point, namely, that the world aggressively rejects that which can truly sustain it in favor of (the illusion of) being self-sustained.

[72] I argue for a eucharistic understanding of the morsel on two grounds. First, and more generally, the morsel, by virtue of its being a gift, functions as an extension of Jesus’s being. Second, and more specific to a textual argument, the morsel serves as a fulfullment of the prophecy given in John 13:18, which states that the one “gnawing” Jesus’s bread will betray him. The prophecy uses the word tr≈gvn, the same term used in the eucharistic passage already discussed (John 6:51c–58), and since this term is used only in these two places in John’s Gospel, it strongly suggests a link between the two. (Note that the evangelist could have used §sy€vn, for he is quoting LXX Psalm 41:10 as a prophecy.) Moreover, Judas being turned over completely to Satan for having eaten the eucharist in an unworthy state fits very well Paul’s warning in I Corinthians 11:27-32 against eating the eucharist unworthily.

[73] Ernst Käsemann, Die letzter Wille nach Johannes 17 (Tübingen, 1980), has interpreted John 17 as presenting Jesus’s last will and testament given to his disciples on the night before his death. Moreover, Jesus’s act of washing the feet of his disciples on this night before his death is explained by John 13:8 as necessary for “having a part/portion with” Jesus, which may very well mean “having an inheritance with” Jesus (cf. Hodges, “Food as Synecdoche”, Chapter 4, Part 1.). Perhaps, then, one is also justified in interpreting Jesus’s offer of the morsel to Judas in John 13:26–27 as a gift offered by Jesus in contemplation of his own death. Such an interpretation receives further support by the fact that this morsel, by virtue of its being eucharistic, is in fact a profoundly significant gift offered by Jesus in contemplation of his death. Because Judas does not explicitly refuse the gift of the morsel in either deed or word (though he implicitly rejects the communion with Jesus that it offers), then according to Jewish law (as recorded in later rabbinical works), he has formally accepted this gift. On this cf. Reuven Yaron, Gifts in Contemplation of Death in Jewish and Roman Law (London, Oxford University Press: 1960): “It is obvious that nobody should be forced to accept gifts against his wishes. But since usually the donee profits by the gift, even his silence will be interpreted as consent to accept…. To prove repudiation of the gift by the donee clear evidence is necessary. If he is silent but subsequently objects to the gift, this is of no direct effect; he can only alienate or discard it” (p. 135). This legal aspect, if genuinely applicable here, increases the tension inherent in the contradiction between Judas’s formal, external acceptance of the gift and his inward, substantive rejection of it.

[74] Recall the literature on bonding effected by the gift of life-giving nourishment: Telfer, Food for Thought, pp. 83–84; Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 268–269; Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, p. 231; Mennell, Murcott, and Otterloo, Sociology of Food, pp. 1–19 and 115–119; Douglas, “Anthropological Perspective”, pp. 8–11 and “Social Uses of Food, p. 12. Of course, in Johannine thought, the bonding and life-giving qualities of food as a gift carry even more significance due to the divine status of the giver.

[75] John 17:12. This identification of Judas with destruction implies the judgement of the holy against the impure, for in encounters between the two, the holy (eventually if not instantly) destroys the impure. Seth Sanders (private correspondence, March 14, 2000) points out that the Hebrew and Aramaic behind the expression “son of destruction” (John 17:12: oJ uiJo;" th'" ajpwleiva") simply means “doomed person”. However, the New Testament uses the expression in an extended, theological sense to mean “Those destined to destruction” (William F. Arndt and F. Wilber Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1968), p. 103); cf. Barclay Newman, Jr., ed., A Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament (Stuttgart, United Bible Societies, 1971): “one bound to be lost” or “one destined for hell” (p. 24a); Max Zerwick and Mary Grosvenor, A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament (Rome, Biblical Institute Press: 1981): “son of perdition, one destined to be lost” (p. 337). Cf. 2 Thessalionians 2:3, where the oJ uiJo;" th'" ajpwleiva" refers to the antichrist. Note also that the fourth evangelist several times employs the verbal form of the noun ajpwvleia, i.e., ajpovllumi, to mean perish eternally, for he uses it in contrast to eternal life (cf. John 3:16, 6:39–40, 10:28, and 12:25).