As Jesus announces the key to the Christian Mysteries in John 6:53–56, he makes crystal clear that the “True Food” and “True Drink” of his flesh and blood are nothing less than the flesh and blood of Dionysus. Not only because the words that John uses for “flesh” (sarx/σάρξ) and “blood” (haima/αἷμα) are identical to what Euripides wrote in the The Bacchae five hundred years earlier, but because of what Jesus asks his followers to do to that “flesh.” Twice in this passage the Evangelist drops the word trogon (τρώγων). But to translate trogon as “eat,” as do most English translations of John’s
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