John 6 contains the summary of the Gospel of John in the aspects of a religious, theological, and structural riddle. Whenever one tries to explain John chapter 6 in the various traditions, one can eventually discover an inconsistency between 6:51-56 and 6:63. In particular, John 6:53 states, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves.” In John 6:51-59, whether one interprets the flesh as a spiritual flesh, bread, or Logos (word), the following passage presents another problem - “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail” (John 6:63b) - because the verse evidently differentiates spirit from flesh and supports strong Gnostic characteristics.
As Bultmann suggested, the geographical information provides that all events and discourse in 6:1-71 happened around Capernaum, which supports literally coherence of the structure of John 6. In order to avoid some misunderstanding of gnosticism, one distinguishes ancient gnostic ideas that have existed before Christianity from 2nd century gnosticism. Gnostic ideas are difficult to define, but their core elements are ‘the theology of Monad’ and ‘the journey of soul’. By using these, one can find two understandings of “flesh” in John: one is Dionysiac doceticism and another is an ancient gnostic idea. In this regard, Menken interprets John 6:51C-58 as “an anti-docetic Christology” in which real consumption of flesh and blood indicates Jesus’ real humanity. However, John’s flesh cannot be explained without the gnostic feature here. From the prologue of John (1:1-18), thus, one can easily find the same notion of Monad just appears in Eugnostos the Blessed and The Sophia of Jesus Christ. In addition, the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas share similar thought from the feature of ancient gnostic ideas. Because the Gospel of John makes dialogues with many traditions such as the cult of Dionysus, gnostic ideas, doceticism, and anti-doceticism, John 6 reflects different interpretations of the flesh at the same time. In general, John presents two kinds of flesh in his Gospel. Because of dominant gnostic features throughout the Gospel of John, one can not object that Jesus’ flesh and blood have spiritual elements, and humans’ flesh does not have spirit. Humans’ flesh cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, but Jesus’ flesh gives spirituality because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).