This Is My (Weary) Body

Perhaps no other words have been the subject of so much theological debate; the major sacramental issue dividing exegetes is the proper explanation of Jesus Christ’s words at the Last Supper. The Catholic Church has historically interpreted these words literally. Luther maintained the literal meaning of the words, this is my body, this is my blood, deviating by inventing a way for the laymen (not the priest) to “make” the body and blood of Christ real: at the moment of reception, based on the faith of the recipient, the bread becomes Our Lord’s body. Calvin moved even further away by replacing the literal body and blood with the spiritual presence of Christ (after all, his glorified body is in heaven, and cannot be in two places at once (that would require a miracle)). Finally, low-church Anglicans and Anabaptists went furthest of all, adopting a symbolic understanding of the Eucharist, i.e., that Our Lord is present in our minds because we are reminded of the Last Supper by partaking of the communion meal. In any case, it is the change of the Mass from a sacrifice to a communion meal that is the common “inheritance” of these denominations.

I believe there is a clue to the sacrificial character of the Mass in the biblical texts that has been ignored, and it revolves around a single word in Aramaic for “body.” Using linguistic analysis as my tool, I hope to show that the conclusions drawn up by Joachim Jeremias in Eucharistic Words of Jesus (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1977) are not as definitive as he made them out to be. For anyone who is not familiar with Jeremias, he is considered the primary scholar who among other things reveals which words of the Last Supper are semitisms, terms which can only be properly explained by reverting to the original language.

Jeremias contends that the Hebrew/Aramaic bashar, which literally means ‘flesh,’ must be the original word which underlies Our Lord’s statement, “this is my body” (pp. 198-201). This is the claim which I will dispute, arguing instead that it is peger.

Some background: the Latin terminology distinguishes between flesh carnis, corpse cadavera, and body corpus, whereas the original Greek, soma does not. In Hebrew and Aramaic, the following words relate to the term “body”: gev, gevah, geviyah, bashar, peger, geshem, beten, guwph, nebelah, nephesh, ‘tsm, shar, yrk, nidneh. Only five of these have soma in the Greek Septuagint as their equivalent: bashar, geviyat, guwpt, nebelat, and peger.

I will analyze these five words under the following three categories: flesh (Heb. bashar, Aramaic bishara); Living body (Heb. geviyat, Aramaic gwyh), and Dead Body (Hebrew guwpt, Aramaic gwph, Hebrew nebelat, and Hebrew and Aramaic peger).

Flesh

Bashar means flesh, which right away links us to St. John’s gospel, verses 6:51-52, which, though they do not directly mention the words used at the Last Supper, use the term ‘living bread,’ equating it with ‘flesh.’

John 6:51-52 I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.

In the Septuagint Old Testament, bashar is translated as soma seventeen times in Leviticus (e.g. Leviticus 16:24: “He shall wash his flesh in the holy place, and shall put on his own garments”; it is almost always in the context of a body in need of washing, so that it may be made ritually clean; one of the verses refers to forbidding tattoos); three times in Numbers, twice in Job, and once each in Proverbs and Daniel. The Latin Vulgate translation of soma in these examples seems split evenly between carnem (flesh) and corpus (body).

Jeremias’ argument in favor of bashar is that since ‘body and blood’ is used as a phrase in Greek, the Hebrew equivalent must be a similarly paired expression, and the closest one that exists in relation to body is bashar-dam, Hebrew for flesh/blood. Jeremias’ linking of flesh and blood does not take into account that the bread and wine blessed at the Passover are separated by a meal, which Christians eliminated and joined together to form the consecration prayers of the Canon of the Mass. The unleavened bread used is called “the bread of affliction,” as in Deuteronomy, lechem ‘aniy. The wine is placed in a kiddush cup, kiddush meaning sanctification, in memory of God’s sanctification and saving deeds during the events of the Passover in Egypt. Our Lord’s words reflect his suffering and the resulting salvation he offers us.

Moreover, if Our Lord had used the word bashar, flesh, as in “this is my flesh,” then why wouldn’t the Greek have been simply translated “haute esti he sarx mou” ? Or phrased another way, why does John use “flesh,” and Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul use “body”? According to Jeremias, it is because the Greek speaking Christians could not handle the word flesh, and found the word body less offensive (in relation to eating). However, given that Christ did not shy away from using the word flesh, even when his audience found it disgusting and repugnant (cf. John 6:51-61), why would Christ’s disciples? I would like to make a proposal which obviates such speculation. I will present evidence that Jeremias did not take into consideration, the possibility that the Hebrew/Aramaic word used for body by Jesus at the Last Supper was peger. In Hebrew it means corpse, which would seem to rule it out, but in Aramaic it means living or dead body, just as the Greek soma which it translates in the Aramaic New Testament, the Peshitta.

The use of flesh does not fit St. Paul’s account of the Last Supper. In 1Cor 11:24, Paul mentions that the bread is Our Lord’s body broken; in Greek, klao/klazo means to break off or tear. In the context of the body, it would refer to broken bones. The Septuagint contains two verses in which the verb klao, to break, relates to the human body:

Judges 9:53 And behold a certain woman casting a piece of a millstone from above, dashed it against the head of Abimelech, and broke his skull. Hebrew rtsts, to crush.

Ezechiel 29:7 When they took hold of thee with the hand thou didst break, and rent all their shoulder: and when they leaned upon thee, thou brokest, and weakenest all their loins. Hebrew shaber, to break in pieces, destroy.

One cannot break flesh, since by definition, flesh is the muscular tissue of the body.

There are 11 verses in the Old Testament in which the word bashar - flesh, is translated as Greek soma and Latin corpus. Seven of these refer to washing or bathing the flesh, i.e., the outside of the body, e.g. Lev 17:16. Proverbs 5:11 refers to flesh consumed; Ez 10:12 refers poetically to the whole body covered with eyes; Dan 1:15 refers to someone who appears “fatter in flesh.” When you examine bashar in combination with the words blood and life, there are four Old Testament verses: Gen 9:4, (kreas) ; Lev 17:11, (sarkos) ; Lev 17:14 (sarkos) ; and Deu 12:23 (krewn). Notice that none of these use soma to translate bashar. Nor do the two references in the New Testament that contain a reference to flesh, blood, and life use soma, but rather sarx.

The root of bashar is the verb bashar, meaning to bear (good) tidings.

Isaiah 52:7 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, and that preacheth peace: of him that sheweth forth good, that preacheth salvation, that saith to Sion: Thy God shall reign!

In the Spanish language, albricias, from Arabic al-bishara is a gift given to someone who brings good tidings. In Luke 2:10, good tidings is the English translation for the Greek euaggeliso, “to preach good news [the gospel].” Bashar could only have been used by Our Lord at the Last Supper if he wished to exclude reference to his crucifixion, since the good tidings (of the resurrection) came after his passion, crucifixion, and burial.

Living Body

Geviyat means body, deriving from the root gev, which means back, the body as a physical object. Geviyat would fit the context of the resurrection much better than that of the crucifixion. Its root is gah, meaning to rise up, as in Eze. 47:5, where the river’s waters rise up. Geviyat is translated as soma in seven verses: Gen 47:18, 1Sa 31:10, and 1Sa 31:12; Ez 1:11, 1:23, Dan 10:6, Nah 3:3. 70 percent of the time, Geviyat refers to body in the plural, “bodies.” Three verses employ geviyat to denote corpses: 1Sa 31:10, 1Sa. 31:12, and Nah 3:3. Two additional verses refer to a mystical vision: Eze 1:11 and 1:23, where the creatures’ wings cover their bodies, and Dan 10:6 who sees a man’s body shining like a gemstone. Gen 47:18 treats the body as a commodity; in exchange for food, they will sell their bodies to the Egyptians.

Dead Body

The other three Hebrew words referring to the body relate to ‘dead body,’ ‘corpse,’ and ‘carcass,’ potentially linking them to the crucifixion:

Guwpt is used in only one verse in the Old Testament, 1Ch 10:12; it comes from the root “to close.”

1 Chronicles 10:12 All the valiant men of them arose, and took the bodies of Saul and of his sons, and brought them to Jabes, and buried their bones under the oak that was in Jabes, and they fasted seven days.

There is no indication that guwpt was the word used by Our Lord at the Last Supper; it means only “dead body”, and its root does not match any of the shades of meaning that are part of the Eucharistic tradition. A scholar before Jeremias thought the word guwpt could have been the word used by Jesus, but in the biblical sense guwph means corpse, both in Hebrew and in the Aramaic NT. It began under Greek influence, according to Jeremias, to mean also body, in the sense of that part of us that is not the soul. However, since Our Lord was not saying ‘this is my body’ in opposition to the doctrine of the soul, guwpt does not fit. In the Aramaic New Testament, guwpt never translates soma.

Nebelah, which comes from the root “fade,” “wither,” “drop down.” It is used only for the words carcass and corpse. There are six verses in the Old Testament containing nebelah in which the word is translated as soma. In the Hebrew religion, nebelah was the body of an animal that was unclean, i.e. could not be used for sacrifice, because it had not been slaughtered according to the Mosaic Law. As such, nebelah could not have been the word that Our Lord used at the Last Supper when he said, “this is my body.” As if to confirm this, the Latin Vulgate uses cadaver where the Greek reads soma.

Peger comes from the root pagar ‘to be faint’ (all Hebrew and Aramaic nouns have a verb which is their root, i.e., the word from which their spelling and meaning derive). Peger not only means body, but wounded body (as in soldiers wounded in battle). In Hebrew, the word has a more restrictive meaning than in Aramaic - Hebrew peger means dead body, corpse, carcass. In Aramaic, peger means either living or dead body.

Pagar, (the verbal root of peger), to be weary, to faint, is used in two verses in the Old Testament: 1Sa 30:10 and 1Sa 30:21

1 Samuel 30:10 But David pursued, he and four hundred men: for two hundred stayed, who being weary could not go over the torrent Besor.

1 Samuel 30:21 And David came to the two hundred men, who being weary had stayed, and were not able to follow David, and he had ordered them to abide at the torrent Besor: and they came out to meet David, and the people that were with him. And David coming to the people saluted them peaceably.

There are two verses in the Old Testament using peger for which the Septuagint translates soma: Gen 15:11 and 2Ki 19:35. The latter is a reference to viewing the results of a battle:

2 Kings 19:35 And it came to pass that night, that an angel of the Lord came, and slew in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and eighty-five thousand. And when he arose early in the morning, he saw all the bodies of the dead.

In Gen. 15:11, peger refers to the bodies of animals slaughtered for sacrificial offering and lying on an altar. It is the only Old Testament verse to refer to body in relation to sacrifice.

Genesis 15:8-11 But he said: Lord God, whereby may I know that I shall possess it? And the Lord answered, and said: Take me a cow of three years old, and a she goat of three years, and a ram of three years, a turtle also, and a pigeon. And he took all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid the two pieces of each one against the other; but the birds he divided not. And the fowls came down upon carcasses, and Abram drove them away.

In Aramaic, Peger means both living and dead body. Hence, in the Peshitta, peger is used for Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul in their recording of Our Lord’s words “this is my body.” If Our Lord used peger for the phrase “this is my body,” he spoke in Aramaic, thus referring to his body as the sacrifice on the cross, without ruling out his resurrected body (the way that Gwph and Nebelah do).

Incidentally, the root pgr in Ugaritic means stela, a monument in stone set up as a commemoration. Thus there are three verses where peger in the Old Testament should be translated as monument: Lev. 26:30, Ez 43:7, and Ez 43:9. Unfortunately, The Douay Rheims uses “ruins,” in the verse with the clearest reference to peger meaning monument, since the monuments, related to pagan worship, are destroyed:

Leviticus 26:30 I will destroy your high places, and break your idols. You shall fall among the ruins of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.

The purpose of the stela was to be a memorial to the victors of a battle. Memorial is used in Luke’s and Paul’s account of the Last Supper: Luk 22:19, 1Cr 11:24, 11:25: “do this in memory of me.” Memorial in the Old Testament is found in two verses, both in reference to sacrificial offering: Lev 24:7 (showbread), and Nu 10:10 (holy day sacrifices in the temple). If Our Lord said in Aramaic, ‘sbw hla aytwhy pgry’, “take it this is my body”, [as taken from the Peshitta], then peger in Aramaic contains the following notions in relation to body:

Sacrifice - we have seen how peger in Hebrew means only dead body, corpse, and in Aramaic both dead and living body. Also, how the animals slain and ready to be sacrificed are called peger.

Resurrection - peger in the Aramaic of the Peshitta is the primary word used for the living body.

Memorial - peger in Ugaritic means monument or stela, and carries this meaning in three verses of the Old Testament (though it is not necessarily translated correctly in all English versions of the Bible).

Aramaic New Testament – Translation of Soma

Peger is used in the Peshitta to translate soma for 111/144 verses (86%)

Bashar is used in the Peshitta to translate soma in only four/144 verses (2%): 

Luke 3:6- And all flesh shall see the salvation of God (all living creatures).

Romans 8:13- For if you live according to the flesh, you shall die: but if by the Spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live. (idiomatic phrase, according to the flesh).

Hebrews 13:3 – Remember them that are in bands, as if you were bound with them; and them that labour, as being yourselves also in the body.

Hebrews 13:11 -For the bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the holies by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp.  [Only the blood was offered; the flesh was considered unclean, as it "bore" the sins of he who offered it; the flesh was burned outside the camp, as a sin offering, see Ex. 29:12 - 29:14. Even though the Douay translates the word here as "body", the real meaning is flesh as is seen from the context.  Even though our Lord's offering of himself as the supreme victim for our sins is in effect a sin offering, yet his body was not burned, because the Old Covenant at this point was superseded.]

None of these four examples could be applied to the Last Supper to give evidence that our Lord used bishara, ‘flesh,’ when he said, “This is my body.”

Surprisingly, there are 27 verses in the New Testament using sarx (flesh), where the Aramaic uses peger (and translates it as ‘body’ instead of bishara ‘flesh’). The evidence Jeremias uses, the Eucharistic discourse of St. John, to equate the consecrated bread of the Last Supper with the word flesh rather than body, does not stand up against the evidence in the Peshitta; all the verses in John use peger in the Aramaic ‘body’ rather than bishara ‘flesh.’ I have taken those which contain a common theme and grouped them according to whether they refer to the weary body or just the living body.

(1) In these verses, the body suffers. This meaning of peger relates directly to its linguistic origin; peger comes from the verb ‘to be weak,’ ‘to faint,’ ‘to be wounded’:

1 Peter 3:18-  Because Christ also died once for our sins, the just for the unjust: that he might offer us to God, being put to death indeed in the flesh, but enlivened in the spirit.

Matthew 26:41- Watch ye, and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak.

Mark 14:38- Watch ye, and pray that you enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Acts 2:26- For this my heart hath been glad, and any tongue hath rejoiced: moreover my flesh also shall rest in hope.

1 Corinthians 7:28- But if thou take a wife, thou hast not sinned. And if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned: nevertheless, such shall have tribulation of the flesh. But I spare you.

2 Corinthians 7:5- For also when we were come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, but we suffered all tribulation; combats without, fears within.

Ephesians 5:29- For no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, as also Christ doth the church.

(2) In these verses the body is more generally understood, and is related to communion/salvation:

John 6:51- If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.

John 6:53-54- Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day.

John 6:56- He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.

2 Corinthians 4:11- For we who live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake; that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh.

Acts 2:31- Foreseeing this, he spoke of the resurrection of Christ. For neither was he left in hell, neither did his flesh see corruption.

1 Corinthians 5:5- To deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 3:21- Whereunto baptism being of the like form, now saveth you also: not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the examination of a good conscience towards God by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

While in the second category the Peshitta could be wrong, and Jeremias could be right, that our Lord said “the bread that I will give, is my bashar/bishara” and not “the bread that I will give, is my peger,” there is no other word like peger in the Aramaic which means, this is my wounded body, my weary body, my body which is faint, nor indirectly, this is my body which is my memorial (of death). Moreover, if Our Lord used peger rather than bishara when he said in Aramaic “this is my body”, this justifies the use of Matthew and Mark’s words as the formula for consecrating the bread of the Roman Rite Mass from the time of Gregory the Great in the 5th century to the time of Pope John XXIII. The doctrinal reason given for the change was that Matthew and Mark spoke only of the Real Presence, not of sacrifice. As a result, in the 1969 Latin text of the Mass, the words were changed to Paul’s “This is my body which will be given up for you,” which were seen as more “sacrificial” (cf. Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975 [Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1990] pp. 453-454).

Not only does peger justify Matthew and Mark’s shorter formula, since it already carries all the sacrificial connotations provided by the additional words “which will be given up for you” but it gives a rich imagery of the link between the Old Testament bread of affliction, the Passover bread; the Passion of our Lord, where his body was weary, weakened, and wounded, and the fact that the Mass is the memorial of the Lord.

Ed Snyder