When He says "this is my body"? What is there to misinterpret?
Edit: I wish I could change the title. Maybe it's too contentious. Forgive me.
It is sometimes said that the people who quickly drifted away after that would have assumed Jesus was talking about cannibalism - an accusation against Christians apparently made against Christians by pagans in the early days.
However, what I find interesting about this is that Jesus could have explained what he meant (and was, in a sense, foretelling), but he chose not to. My impression is that they were the more intellectual rabbinical types, synagogue worthiess, who took Jesus' words at (materialistic) face-value, and concluded that he was a 'nutter', an idiot, moreover ; an itinerant, maverick preacher, virtually in his own words, a vagrant.
On the other hand, who were the types who stayed, and continued to listen to Jesus' words, if not his beloved Anawim and his devout, though less numerous middle-class types ? The kind of people who, without a professional axe to grind, and possessed, like children (to which he sometimes compared them), of total intellectual integrity, (keen to find out the truth about everything),would have thought to themselves something along the lines of :
'Well we've seen and listened to this man for long enough to 'cut him some slack' here, not for his benefit, but ours. He'll surely explain it to us later.
How much good have we seen him do, miracles of healing even and casting out devils, and how much more in line with the scriptures are his sermons, warning against compromising with the World to enrich ourselves at the expense of the poor - an imbalance that persists in the Christian church to this day, since its clerical and episcopal hierarchy have long, primarily, been the preserve of the monied, middle* and upper classes.
For those who doubt the paradoxically mysterious truth, albeit, seemingly oxymoronic, you should watch the YouTube video-clip of the exposition of a Sacred Host in a church in Argentina that having turned into flesh and blood, when examined by cardiologists and other specialist physicians, was discovered to be taken from a human heart. But the thing is you can see it throbbing in a most eerie way.** I think it was said that it was of AB* type, and showed signs torture.
In short, Jesus was happy to 'sort the men from the boys' in that way, presumably even anticipating the departure of the faithless 'know-alls'.
*In the sense of the class-milieu of Agatha Christie's central characters, for example.
** I couldn't find that clip just now, and don't have the time to go through all the clips on that and similar miracles, but this one should knock the socks off anyone. It concerns the same miracle. Pope Francies was involved in having it medically examined.