Is Thomas More's reading of "This is my body" a literal one by modern standards?
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Hyper-Literalism
This seems to be a case of taking the Scriptures too literally when it is intended to be symbolic.
If Christians are the "light of the world", as Jesus said in John 8:12, then all we would need to do to see if someone is a Christian or not would be to turn out all the other lights and see if the person gives off any light himself.
All people who ever hated anyone would be convicted of murder (Matthew 5). Jesus is a door to a sheep pen where he keeps his sheep and shepherds them, but He Himself was also a sheep who could talk, or at least half man, half sheep. No, God became a Man--not a sheep.
The Bread and the Wine
The reason that most Protestants reject the notion that the elements of communion are literally the body and blood of Christ is that when Jesus said those words, He was referring to literal bread and literal wine, neither of which was His body or blood.
Also, Paul refers to Jesus as our Passover in 1 Corinthians:
For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 1 Corinthians 5:7
It was the Passover celebration that Jesus was celebrating with His disciples when He spoke of His body and blood. The bread was unleavened bread. Leaven was symbolic of sin, so the unleavened bread represented the sinlessness of Christ.
So, there is ample evidence that this was always to be understood as symbolic.
Taking things as literal when they were mean to be symbolic is definitely problematic and distorts the Scriptures as much as those who symbolize things that were clearly intended to be literal.
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