. . . let me remind you that at the time circumcision was supposedly mandated by God as a sign (let's just say "signature" for fun) of the Covenant, writing was already available -- and a pretty reasonable "sign" might just be a signature. So God might just as well have said "sign here, or lop of the end of your willy!" Which would you choose?
It also fails, rather patently, in my view, to bring women into the Covenant, don't you think?
Brit milah (ritual circumcision) and female menses are two side of the same coin of the realm so far as the covenant is concerned. To understand how, and why, requires a deeper knowledge of the meaning of brit milah and menses than most persons posses. Which is why the thread on meiosis and Messiah attempted, and failed, to get interested parties up to speed. Oh well.
53 Then Jesus 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 no life in you. 54 Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. 56 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. . . 60 Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? 61 When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you? . . . 63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. 64 But there are some of you that believe not.
John 6:53-64.
Rabbi Samson Hirsch thought of "blood" as "liquid flesh," a, "
prototype of the whole body; it is the body in its liquid state, so to speak. . . Thus, the whole organism is contained in the blood" (
Hirsch Chumash, Bereshish, 9:4). He goes on to explain how blood represents "soul," blood is the representation of soul, hidden inside the body, while in our parlance, the body is the bride, and the soul the groom. Body/flesh=female, while, soul/blood=male, such that when the
mohel opens the flesh (milah), tears the membrane of virginity (periah), and captures the blood in a goblet passed around to the
brit participants (so that they all participate in the final stanza,
metzitzah), he, the
mohel, is stating, in ritual, precisely what's read out loud in John 6:53-64.
If, with John chapter 1, we think of the concept of the divine Logos as thought made flesh, perhaps blood made flesh, male transmuted into female (to receive the male, Gen. 2:7), then John 6:53-58 begins to look almost like a cryptic message sent through time to our generation. Many of Jesus' statements are peculiar when we understand the setting in which he made them. For instance, when he told his disciples that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood if they wanted to attain immortality, many of his disciples decided they'd heard enough and split. Even his closest followers were confused. So why would He make such a statement unless it was meant for `
sheep from another pen'?
I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice.
John 10:16
He might have added, " . . .
But they will understand general relativity and the convertibility of time, space, matter and thought, so that when I say, 'You must drink my blood', they'll understand that I'm speaking conjectural of my life, converted into thoughts, transferred through words, metabolized by thought. Jeffery Satinover said, concerning the Torah:
The Torah has always been viewed by Jews as a map of all existence through space and time, standing outside and above it. The physical world is the Torah's derivative, not the other way around. And it is, in particular, the `letters' of the Torah that, in some mysterious way, are God's agency for the world's creation. Thus, in its mission to preserve the Torah as exactly as it can, by treasuring and preserving every letter, Israel's historical purpose is also to preserve and care for the blueprint of all existence.
Many, if not most non-theistic scientists agree that life, and thought, are different aspects of the same essence. In
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins says that ideas in the human mind (thoughts) " . . .
should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically, but technically." Frank Tipler, in,
The Physics of Immortality, states that life is information processing, or thought. St. John says that the Word (a representation of thought) was with God and the Word was God. So if Jesus is the living word, versus the written Torah, then to know the living Word is to know the thoughts of Christ.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling in us.
John 1:14.
Which segues back into the meat, or flesh, of the words being expressed here, i.e., why would Jesus' words be any different than any other words? Why would we need Jesus' words more than Moses', or the words of Moses' angel? Which is to say, in the context of what's being said, why are Jesus' words unique, and life-giving, while Dostoevsky or Shakespeare's words are merely entertaining?
John
