There is a second live option to explain the gender incongruity of
touto and arton. On this construal, the antecedent of the pronoun
is indeed arton – as is the intuitive English read – but the gender of
the pronoun has shifted to match that of the predicate nominative ‘body’ ( to
soma ) by way of inverse attraction . Wallace comments, ‘on rare occasions
there is a gender shift between antecedent and pronoun, the pronoun is almost
always caught between two nouns of different gender. One is the antecedent; the
other is the predicate nominative.’ Christ’s locution in full is, ‘touto
estin to sōma mou’ (‘This is my body’), with the predicate nominative, to
sōma , being a neuter noun. The grammatical idea of inverse attraction
states that due to the presence of a predicate noun of a different gender than
the pronominal antecedent, and the presence of the copula, even though the
actual antecedent of touto is masculine, touto has taken the
neuter gender of to sōma . Th us, the meaning of ‘This is my body’ is
the sense one gets when reading the passage in English; that is, ‘this’ means
‘the hunk of bread in my hand and the pieces of bread that I am passing around to
you,’ and, moreover, those objects (this hunk + pieces of bread) are ‘my body’.
(James M. Arcadi, An Incarnational Model of the Eucharist [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018], 28-29)