Thursday, July 11, 2024

James M. Arcadi on Luke 22:19 and the coupling of τουτο with σωμα

  

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)