John 6.8-13.
The way preachers tell this story, some boy volunteered his lunch, and Jesus multiplied it. I certainly hope the boy volunteered his lunch, because the text actually doesn’t say he did! The word for boy, παιδάριον/pedárion, is also slang for “slave,” and it’s entirely possible this was a slave’s lunch—and back then, people regularly forgot their manners with slaves, so it’s entirely possible one of Jesus’s students saw the lunch, said “Gimme that lunch!” and brought it to Jesus.
And yeah, we’d expect Jesus to respond to such behavior, “What is wrong with you? ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ We were just talking about that command last Tuesday. Go sit over there and think about what you’ve done. Son, I apologize for my student. Can I borrow your lunch? I promise I’ll give back even more.” But okay, let’s presume Jesus’s students knew better than to do any such thing.
The reason I translated ἄρτους/ártus, “breads,” as “pitas” is because that’s quite likely what they were: Flatbread. Smaller than naan or bagels, bigger than dinner rolls, but of course flat, ’cause of the way they were cooked on the side of a clay oven. Five was a small lunch—a child’s lunch, which is why it’s probably correct to say it came from a child instead of a slave. Made of barley instead of wheat; barley was cheaper, so this was likely a poor person’s lunch.
The synoptic gospels call the fish ἰχθύας/ikhthýas, “fishes,” which they were; but John identifies them as ὀψάρια/opsária, dried and salted fish, which you’d spread on the pitas if you didn’t only wanna eat bread. I translated them “anchovies,” which isn’t a precise translation, but it’s close enough. “Kippers” works too. You’ll notice in John, Jesus made the fish optional—if you wanted your pitas without fish, it’s fine. Even back then, not everybody liked anchovies!
Custom was for students to stand when the rabbi was talking. Now Jesus had them lie down, ’cause that’s how people ate in his culture.
- John 6.8-13 KWL
- 8Simon Peter’s brother Andrew,
- one of Jesus’s students, told him,
- 9“A boy is here who has five barley pitas and two anchovies,
- but these things amount to what, for so many?”
- 10Jesus says, “Make the people recline.”
- There’s a lot of grass on the ground, so the men recline.
- Their number is like 5,000.
- 11So, taking the pitas and giving thanks to God,
- Jesus distributes them to those reclining.
- Likewise from the kippers—
- as much as they want.
- 12Once they’re full, Jesus tells his students,
- “Gather the overabundant scraps,
- lest any of them perishes.”
- 13So they gather and fill 12 two-gallon baskets
- with scraps of the five barley pitas
- which exceeded what was eaten.
Baskets of leftovers.
A kófinos kinda looks like this. They still make ’em. [Tradition Now]
Pharisee custom was to not waste food. Crumbs—“smaller than an olive’s bulk” is how the Mishna and Gemara tend to phrase it—could be abandoned for dogs to eat off the floor, but bigger pieces had to be kept and used in something, like soup. Yeah, it sounds a little unsanitary to pick food off the floor, but you boil soup; it shouldn’t kill you.
So once everyone had eaten enough, Jesus had the Twelve go collect the leftovers. Each of the Twelve came back with a basket of leftovers. Not a little basket either; a κοφίνους/kofínus holds 7½ liters, or 2 gallons. About the size of a laundry basket.
All told, 24 gallons of scraps. All taken from five pitas.
All the gospels state there were about 5,000 men, but Matthew mentions women and children as well. I should point out his word χωρὶς/horís, “without,” likely means “not counting”—it does not mean “5,000 men, who came without their women and children.” Women and children were most likely there. Jesus got the pitas and fish from a child, remember? Likewise Jesus has no qualms about teaching women.
But because John wrote the ἄνδρες/ándres, “men”—not ἄνθρωποι/ánthropi, “people”—reclined on the ground, Jn 6.10 it’s fair to assume the bulk of the people, if not nearly all the people, were men. With some women and children. So let’s not presume Jesus actually fed three to four times the people the gospels say he did, and claim the gospels are false because we aren’t sexist like the writers of the gospels, and we wanna hype a bigger miracle. If Jesus actually fed 20,000 people, the gospel authors would’ve eagerly said 20,000 people. Nope; it was just 5,000 or so.
Still, Jesus could’ve fed even more. Doesn’t tax his kingdom’s resources any! Which again is the point of this miracle. We look at a crowd of 5,000 and think, “How much will it cost to feed them?” and Jesus’s answer is, “Well how much faith do you have? That much.”
