Christianity is for pagan cannibals and is thus, FALSE. Why else did Jesus say we must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have life (John 6:53-54)?

At least this objection takes the text seriously enough to be offended by it. The problem is that it reads two verses in isolation from a discourse that tells you, repeatedly and in the same chapter, how to read them.

1. The metaphor runs the whole chapter. Jesus opens by calling himself “the bread of life” (John 6:35) and says the bread he gives “is my flesh for the life of the world” (John 6:51). He is not claiming to be a loaf, and no reader has ever thought so. From verse 35 onward the register is figurative, and the disputed verses sit inside it.

2. Eating and drinking mean believing. In the same discourse: “Whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35), and “everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life” (John 6:40). The chapter supplies its own key. To feed on Christ is to trust him — the ingestion language is the metaphor for faith.

3. John does this deliberately, repeatedly. Nicodemus hears “born again” and asks about re-entering the womb (John 3:4). The Samaritan woman hears “living water” and asks about a bucket (John 4:11). The crowd hears “this temple” and thinks masonry (John 2:19-21). Misreading Jesus crudely, then being corrected, is John's standard technique.

4. Jesus answers the literal reading himself. “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). That is the chapter closing the door on a physical reading of its own language, in its own words, before anyone had to guess.

5. The earliest church forbade blood. The Jerusalem council instructed Gentile believers “to abstain from blood” (Acts 15:20). If John 6 required literal blood-drinking, the apostles who wrote both would be contradicting each other within two decades. They plainly did not read it that way.

6. Nobody has ever taught cannibalism. Even transubstantiation holds that the appearances of bread and wine remain; the sacrament is eating, not butchery, and it is done in a room with a table. Second-century pagan critics did accuse Christians of cannibalism, and writers like Justin Martyr and Athenagoras answered it as slander — because nothing of the kind was practiced.

7. “Flesh and blood” is a Hebrew idiom. It means the whole person, or the sphere of ordinary human existence: “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you” (Matthew 16:17); “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50). Jesus is saying that his whole life, handed over in death, is the believer's food.

8. The literalism proves far too much. If every eating and drinking image must be physical, then the disciples were literal sheep (John 10:11), literal branches on a vine (John 15:5), and the temple really was demolished and rebuilt in three days. Nobody reads any book that way — including the challenger, who has quietly read “pagan” and “cannibal” figuratively enough to make the sentence work.

9. The offense is at the cross, not the table. “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” (John 6:60), and many walked away (John 6:66). What scandalized them was a Messiah who would die and give himself away — not a menu. That is the stumbling block John is actually recording.

10. Christians differ on the Supper, not on this. Catholics hold a sacramental realism, Lutherans a bodily presence in the meal, Reformed and Baptist churches a symbolic or memorial emphasis. That is a real disagreement among serious Christians and should be stated. What no tradition teaches is the eating of human tissue.

The passage is offensive, but not for the reason alleged. Its claim is that life comes by feeding on a person who dies — which is the same claim the rest of the New Testament makes in much plainer words.

Sources: Craig Keener, The Gospel of John; D.A. Carson, The Gospel of John; Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John.

Related challenges:
• Did Jesus really claim to be God, or did His followers just say that about Him? Might not Dan Brown have been on to something?
• It should be called Paulianity – for centuries Christians have presented the ideas of Paul as the teachings of Jesus, and that’s a mistake. It was all Paul’s INTERPRETATION. Check the data.
• Jesus is a borrowed myth dressed up like a Jew. He never existed, period. There is zero SUFFICIENT evidence that Jesus ever existed? Zero. It’s all a terrible hoax for the church to control the masses.