As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever. (John 6:57-58)
Commenting on the expectation that the Messiah would bring new manna, being an antitype (i.e., greater fulfilment of the Old Testament type) of the manna in the book of Exodus, Geoffrey Wainwright wrote:
The new manna
Israel remembered that God had fed His people with manna in the wilderness at the time of the exodus (Exod. 16:4, 15; Ps. 78:24f; Neh. 9:15; Wisd. 16:20; 4 Ezra 1:19), and there is ample evidence that the Jews expected a renewal of the gift in the coming time of salvation. The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch speaks thus: ‘And it shall come to pass at that selfsame time that the treasury of manna shall again descend from on high, and they will eat of it in those years, because these are they who have come to the consummation of time’ (II Baruch 29:8). In some places it is the messiah who will be instrumental in calling down the new manna. Thus in the Midrash Rabbah: ‘Just as the former deliverer [Moses] made manna descend . . . so also the latter deliverer [the messiah] will make manna descend’ (Midr Qoh I, 9). The importance of the Jewish expectation of a coming messianic distribution of manna for the Christian eucharist is seen in the feeding miracles of Jesus and in the discourse on the heavenly bread of life of John 6 (the eucharistic significance of each of which will be argued later), and in I Cor. 10 (where the manna of the exodus is presented as a type of the eucharistic bread). (Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology [2d ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1981], 22)
