MHG, I am in limited agreement with MD on this. I too can read Greek (with crutches), and have always found the passage (John 6:63) connected back to the flesh of Jesus by contextual clues, not by any special mechanism of the Greek per se.
The sense of it seems to be that Jesus is setting forth a correction to the category error His fair weather disciples are making. They have missed the metaphor, and are stuck in a materialistic understanding, a flesh-bound frame of reference, and cannot see the spiritual point being made, that they must crave Jesus for spiritual life like they crave food for physical life. Jesus directs them in the disputed passage to look to the category of spiritual things, rather than fleshly. It is a category correction, and as such no personal pronoun is necessary, as the physical flesh of Christ is included in the category of flesh generally.
But as I said, and really as MD’s position allows, that analysis is based on nothing extraordinary in the Greek, but just context equally as evident in the translation as the original.
Peace,
SR
I was referring to the word ‘profits’ and the negation which follows it in the Greek text, indicating that the ‘thing’ flesh benefits nothing. The inference is back to what He had said about eating His flesh, and He was correcting the possible misunderstanding that may have left with His steadfast followers. The way many read the sentence they believe Jesus is saying the flesh gets no benefit/profit from eating Him. It is not the way the Greek sentence is constructed. The construction indicates the flesh is the thing that either gives the benefit or not. In this case the ‘not’ is indicated with the flesh ‘not profits nothing’ ‘ouk ophelei ouden’. Jesus goes on to point to what does profit or benefit the believer: “The words that I speak to you spirit are, and life they are.” This then refers us back to what does not profit, what is not spirit and not life. Catholicism truns that meaning on its head, just as those who ceased to follow Him had done in the carnal perspective of thinking He had commanded them that they must eat His flesh for spirit and life.