Around the Lord’s Supper, I would often hear the words of Jesus echoed by Paul read aloud, “This is my body which is broken for you, do this in remembrance of me”. One day I got to thinking, ‘Was Jesus’ body broken? I thought Jesus’ body couldn’t be broken because of a certain prophecy that had to be fulfilled in which the body remained unbroken?’ So, I got to digging.
The idea of a “broken body” is almost entirely a legacy of the Byzantine manuscript family used by the King James translators in 1611. When we look at our oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, the Greek word for broken (klōmenon) is completely absent from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.
The text simply reads:
“This is my body, which is for you.”
Early scribes, copy-editing the text by hand, likely added “broken” to match the action of Jesus breaking the bread earlier in the verse. This is why you will only find the word “broken” used in the King James version. But theologically, the early church knew that Jesus’ literal body could not be broken in a skeletal sense. John’s Gospel goes out of its way to emphasize that during the crucifixion, the Roman soldiers did not break Jesus’ legs because he was already dead. This explicitly fulfilled a prophecy about Him in the Old Testament, “Not one of his bones shall be broken” (John 19:36, Exodus 12:46).
Therefore, the bread was broken; the body was not.
2. The Vocabulary of Luke and Isaiah
To find the explicit language Jesus used, we have to look to Luke’s account of the Upper Room. In Luke 22:19, Jesus takes the bread, breaks it, and says: “This is my body, which is given [didōmenon] for you.”
When Jesus chooses the word given, He is deliberately using poetic imagery from the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 53. In that ancient scroll, the root word for “handed over” or “given” (didōmi) is the action of the text: “He was handed over because of our sins… his soul was handed over to death” (Isaiah 53:5, 12).
Furthermore, the Greek didōmenon is an active, intentional participle. “Broken” is passive—it implies a victim crushed by an outside force. But “given” implies a generous go and a willing Servant to obey. Jesus was never a helpless victim trapped by the religious leaders or Rome. As He states in John 10:18, “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” It was an act of radical, and self-giving love. He knew exactly what he was doing at the cross and at Passover.
3. The Table
If Jesus didn’t mean His physical body would be snapped in pieces, why is the physical breaking of the bread the central action of the meal?
In first-century Jewish hospitality, a loaf of bread was the anchor of the table. You didn’t slice bread with a knife; you tore it apart with your hands. When the head of the house took the loaf, blessed God, and broke it, he wasn’t symbolizing something breaking apart. He was performing an act of distribution and inclusion.
By breaking a single loaf into smaller pieces and passing them around, he was saying, “We are all sharing this one life together. What was one is now distributed among many.”
Paul captures this exact paradigm in 1 Corinthians 10:16-17: “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”
When Jesus breaks the bread and says, “This is my body, given for you,” He is establishing a new covenant reality. He is saying, “My life is about to be poured out so that it can be shared with all of you. You are being brought into covenant oneness with Me and with each other.” His physical body was not broken, it was given and this should be reflected in the Lord’s supper we observe today.
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