JOHN’S GOSPEL DOES NOT DESCRIBE THE INSTITUTION OF THE EUCHARIST

June 23, 2018Science & Faith

The most important fact that strikes the reader of the Passion in John’s Gospel is that he makes absolutely no reference to the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper of Jesus with His Apostles.

There is not a single Christian who does not know the iconography of the Last Supper, where Jesus is for the last time seated among His Apostles at table. The world’s greatest painters have always represented this final gathering with John sitting near Jesus, John whom we are accustomed to considering as the author of the Gospel bearing that name.

However astonishing it may appear to many , the majority of specialists do not consider John to have been the author of the fourth Gospel, nor does the latter mention the institution of the Eucharist. The consecration of the bread and wine, which become the body and blood of Jesus, is the most essential act of the Christian liturgy. The other evangelists refer to it, even if they do so in differing terms, as we have noted above. John does not say anything about it. The four evangelists’ descriptions have only two single points in common: the prediction of Peter’s denial and of the betrayal by one of the Apostles (Judas Iscariot is only actually named in Matthew and John). John’s description is the only one which refers to Jesus washing his disciples’ feet at the beginning of the meal.

How can this omission in John’s Gospel be explained?
If one reasons objectively, the hypothesis that springs immediately to mind (always supposing the story as told by the other three evangelists is exact) is that a passage of John’s Gospel relating the said episode was lost. This is not the conclusion arrived at by Christian commentators.

Let us now examine some of the positions they have adopted.

In his Little Dictionary of the New Testament (Petit Dictionnaire du Nouveau Testament) A. Tricot makes the following entry under Last Supper (Cène). “Last meal Jesus partook of with the Twelve Disciples during which he instituted the Eucharist. It is described in the Synoptic Gospels” (references to Matthew, Mark and Luke) . “. . . and the fourth Gospel gives us further details” (references to John). In his entry on the Eucharist (Eucharistie), the same author writes the following. “The institution of the Eucharist is briefly related in the first three Gospels: it was an extremely important part of the Apostolic system of religious instruction. Saint John has added an indispensable complement to these brief descriptions in his account of Jesus’s speech on the bread of life (6, 32-58).” The commentator consequently fails to mention that John does not describe Jesus’s intitution of the Eucharist. The author speaks of ‘complementary details’, but they are not complementary to the institution of the Eucharist (he basically describes the ceremony of the washing of the Apostles’ feet). The commentator speaks of the ‘bread of life’, but it is Jesus’s reference (quite separate from the Last Supper) to God’s daily gift of manna in the wilderness at the time of the Jews’ exodus led by Moses. John is the only one of the evangelists who records this allusion. In the following passage of his Gospel, John does, of course, mention Jesus’s reference to the Eucharist in the form of a digression on the bread, but no other evangelist speaks of this episode.

One is surprised therefore both by John’s silence on what the other three evangelists relate and their silence on what, according to John, Jesus is said to have predicted.

The commentators of the Ecumenical Translation of the Bible, New Testament, do actually acknowledge this omission in John’s Gospel. This is the explanation they come up with to account for the fact that the description of the institution of the Eucharist is missing: “In general, John is not very interested in the traditions and institutions of a bygone Israel. This may have dissuaded him from showing the establishment of the Eucharist in the Passover liturgy”. Are we seriously to believe that it was a lack of interest in the Jewish Passover liturgy that led John not to describe the institution of the most fundamental act. in the liturgy of the new religion?

The experts in exegesis are so embarrassed by the problem that theologians rack their brains to find prefigurations or equivalents of the Eucharist in episodes of Jesus’s life recorded by John. O. Culmann for example, in his book, The New Testament (Le Nouveau Testament), states that “the changing of the water into wine and the feeding of the five thousand prefigure the sacrament of the Last Supper (the ‘Eucharist’)”. It is to be remembered that the water was changed into wine because the latter had failed at a wedding in Cana. (This was Jesus’s first miracle, described by John in chapter 2, 1-12. He is the only evangelist to do so). In the case of the feeding of the five thousand, this was the number of people who were fed on 5 barley loaves that were miraculously multiplied. When describing these events, John makes no special comment, and the parallel exists only in the mind of this expert in exegesis. One can no more understand the reasoning behind the parallel he draws than his view that the curing of a paralized man and of a man born blind ‘predict the baptism’ and that ‘the water and blood issuing from Jesus’s side after his death unite in a single fact’ a reference to both baptism and the Eucharist.

Another parallel drawn by the same expert in exegesis conconcerning the Eucharist is quoted by Father Roguet in his book Initiation to the Gospel. “Some theologians, such as Oscar Culmann, see in the description of the washing of the feet before the Last Supper a symbolical equivalent to the institution of the Eucharist . . .”

It is difficult to see the cogency of all the parallels that commentators have invented to help people accept more readily the most disconcerting omission in John’s Gospel.