Touto Esti

A reader writes:

I’m trying to counter the common anti-Catholic argument that Jesus’ words "touto esti" (at the Last Supper) actually mean "this stands for" or "this represents" my body. I tried searching on the Internet without a lot of luck and I don’t know the Greek language at all.

Could you tell me the real meaning of the phrase or point me to a website that might have more info?

Touto esti means "This (touto) is (esti)." Period.

The verb eimi (here in its third person singular form esti) does not mean "stands for" or "represents." Nobody with adequate training would translate it that way.

This is not to say that eimi cannot be used symbolically. Just as in English we can say of a king who is also a great warrior, "The king is a lion" (meaning that the king has the qualities in battle of a lion), so one could say "This is my body" (meaning that "this" represents one’s body).

The language thus means one thing but may be taken in one of two ways.

The debate thus graduates from the level of language to the level of meaning. The broader context, both of Scripture and the Church Fathers, shows that Jesus meant what he said literally, not symbolically.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

13 thoughts on “Touto Esti”

  2. I’ve been reading your site for a week now, and had to jump on this. According to my Lutheran friends, Martin Luther also argued for “Touto esti” meaning “This is.” He was so irritated with one fellow (whose name escapes me) that he actually carved the words onto the table at which they were sitting. I just wish I could remember that particular fellow’s name…

  3. As a point of reference: This is the exact same verb used in Luke 9:35: “This is my beloved Son . . . “, so unless your debate partner wishes to deny that Jesus was really God incarnate, this argument is dead in the water.

  5. Goeff: you write “this argument is dead in the water”

    Golly, is it? Jimmy’s whole point is that the same words can be taken, at face value, in very different senses, no? I accept what I’ll call the literal meaning for both quotations, but the Eucharist debate is not settled by reference to Luke 9.

  6. the Eucharist debate is not settled by reference to Luke 9.

    It would sure be convenient, though, wouldn’t it? 🙂

    All I meant (and didn’t say well) was that the argument that “estin” means “represents” and only “represents” is dead in the water. That moves the question on to the higher level that Jimmy mentioned.

  7. So here is the question: can you think of other passages in the Greek NT which would support a symbolic understanding of “esti” here? I’m inclined to think, though I don’t have the time to look into this at all, that the ancients did not use metaphor as freely as we do (and ancient literary critics use the term for something almost entirely different, anyway). The symbolic usages which I can come up with off the top of my head tend to have additional stuff in them – some formation of homoios, a conjunction like hws or hwsper, etc. Granted, most of these are Classical, not Biblical, but you can see the same sort of thing in “The Kingdom of God is like unto…”, or “The Kingdom of God is as if….” Are there undisputed examples of the symbolic usage in the New Testament with just a bare “esti” or “eisi”?

  9. Good point. That whole chapter of John is full of this exact sort of thing. I’ll have to go parallel-hunting now….

  10. Jesus presumably spoke in Aramaic. There is no verb to be (“is” for example) in Aramaic or Hebrew.

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