This 'is' my body: sympathy for a former president

Bread & Wine
Originally uploaded by cas lad.

Since the question of what is meant by Jesus' words, "This is my body," was brought up during our Life Builders time, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a more careful look at this debated statement. Without sounding too Clintonian, our first stop is to examine the word 'is'.

From Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, pp 57-58

Few words with broad semantic range cause more interpretive difficulties than the copula eimi (to be). Caird (Language and Imagery, p. 101) provides a useful list of what he calls the “main types” of copula usage in Greek:

a) Identity: “Is the law sin?” (Rom. 7:7)
b) Attribute: “No one is good except God alone.” (Mark 10:18)
c) Cause: “To be carnally minded is death.” (Rom. 8:6)
d) Resemblance: “The tongue is a fire.” (James 3:6)

This is very helpful and is obviously pertinent to any consideration of the four most disputed words in the Bible, “This is my body.” Several branches of Christendom treat “is” in the sentence as a statement of identity; but quite clearly the semantic range of “to be” is broad enough that identity cannot legitimately be presupposed: it must be argued. ... Caird proceeds to argue that the statement “this is my body” cannot be one of identity, because “Jesus cannot be supposed to have identified the bread in his hands with the living body of which those hands were part.” But if “body” in this instance has a slightly different referent that the body of which the hands are a part, then “is” is being used metaphorically, and all metaphors belong to class d.

To restate: if we agree with the various classifications of 'is' above, then unless Jesus is referring to the bread and wine in the same way he would refer to his hand, the 'is' must fall into category d. Even if you believe in transubstantiation, there is a difference in Jesus' physical body and communion elements: Christ's body contains both the accidents (form) of flesh and blood and the substance of flesh and blood, while the communion elements retain the accidents of the bread and wine. The argument in transubstantiation is whether the substance has changed. But the point is this: clearly there is a difference between Christ's blood and wine.

From the Catholic Encyclopedia (newadvent.org)

Finally, Transubstantiation differs from every other substantial conversion in this, that only the substance is converted into another — the accidents remaining the same — just as would be the case if wood were miraculously converted into iron, the substance of the iron remaining hidden under the external appearance of the wood.

Again, there is a difference between an iron bar and an iron bar that has all the appearances of wood. The 'is' in "This is my body" is in category d.