“He that hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has eternal life, has passed from death to life.”
John, chapter 6
Chapter six begins with the words “After this.” If we follow the logic of the narrative, then – this is after what was stated in the fifth chapter: another unexpected rush to Jerusalem, the healing of the paralyzed in the Sheep font and a long sermon to the Jews in the temple about the right of Jesus to perform healings on Saturdays, since He is the Son of the Jewish God. The Jews wanted to kill Him for this, but for some reason they did not do it – the Evangelist explains this by the fact that “His hour did not come”. Yes, told it to the Jews.
So, chapter six.
“After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, in the vicinity of Tiberias” – that is, just like that, suddenly from Jerusalem he found himself on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and not by himself, but with a whole bunch of people that came out of who knows where. Here, the insertion of the entire fifth chapter is directly visible, since the fourth ends with the miracle of the healing of the courtier’s son from Capernaum, and AFTER this, from Cana of Galilee “Jesus went to the other side of the sea”, which in fact is not a sea, but just a very large lake. And not to the “other side”, since Cana and Capernaum, and Nazareth and even Tiberias are all on one side of the sea, the western one, and on the other, the eastern side, there is the territory of a completely different country, Syria. Apparently, the knowledge of geogrsphy was very bad indeed mong the compilers of the Gospel.
Further, in verses 12, from 2 to 13, the well-known miracle of feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fish is described. We will not cite it in full, we will dwell only on some details:
“2 Many people followed Him, because they saw the miracles that He performed on the sick” – on foot 20 kilometers from Cana? I wonder: did they go straight ahead, without even thinking to stock up on a some bread? Doubtful. And again – what kind of miracles are performed “over the sick”, who saw them and where? Since you and I have so far certified only two miracles: wine at a wedding and the healing of a child at a distance – there are “no more miracles”.
“3 Jesus went up a mountain and sat there with his disciples.” – 20 kilometers walk in the heat. Let’s suppose it happened.
“4 The Passover, the feast of the Jews, was drawing near” – how, again, the Passover? And what does this have to do with it? This is another “false insertable jaw”, so as not to forget who is the real Master here, and whose holidays are celebrated and honored here. But for some reason no one rushed back to Jerusalem – neither Jesus nor the peoples. What a bunch of sinners.
“13 And they gathered, and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves that were left by those who ate” – an interesting remark. Why did they collect it, and how did they do that – was it taken directly from people’s hands? People probably took the excess and hid it for the road back. Or they threw the remains on the ground (which is unlikely). The answer is contained in the “twelve boxes”: did Jesus and his disciples have such quantities of empty boxes in advance? Or did they run to the store to buy only to collect other people’s leftovers in them? There was no shop, no markets – nothing at all, the place was deserted. So this is added for the sake of a catchphrase, in order to convince of the proof of the miracle: here is how much is left of five loaves of bread – and this lie “as a testimony”, being exposed, undermines the credibility of the miracle itself: if someone lied in little, who will believe them in the big? And why twelve? Oh, because the twelve tribes of Israel – and the Greek author is unaware that for a long time there had been no “twelve tribes of Israel”
Okay, let’s say – why wouldn’t Jesus really feed the hungry away from home? The question is – why did He even bring them there? It seems that it remains to assume that he was fed up with all this popularity, He was tired of the enthusiastic crowd and wanted to escape somewhere to a deserted place, where no one would follow him, to hide from everyone – but they followed Him, literally dooming themselves to hunger with the children, you can’t get out of there quickly back to civilization, to get back you need to walk again on foot in the heat. And here, for sure, one portion of the distributed bread will not be enough, it is not out of order to pour manna from heaven onto a crowd of people like this, all along the way back home to Galilee.
What is the meaning of this hike outside the city remains a mystery – did Jesus decide to arrange a picnic for his disciples and admirers? Well, at least they could have stocked up on meat, or something, and fry a kebab.
In fact, all these incongruities have a simple explanation: Jesus went throughout the country preaching, and finally got to Tiberias. But did not go there on foot, accompanied by crowds…
Note that the narrative omits a huge and important period in the development of Jesus’ preaching after the first and second miracles: for more than one year He walks on foot throughout Galilee and Samaria – but does not go to Judea, they will kill anyone who dares to at least mention another god besides Jewish Yahweh-Jehovah. He preaches, works miracles, heals the sick on a massive scale throughout the country – and becomes widely known as a great prophet and miracle worker, His glory thunders throughout the country, the people rush to Him, and follow Him relentlessly and thoughtlessly, wherever He goes – the authors simply omitted all this as unnecessary. Why? Well, because all these “events” are generally needed by the authors only for the “bundle” of the narrative, which without such events would turn into a disorderly set of disparate, unconnected, utterances of Jesus of the type of e. Thomas. But the authors wanted to create exactly the narrative, the history of the development of the Teachings of Jesus as they understood it. To do this, arranging the available records in a certain meaningful order, as well as a small number of recorded testimonials about individual events that accompanied the sermon of Jesus, especially vivid, important and therefore clearly remembered, the authors, or rather, compilers, supplemented them with some connecting events that, perhaps, did not happen at all, or, in any case, the authors did not really know anything about them, having only inaccurate rumors in the form of folk tales that had developed over the decades after the Gospel events. And therefore, almost everything described by the evangelists is simply reconstructed or made up material in order to make more authentic (like 12 boxes) the narrative bundles, some events to which the already existing scattered records of Jesus’ utterances could be tied.
Such semantic connections are given away especially by the schematic description of events in them, in contrast to those few living, full of reliable details of vivid memories,