SR: Does it matter to the finding of metaphor that He is or is not speaking of a possession? I understand you are trying to establish that the form is not possessive, but in fact, as a matter of logic, His blood and Body are His possession.
V: Jesus is the single most unique being ever in the history of the universe. He is both fully Human and fully Divine at the same time. He is made up of His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. They are not His possessions, they are His essence, they are what make Him, Him.
Of course I do not dispute the uniqueness of the person of Christ. But I am concerned that His uniqueness not be mistaken for a blank check to read into the text things that are not in fact there. Consider. How do we know of His uniqueness? From the clear words of Scripture, words that speak plainly of His humanity and divinity. In those places we only need to let the words speak their ordinary sense to gain knowledge of the extraordinary nature of their subject. We do not work the other way around, assuming in advance we will find a divine Christ and then inflating ordinary words beyond their ordinary sense to say what they really do not say. It isn't necessary. If a doctrine is true, the ordinary sense of the words teaching it will always suffice to carry the burden of that truth.
So here I cannot make sense of your statement that He does not possess, at least in some sense, His own body and blood. If He does not possess it, it is never proper, even now, to say "His body," or "His blood." Yet the Scriptures always refer to His blood as His blood:
1Cor_10:16 The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?Those are all possessives. And that last passage is most interesting. The Greek:
Eph_2:13 But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.
Heb_9:14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
1Pet_1:2 Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied.
1Pet_1:19 But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:
1Jn_1:7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
Rev_1:5 And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood,
λύσαντι ἡμᾶς ἐκ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ αἵματι αὐτοῦ
If this blood spoken of by John is not Jesus' own blood, then whose blood is it? God's? But Jesus is God, so it is still His blood. I honestly cannot see how to separate the blood of Christ from Christ in the sense you appear to be proposing. It turns all these possessive genitives on their heads, and I don't see the warrant for that.
V: Your second point:The shared attribute is the analogical teaching element, and the contrast in category, the "impossibility factor," is the trip wire for spotting the metaphor.
I personally don't see the "impossibility factor" as an issue. Jesus as a divine being is not subject to the same limitations that our bodies and natures subject us to. This is the being that raised Talitiha and Lazarus from the dead, so turning bread and wine into His literal body and blood would be nothing. Keep in mind that God the Father created the entire universe Ex nihilo from nothing.
On this I think you may have misunderstood me. I am not suggesting that anything is impossible to God, other than things that would violate His own reason and righteousness. It is impossible for God to sin, for example. But no, this "impossibility factor" of which I spoke is a psychological property of the hearer. It is how certain word patterns are guaranteed to impact the ordinary listener. Going back to my paper map of Texas, if I'm your employer, and I hold that paper up to you and say, "This is Texas, and I want you to go live here," what will you do? Take the paper from my hands and stand on it? I don't think so. You're going to know exactly what I meant, because you already, subconciously, with no effort at all, knew I was not talking about the paper. It's the discrepancy that automatically triggers the recognition that the paper is a reference to something else.
So please don't misunderstand. I know God can do anything. But He's also the one who wired us to hear metaphor. When Romeo says of Juliet, "shall I compare thee to a summer's day," you and I and every reader here has already automatically spotted the "impossibility" of the concrete meaning (Juliet is NOT a day in summertime) and moved on to the lesson of the metaphor, that Juliet possesses attributes of beauty and refreshment that remind one of the pleasures of a summer day. It's all automatic. It would be bizarre to have some later group of thespians come along and insist that some particular summer day really is Juliet, even though there is no evidence whatsoever for such an odd association.
Your third point:But I do want to understand your grammatical point. "mou" is extremely frequent in the NT corpus as a simple genitive, most often showing possession (although I think the genitive can be broader than that, going to the root idea of "the source of x", hence the "gen" in genitive).
I know that you are aware of the following, but I want others to see my reasoning. The genitive case does refer to possessions, but was not used.
Let's stop right there. I am confused by this. You say the genitive is not used in Luke 22:19. It sure looks like "mou" is in the genitive case to me:
Note the Genitive form of "ego" above is "mou," and it is the "mou" which will determine whether it is correct to say "my body," which it is. This is confirmed by my Logos Greek texts (Byzantine and NestleAland), which have complete morphological tagging in place, and both agree the "mou" is genitive.
However, because you are discussing the pronoun "This," I think you are trying to get away from the genitive by finding it absent in some other part of the construct. But as far as I am aware, the "mou" is determinative. This is a possessive.
To continue ...
The dative case refers to refers to instrumentality, location, or reception and also was not used.
We agree on this, no matter which understanding is adopted.
That leaves the Accusative and the Nominative both as possibilities.
My Logos software morphology tags say it is nominative as to "soma," genitive as to "mou."
The accusative case refers to the direct object of a verb generally an action verb ie. He runs, She talks, etc..
I agree that the accusative inflection determines the form of the direct object. However, the examples you have provided are of intransitive verbs, i.e., verbs that only have a subject, and cannot "transit" to a direct object, because there is none. So I'm not sure how this speaks to eliminating the accusative.
That leave the nominative which is the subject of the sentence. In this case "This is" "This" being the bread.
The "This" is the subject of the structure, true. But I thought we were talking about the direct object, "the body," and whether "mou" modifies it to serve as a possessive. Again, it's late, I'm tired, and my doctorate is in law, not Greek, so illuminate me. What am I missing here?
All of your examples are good ones, but you left out the one in which a divine being, God the Father, is discussing another divine being, Jesus.
Luke 6:35 And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is my Son, my chosen: hear ye him.
καὶ φωνὴ ἐγένετο ἐκ τῆς νεφέλης λέγουσα· οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητός· αὐτοῦ ἀκούετε.
You doubtless meant Luke 9:35. There is nothing here but ordinary grammar. In "ὁ υἱός μου," the article and the noun are masculine, whereas in "τὸ σῶμά μου" (for Luke 22:19) the article and noun are neuter. This is the exact expression Paul uses when speaking of giving his body to be burned etc. It is the same structure for both divine and mortal beings, because in Greek, that's how you express the possessive. Jesus is God's Son, the sick child is the man's son, the body offered to be burned is Paul's body, and the body held in metaphoric relationship to the bread is Jesus' body.
Three verses down Luke6:38 And behold, a man from the multitude cried, saying, Teacher, I beseech thee to look upon my son; for he is mine only child:
καὶ ἰδοὺ ἀνὴρ ἀπὸ τοῦ ὄχλου ἀνεβόησε λέγων· διδάσκαλε, δέομαί σου, ἐπίβλεψον ἐπὶ τὸν υἱόν μου, ὅτι μονογενής μοί ἐστι·
In the first example the nominative case is used in the second, the accusative case.
Again, the reason for the accusative there is most simply explained by the fact that, rather than being the direct recipient of the verb, it is positioned behind the preposition "epi," and needs the accusative to be brought forward as it were to serve as the direct object. There is no special handling in the grammar as a result of deity or lack of it. A possessive is a possessive for both.
This is why I am convinced that they nominative case was used. The genitive tou which could refer to a possession was not and the accusative would have to have a direct object.
And for the reasons given, it does not appear that you have displaced the possessive "mou" as the determinant of possessive status, and that there is therefore no basis for imagining some special ontological construct that gives something other than the ordinary meaning. And if the meaning is ordinary, then the effect of the sharp contrast between the bread and the body, combined with a long tradition of assigning metaphoric meaning to the bread based on the events of the Exodus, there is no reason whatsoever for the disciples to hear anything but the the instruction to remember Christ and His sacrifice of love in the figures of the bread and the wine of this sanctified fellowship meal, just as Augustine taught.
But that is not the end of it. I combine that with the Bread of the bread of life discourse at the end of John 6 Josh 6:53 Jesus therefore said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.
Josh 6:54 He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life: and I will raise him up at the last day.
Joh 6:55 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
Joh 6:56 He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him.
I understand the argument from John 6 on much the same basis as the one in Luke. But that remains to discuss some other time. It is late, and I have to go to bed. It's been good talking with you.
Peace,
SR