Scriptural Mormonism: Jerker Blomqvist and Karin Blomqvist on the use of τρωγω in John 6

Friday, February 21, 2025

Jerker Blomqvist and Karin Blomqvist on the use of τρωγω in John 6

Verbs of the Eucharistic Ritual

In ancient Greek, τρώγω is attested from Homer onwards. In its earliest occurrences it seems to denote a particular way of eating – gnawing or nibbling – typical of rodents and similar small animals. In the Hellenistic period it becomes fully synonymous with ἐσθίω. The synonymy is apparent in passages where τρώγω refers to humans eating food prepared precisely for human consumption, such as bread, and when there is no indication that the food was consumed in any other way than what is normal for humans, e.g., John 13.18 ὁ τρώγων μετ᾽ ἐμοῦ τὸν ἄρτον ‘he who eats the bread with me’ or Hermas, Similitude 56(V.3).7 ἐκ τῶν ἐδεσμάτων σου ὧν ἔμελλες τρώγειν ‘out of the food stuff that you would have eaten’. The equivalence of the two verbs also becomes clear when the combination τρώγειν καὶ πίνειν is used as a set phrase just as ἐσθίειν καὶ πίνειν and when John, in his quotation from LXX, substitutes τρώγων for ἐσθίων. This shows that the two verbs are interchangeable. John never uses the present ἐσθίω and, when Matthew speaks of those who experienced the feeding of the five thousand as οἱ ἐσθίοντες (14.21), John refers to the same persons as τοῖς βεβρωκόσιν (6.13), avoiding ἐσθίω as in the LXX quotation. Thus, John’s preferred verb for ‘eat’ in the present tense was τρώγω.

This inference is important for the interpretation of Jesus’ discourse on the bread of life in John 6.53–58. In v. 53 aorist forms of verbs for ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ are used: ἐὰν μὴ φάγητε τὴν σάρκα τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πίητε αὐτοῦ τὸ αἷμα κτλ. ‘unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood’, etc. In the following verses John chooses the present instead: ὁ τρώγων μου τὴν σάρκα καὶ πίνων μου τὸ αἷμα (twice) … ὁ τρώγων με … ὁ τρώγων τοῦτον τὸν ἄρτον ‘eats my flesh and drinks my blood … eats me … eats this bread’. Possibly mislead by school grammars that represent ἐσθίω as the only proper present form corresponding to the aorist ἔφαγον, some commentators have believed that John, when using the present form τρώγων in the following verses, introduced a verb with a meaning different from that of ἐσθίω/ἔφαγον. That is not the case. The difference in sense between φαγών and τρώγων is the same as between πιών and πίνων, i.e., a difference between perfective and imperfective aspect, expressed by the aorist and present stems, respectively. It is not a difference in lexical meaning. There is no linguistic reason for supposing that τρώγων in this passage refers to an action different from the one referred to by φάγητε, etc. For a full understanding of what exactly is meant by “eating my flesh”, “eating me” and “eating this bread” of life, philology offers no definite clue. (Jerker Blomqvist and Karin Blomqvist, “Eucharist terminology in Early Christian Literature: Philological and Semantic Aspects,” in The Eucharist—Its Origins and Contexts, ed. David Hellholm and Deiter Sänger, 3 vols. [Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 376; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017], 1:404-5)