Why do you insist on skipping the Scriptural sequence comprising the conversation?
Shrug. I cannot afford to spend time on an argument to which you will provide no responsive analysis. Possibly you feel you have answered me. I don't think you have. My points before were simple enough:
1. How well the Jews understood Jesus in John 6 is controversial. We know they were thinking of literal food. But they couldn't even agree among themselves exactly how that applied to Jesus' body and blood. You can take it to the bank that not one of them imagined it was anything like Aquinas' transubstantiation.
2. Even if one of them had been Aquinas, and laid out the doctrine of transubstantiation perfectly, it could still be a misunderstanding, because Jesus had no duty to correct any such misunderstanding.
The combination of these two is effectively an argument from silence, according to the following syllogism: :
Premise 1: If the Jews misunderstood Jesus, he had a duty to correct them.
Premise 2: They understood him in the Catholic way of understanding, and He did not correct them,
Conclusion: Therefore the Catholic way of understanding this passage must be correct.
My response has been, as stated above, that your premises are flawed. That has not required a comprehensive analysis of the entire passage. Only a demonstration of specific errors, which I have provided, as follows:
As to Premise 2, The Jews were so far from understanding Jesus they could not even agree among themselves what He meant. If they appear to be united about anything, it was that they hoped the food in question would satisfy their physical hunger, just as the miracle of the loaves and fishes had done.
As to Premise 1, we have shown there was no duty to correct any misunderstanding. However, we will agree that Jesus could offer a correction as a matter of grace and mercy, and He does so. But it is not the correction looked for by the transubstantiationist, and so it is passed over as if it was never said. Jesus makes it clear that the
eating of his body and the
drinking of His blood has nothing to do with the flesh, but with believing in Him, coming to Him in faith, as Peter demonstrates at the end of the passage, "You have the words of eternal life." The transubstatiationist overlays this entire passage, and particularly verses 53 through 58, with a pseudo-Aristotilian theory that would not appear until over 800 years later in the teaching of Radbertus. The raw text of the passage offers no support for such a fantasy. It is much more straightforward to see the 'eating' of the passage as an ordinary teaching metaphor for putting one's faith in Jesus, who was soon to offer His body and blood for the life of the world.
Due to the defects in the above premises, your logic provides no justification for concluding that the typical Catholic understanding of this passage is correct. Your point remains unproven. If you feel I am being too selective in the passages I am addressing, the burden is on you to demonstrate how my analysis contradicts something specific in the text. Up to this point, you haven't done that. Quoting vast blocks of Scripture and proclaiming Aha! doesn't constitute an argument. It's arm-waving. Man shall live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Each word is important. Make your argument from the words themselves. Show how 'eating' can't possibly be a metaphor for faith in this passage. Show how this passage teaches the Aquinan distinction between accidents and substance in the bread and the wine. Show that the Jews really all agreed on the same transubstantive understanding of Jesus' words. Find somewhere, anywhere, where Jesus is said to be duty-bound to make sure every student came away from His lectures with a fully Christian understanding of what He was teaching. If you can't do these things, you do not have a case.
Peace,
SR