RandyPNW
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- Jun 8, 2021
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You're trying to apply English grammatical rules to idiomatic language used by another culture that defies rules that in our culture might want to disallow such a sense. Translated into English it still means the same thing. Jesus is saying his flesh is bread and his blood is drink, indicating that *after his death* it will be so. It was not at the time even though Jesus says it as such.The grammar of "This is my body" is not rocket science. The subject of the sentence is a personal pronoun, the verb is "TO BE" and the body is a predicate nominative.
When Memorialists state this sentence means "represents" this rips apart the most elemental rules of grammar. When the verb TO BE is replaced with "represents" the predicate structure is destroyed and replace with a direct object. The word body is no longer a predicate nominative but a direct object which takes on other aspects of interpretation.
Different verbs change the meaning in language. This is typical American Evangelicalism. To change the meaning of a statement, they change the verb. And of course, add to Scripture.
Jesus is calling into use a ritual that will depict something not yet current and yet demonstrated as if it is already present. And that's because what he was at the moment will be prepared for food and drink in the future. They are just, in a sense, rehearsing it or celebrating what will happen but has not yet happened.
We get similar strange language use in John's use of the prolepsis in the book of Revelation. There, John speaks of things happening currently for him, seeing it happen in a vision, even though what he sees represents something that hasn't happened yet.
For example, John sees, in vision, Christ coming on the clouds. But we know that hasn't happened yet, even though by our grammatical rules it *must* be happening currently. And yet it isn't yet occurring, and only occurs currently in the vision.
So much for English grammatical problems. We might not want to believe that something is happening in the present tense when in the culture of prophecy, things seen in vision currently can actually not yet have taken place and will be fulfilled in the future.
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