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You assume way too much in your belief that you are "correct" in your understanding that the Eucharist is not the literal Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ. Look at it this way: Jesus had options in Aramaic when, in instituting the Eucharist, He said: "This is,/i> My Body" and "This is my blood." If he meant this to be figurative, He could have readily indicated such by avoiding the word "is." "Signifies," "represents," "stands for" and others all have Aramaic equivalents. Yet He chose not to use any of them.

Further, as God, He certainly knew on that night of Holy Thursday, when the Eucharist was instituted, that His Church would have an uninterrupted, literal viewpoint on the matter, and that it would be 1500 years before any Christian body would believe otherwise. If, then, as God, and armed with the foresight of God, and seeing that His Church would, in the future, "misconstrue" His intentions on the matter into literal interpretations, it should have been no hard thing to simply indicate His desires on the point. If He had desired to convey that the Eucharist is merely symbolic, His foreknowledge would have given Him all the more reason to insure that it would be understood that way. He took no such precaution.

Finally, the entire tenor of John 6 is pointing to literalness. If it were otherwise, all He had to do, when His disciples were leaving in droves, in disgust over what seemed to be full-fledged cannibalism to them, was to say "Hey! Wait! Come back! I was only speaking 'figuratively'!" Yet, He didn't, did He? On the contrary, He "let them all go away."

As for your observations about "unforgivable sin" and the Holy Spirit, you are correct in the strict sense you seem to indicate. But no one here is saying that Myers is going to Hell because what he did is an unforgiveable sin. Any mortal sin leads to damnation without repentance! If Myers continues in unrepentance for this sin, even unto his dying day, then, yes, he will be condemned to Hell for it. Yet, while he still has breath, he has the possibility to act on God's grace, and repent of his sin. We Catholics condemn no one to the fires of Hell, because we have no way of knowing whether any given person has repented of even the grossest and most publicly manifested sins in their last moment of life. Again, get this right, for it's important: we Catholics consign no one to Hell, no matter how heinous their actions appeared in life. We simply don't have a window into the souls of any sinners during their last moments.

“You assume way too much in your belief...”

You say that He meant that the bread “is” His body.
My question to you...WAS it His body?
Obvious answer to any thinking person is...no...it was bread!

He took the BREAD and giving thanks He broke it...the bread...not his body.

So if it was His body, why does Scripture, not state that He took His body and after giving thanks broke it, sayign this is my body.

Be careful how you selectively parse.

His body was the hand that held the bread...not the actual bread.

You obiously don’t know my belief at all and your attempted ancient language lesson is unnecessary. But, FWIW what is the Aramaic for “is”? And what is the Aramaic for “signifies”, “represents”, “stands for”?

I’ll bet you’ll take at least one hour of googling to try to explain the verb tense of the original Arimaic, becaus eyou do not know the language and are merely parroting what you’ve been told.

You typed...”Further, as God, He certainly knew on that night of Holy Thursday, when the Eucharist was instituted, that His Church would have an uninterrupted, literal viewpoint on the matter, and that it would be 1500 years”

Unmitigated assumption on your graniose part sir..dontcha think!?! Can you support with scripture how you know what God was thinking in the context of your huge unsubstantiates straw man comment? No. because th scripture does nto support your assumptions.

..obviously discussing the matter with you will be fruitless and neither of us will budge.

best wishes

Look at it this way: Jesus had options in Aramaic when, in instituting the Eucharist, He said: "This is,/i> My Body" and "This is my blood." If he meant this to be figurative, He could have readily indicated such by avoiding the word "is." "Signifies," "represents," "stands for" and others all have Aramaic equivalents. Yet He chose not to use any of them.

I don't get the force of that argument. Except for those few instances where the N.T. writers record an Aramaic expression of Jesus, and then translate it into Greek, (the aforementioned occasion not being one of those few instances) how do you have the slightest idea whether or what Jesus said in Aramaic? Even in the few instances where an Aramaic expression is used and then translated into Greek, the N.T. writers never specifically reveal what language Jesus was using. Why not?

Maybe they expected their readers to know what language was being spoken, whether Aramaic or Greek. Or maybe Jesus spoke in Greek and they were recording their message in the same language in which Jesus spoke. But if they were recording their story in Greek, knowing that Jesus spoke most of his message in Aramaic, then why did they not regard it as essential to let the reader to know what Jesus' original language was, and what his original words were? If it was not essential to them, why does your argument, at least on this point, hinge on it?

Cordially,