Fishes and Loaves

When I was a kid back in Sunday school, I was very curious to know which of Jesus’s miracles were actually real. Being a big believer in magic at the time, I tended to be biased towards believing them. Some of them, though, did seem a little hard to swallow. For instance, healing leprosy was a lot easier for me to believe than the bodily resurrection of the dead. I had read The Serpent and the Rainbow, and considered the possibility that Lazarus and Jesus were drugged to appear dead, like the zombies in Haiti. But this sort of felt like cheating to me. It was not real magic, but stage magic.

One myth that I always had trouble with was the story of the fishes and loaves. I’ll share the first telling of this miracle from the Gospel of Mark, David Bentley Hart translation. Mark 6:30–44:

And those who had been sent out came together to Jesus and reported to him all the things that they had done and taught. And he says to them, “Come by yourselves privately to a deserted place and rest a little.” For there were many persons coming and going, and they had no opportunity to eat. And they went away in the boat privately to a deserted place. And many saw them going and knew where, and ran together on foot from all the cities and arrived before them. And disembarking he saw a great crowd, and was moved inwardly with compassion for them because they were like sheep having no shepherd, and he began to teach them many things. And now, the hour getting late, his disciples approached and said: “This place is deserted and the hour is now late; dismiss them so that, going away to the fields and villages round about, they might buy something to eat themselves.” But in reply he said to them, “You give them something to eat.” And they say to him, “How could we go out and buy two hundred denarii’s worth of loaves, and give them to them to eat?” And he says to them, “How many loaves do you have? Go look.” And finding out they say, “Five, and two fishes.” And he instructed all of them to recline, party by party, on the green grass. And they reclined, group by group, a hundred or fifty each. And, taking the five loaves and the two fishes and looking up to heaven, he pronounced a blessing and broke the loaves and gave them the disciples, to serve to them, and the two fishes he portioned out to everyone. And all ate and ate their fill, and they took up twelve basketfuls of bread fragments and morsels of fish. And those eating the loaves were five thousand men.

This story occurs in a slightly altered and abridged form in Mark 8:1-9. It occurs twice in Matthew, and once in Luke. It also occurs in John, which is notable, as John has much less material in common with the other three gospels. This suggests the story comes from an older tradition of stories about Jesus, possibly oral, that John and Mark both draw from. (Matthew and Luke source the story from Mark.)

What are we to make of this tale? As a kid back in Sunday school, I couldn’t really bring myself to believe this was real magic. There didn’t seem to be any magical mechanism that would create or replicate food in this way. It just didn’t seem to follow the rules. My Sunday school teacher suggested that when Jesus shared the food, it encouraged other people in the crowd to share all the food that they had with them as well, and everyone donated so generously that there was more than enough. That seems a reasonable possibility. A third possibility is that it is just a story.

So I’ve been reading through the Old Testament book of Kings, and I was reminded of all this when I came across this story. 2 Kings 4:42-44, Robert Alter translation:

And a man had come from Baal-Shalishah, and he brought the man of God first fruits, twenty loaves of barley bread and fresh grain in his sack. And he said, “Give it to the people, that they may eat.” And his attendant said, “What? Shall I set this before a hundred men?” And he said, “Give it to the people that they may eat. For thus said the LORD, ‘Eat and leave over.’” And he set if before them, and they ate and left over, according to the word of the LORD.

When I read this obvious precursor to the story of Jesus and the loaves and fishes, I couldn’t help but wonder, how many Christians out there have actually read this? Why is this passage from Kings not mentioned in any discussion I’ve ever seen on the Jesus version of this story? It seems important. Lately, Mauro Biglino has pointed out a couple of stories or sayings from the gospels that were clearly pulled from the Talmud or the Tanakh. (Maybe here and here?) I’m sort of proud that I found this one on my own. Jesus himself, and many of the early Christians, were well-read in Hebrew law, and it’s so fascinating to see these connections.

At first glance, the presence of this precursor story in Kings suggests that the story is indeed just a story, borrowed by early Christian storytellers, and converted into a story about Jesus. But there are other possibilities. Suppose that Jesus’s generosity had inclined the people to take out and share the food they had hidden under their robes. If this were so, then the same “trick” was performed centuries before. Jesus would have known this little fable, and decided to try it out for himself. And it worked.

Alternatively, suppose that Jesus has performed some real magic here. In that case, a nameless man of God performed the same bit of magic centuries before, and Jesus somehow worked out the same spell. Maybe he was taught the spell, or maybe he just figured it out for himself after reading the same story we just read.

Under all three scenarios, the intimate connection between the Hebrew and Christian traditions is highlighted here. The third scenario might pose some problems who both want to take Jesus’s miracles as literal truth, and also want to view Jesus as the one-and-only, all-original Son of God.