Benoni E. Martin wrote: ↑August 27th, 2017, 12:44 pm
... it's not written literally in this way, but I believe it would help on the way to better understanding of our original verse; ...
ὅδε ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου.
Hi Benoni. You might like to check the gender of that pronoun in your re-composition.
According to LSJ, the classical idiom has the distinction / contrast that you are trying to make based on proximity. I don't think, however, that it holds does really hold for the later Koine idiom though. The once dynamic ὅδε (contrasting with the demonstrative ἐκεῖνος) of classical times only really has a few fossilised usages in the texts of the New Testament corpus.
I find it useful to distinguish as to whether the words designated as "demonstratives" are part of the physical relationship between things and the guesturing that took place during a dialogue, or a part of the textualisation process of authorship and redaction.
For whatever relationship ὅδε may have had with physical proximity or guesturing in earlier times, it has become part of the logical arrangement and ordering of passages in the New Testament at least. In one passage for example, from Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 1:7, ὁ δὲ ἐκ Δαυὶδ καὶ πρὸ αὐτοῦ, ὁ τοῦ θεοῦ λόγος, λύραν μὲν καὶ κιθάραν, τὰ ἄψυχα ὄργανα, ὑπεριδών,
κόσμον δὲ τόνδε καὶ δὴ καὶ τὸν σμικρὸν κόσμον, τὸν ἄνθρωπον, ψυχήν τε καὶ σῶμα αὐτοῦ, ἁγίῳ πνεύματι ἁρμοσάμενος, the demonstrative has that sort of "which we see around us", "that we live in here" type of meaning. Of the two examples from the New Testament that are not just an example of a fossilised τάδε meaning "which you are about to here", "the following", the one from James 4:13, εἰς τήνδε τὴν πόλιν, it is a hypothetical literary demonstrative. In John10:39, the physical proximity and literary construction are at odds with each other - Martha is closer in the dialogue but further in person from Jesus than Mariam - and the literary literary usage of the pronoun takes precedence.