TAKE, EAT, THIS IS MY BODY: CANNIBALISM AND THE BIBLE
I had to eat a piece of Jesus once in a movie.
John Lurie, regarding The Last Temptation of Christ (personal communication)
THERE IS ANOTHER FORM of ritual cannibalism whose origins are as fascinating as they are close to home.
Descriptions of cannibalism in the Bible fall into two distinct categories. In the Old Testament, the behaviour was undertaken by the starving inhabitants of the besieged cities of Jerusalem and Samaria. There’s no physical evidence that these events actually occurred (although, of course, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t), though more on the topic of survival cannibalism in Chapter 11.
The second type of cannibalism is found in the New Testament and relates to the literal or symbolic consumption of Jesus Christ’s body and blood during the celebration of the Eucharist – the Christian commemoration of the Last Supper. Considering the paramount importance this ceremony has for all Christians, and in light of differing belief systems that exist throughout Christianity, it’s no surprise that there are disagreements concerning the interpretation of the ritual. One thing common among the vast majority of Christians, however, is ignorance that this particular form of symbolic cannibalism led to the torture and murder of thousands of innocent people.
The following are two of the most famous passages from the New Testament.
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had said the blessing he broke it and gave it to the disciples. ‘Take it and eat,’ he said, ‘this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he handed it to them saying, ‘Drink from this, all of you, for this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.’
Matthew 26:26–28
Jesus replied to them: In all truth I tell you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise that person up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in that person.
John 6:53–56
One way to interpret these passages is that Jesus was using a metaphor to convey a concept to his followers. It was certainly something he had done before, since surely even the dimmest of Jesus’s supporters hadn’t taken him literally when he said, ‘I am the gate’ (John 10:9) or ‘I am the true vine’ (John 15:1). Strangely, though, the leaders of several major Christian religions (including Catholicism) do not support this symbolic interpretation. Here’s how that disagreement came about.
After the first four Crusades, and the capture of Constantinople and large parts of the Byzantine Empire, Pope Innocent III summoned over 400 bishops and many lesser ecumenical leaders to attend the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Also invited were representative rulers from Europe and the Levant (an area now made up of Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Syria and Iraq). During the meeting, there was apparently little discussion between the Pope and the council attendees. Instead, the pontiff presented a list of seventy-one papal decrees, which served notice to all present that the Pope’s powers, as well as those of the Roman Catholic Church, had just been expanded. Among proclamations forbidding the founding of new religious orders, strengthening papal primacy and regulating and restricting Jewish communities, was a decree that spelled out the concept of transubstantiation.
From that moment on, the faithful would be required to believe that the consecrated elements in the Eucharist, the bread and wine, were literally changed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. ‘His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood …’
If the council attendees had any gripes about these new decrees they apparently kept them to themselves. During the sixteenth century, however, the interpretation of biblical passages like those describing the Last Supper became pivot points for the controversies that arose between the Catholics and Protestants. In that regard, Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation, seemed to have a more than little problem with the whole idea of transubstantiation, beginning with the fact that the term did not appear in any biblical scriptures. (Archbishop Hildebert of Tours had coined the term, from the Latin transsubstantiatio, around 1079.) In October 1520, though, Martin Luther referred to it as ‘an absurd and unheard-of juggling with words’, stating that ‘the Church had the true faith for more than twelve hundred years, during which time the Holy Fathers never once mentioned this transubstantiation – certainly, a monstrous word for a monstrous idea’.
A decade later, the Incan King Atahualpa took issue with the concept of transubstantiation. In their entertaining book Eat Thy Neighbour, Daniel Diehl and Mark Donnelly recounted the story of what took place after the capture of Atahualpa by Conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1533, when he was threatened with execution unless he converted to Christianity:
Atahualpa said he bowed to no man and told the Spanish exactly what he thought of their religion. His people, he said, only sacrificed their enemies to their gods and certainly did not eat people. The Spanish, on the other hand, killed their own God, drank his blood and baked his body into little biscuits which they sacrificed to themselves. He found the entire practice unspeakable. The Spanish were outraged and had Atahualpa publicly executed on 15 August 1533.
Unfortunately, other accounts of this incident offer a somewhat less heroic end to Atahualpa’s story. In an alternative version, the captured Incan king converted to Catholicism and was given the name Juan Santos Atahualpa. His fellow Catholics then celebrated Juan’s baptism by having him strangled with a garrotte.
Regardless, Roman Catholic leaders not only adopted the concept of transubstantiation but during the Eastern Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 they took a moment to snub the upstart Protestants:
In the celebration of [the Eucharist] we believe the Lord Jesus Christ to be present. He is not present typically, nor figuratively, nor by superabundant grace, as in the other Mysteries, nor by a bare presence … as the followers of Luther most ignorantly and wretchedly suppose. But truly and really, so that after the consecration of the bread and of the wine, the bread is transmuted, transubstantiated, converted and transformed into the true body itself of the Lord … and the wine is converted and transubstantiated into the true blood itself of the Lord …
Even as recently as 1965, Pope Paul VI made it clear that as far as he and the Roman Catholic Church were concerned, with regard to transubstantiation, their stance had not changed in the 400 years since the Council of Trent, one of the Church’s most important ecumenical councils. As a result, beginning some thirty years after Pope Innocent’s decree concerning transubstantiation, faithful Catholics started rounding up and executing Jews for the crime of ‘torturing the host’.
But firstly, how, you might ask, did the accusers know that their hosts were being desecrated? Apparently, unimpeachable witnesses came forward, claiming to have seen the communion bread bleeding. Secondly, why were the Jews being blamed for this phenomenon? The answer appears to be that while there wasn’t a shred of actual proof, everyone agreed that the Jews hated Jesus, and so perhaps they were re-enacting the Messiah’s crucifixion or using the host as part of their own nefarious rituals. Rumours had begun circulating that Jews were applying the blood that flowed from the host to their faces, to give their cheeks a rosy appearance. Others suggested that the villains were using the saviour’s blood to rid themselves of the foetor Judaicus (‘Jewish stink’).
And so it came to pass that, in the complete absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, Jews were rounded up, coerced and tortured – after which many of them confessed to entirely imaginary crimes. But whether they confessed or not, those found guilty of defiling the sacrament were subjected to additional torture before being burned at the stake, beheaded, or otherwise gruesomely dispatched. Additionally, their families, as well as any neighbours brazen enough to have lived nearby, often accompanied them to their deaths. These practices continued for nearly 400 years in Jewish communities all across Europe, with massacres taking place in Germany, France, Austria, Poland, Spain and Romania. At some point, the execution of Jews for crimes against baked goods ended, though this had more to do with the rise in popularity of a new group – witches – to persecute for similarly unsubstantiated crimes, than any moral qualms on the part of those carrying out the pogroms.
Adapted from a fifteenth-century German woodcut depicting host desecration by the Jews of the Bavarian town of Passau, in 1477. The hosts are stolen and brought to a temple where they are pierced with a dagger during some unspecified Jewish ritual carried out in the presence of a Torah. Eventually, the hosts are rescued in a commando-like raid and the communion wafers are shown to be holy. The guilty Jews are arrested. Some are beheaded, others tortured with hot pincers. Next, the entire Jewish community has their feet put to the fire before being driven out of town (or to their death). In the end, the good Christians kneel and pray.
But what about the bleeding hosts themselves? Were medieval witnesses just making that stuff up as an excuse to get rid of a group they despised? Maybe these people had simply imagined the ruby-stained bread? There is, however, an intriguing alternative hypothesis. In 1994 Dr Johanna Cullen, at George Mason University in Virginia, came up with an explanation for bleeding hosts that was neither mystical nor mental. It was instead, microbiological. Serratia marcescens is a rod-shaped bacterium and common human pathogen frequently linked to both urinary-tract and catheter-associated infections. The ubiquitous microbe can also be found growing on food like stale bread that has been stored in warm, damp environments. For this story, the key characteristic of S. marcescens is that it produces and exudes a reddish-orange pigment called prodigiosin, a substance that can cause the bacterial colonies to resemble drops of blood. Clinically, prodigiosin has been shown to be an immunosuppressant with antimicrobial and anti-cancer properties, and it’s likely that these germ-killing properties protect Serratia colonies from attack by bacteria, protozoa and fungi, in much the same way that the Penicillium mould produces an antibacterial agent that has been co-opted for use by humans. In the fifteenth century, though, Serratia colonies growing on the host may very well have been mistaken for blood.
The work of another researcher, Dr Luigi Garlaschelli, backed up Dr Cullen’s findings. The renowned organic chemist and part-time debunker of reputed miracles like weeping and bleeding statues examined various food items that were said to have bled spontaneously. To determine whether the ‘blood’ was real or not, Garlaschelli tested the items for the presence of haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment that gives vertebrate blood its red colour. In the end, the tests revealed no haemoglobin but plenty of contamination by S. marcescens, and the Italian chemist further demonstrated the likely origin of the bleeding hosts by culturing the bacterium on slices of ordinary white bread.
Quite possibly, then, a common microbe contaminated the bleeding hosts of the Middle Ages, which is actually kind of amusing until you realise how many thousands of innocent people were murdered because of this tragic bit of ignorance and misinterpretation.
A final word on the relationship between transubstantiation and cannibalism concerns the Uruguayan survivors of the Old Christians Rugby Club, who employed what became known as the ‘communion defence’ to justify the incidences of cannibalism that took place after their 1972 plane crash in the Andes. Soon after the sixteen survivors returned to civilisation, positive public opinion over their plight took a knock after it was revealed that the men had remained alive for seventy-two days by consuming the bodies of the dead. Not long after their rescue, and with their hero status now on shaky footing, a press conference was held. Survivor Pablo Delgado, a law student, told reporters that Christ’s Last Supper had inspired him and the other survivors. Delgado explained, since Jesus had shared his body with his disciples, it was okay that they had done the same with their deceased comrades. After hearing this explanation, even the sceptics were won over and soon afterwards the Archbishop of Montevideo made it official by absolving the young men. Years later, some of the Andes survivors admitted that relating their cannibalistic acts to the sacrament was actually more of a public-relations exercise than a religious experience. According to survivor Carlos Páez Rodríguez, ‘We were hungry, we were cold and we needed to live – these were the most important factors in our decision.’