If you look at the context,
Ah, the wonderful chamaeleon, the mirror in which every one of us looks and reports seeing his own face looking back. One man's context is another man's irrelevancy.
Can anything be proved from Scripture? Real question. I'm a skeptic on it. But can we convey the context by choosing verses 29,35,40,47, and 69? What gematria tells us that these verses and these alone provide what we need for accurate interpretation? It's an epistemological question, and I've never seen a good answer.
Jesus used bread and His body and blood as metaphors
Did Jesus intend to deceive? Elsewhere He says, the kingdom of God "is like ...". Here and at the Last Supper He does not say "like". What's up with that? And if they are just metaphors, what's in them to winnow out so many, so that even the twelve seem to be thinking it over ...
One would think that if this "salvation by ritual sacrament" was so important to salvation like belief is that it would be mentioned by the other writers or mentioned again by John... And the rest of the paragraph. Certainly it is question why John does not give an account of the last supper. But it is not a slam dunk to conclude that he does not think it important. Would you say he does not think the Lord's prayer important?
Even in my Protestant days I thought that maybe John's gospel was a mystagogical document, and now I see that it is certainly used that way. John cloaks and lets glimmers show through. I think, but this is a conjecture I admit, he meant to rely precisely on tradition to flesh out (so to speak heh heh heh) what he wrote. For a while there, the Lords prayer and the Sacrament were (i am told ) considered by some to be mysteries NOT to be discussed frankly before the uninitiate. ("The doors, the doors!" Identify that reference and win two weeks in Byzantium)
So that conjecture serves to explain John's reticence. In this reading it's not that it's too unimportant to mention, it's that it's WAY too important to mention.
Of course the nature of the body described is sufficiently problematic that I would hesitate to use the word "physical" to denote what IHS was talking about. I liek your "tense" argument, but hasten to say that the wiggle room is provided by the weird nature of tenses in Hebrew. Does anybody here know how tense is handled in Aramaic?
t is also illogical to think that Jesus meant His physical body as there is no evidence the disciples partook while Jesus was with them
Okay, I'm confused. Are the acocunts of the last supper not evidence?
Thanks again, minnows: nice post.