Five Loaves, Five Thousand; Seven Loaves, Four Thousand
The gospels are full of double events. A thing happens, then another writer tells of a similar but slightly different thing. The parable of the talents and of the pounds, for example. People who adore the Bible almost like Muslims adore the Koran have to get pretty slick to work it all together. Whereas naive intellectuals just assume its garbled recollections of eyewitness accounts and move on. I know because I’m one of them.
One example is the miracle of the feeding the thousands. There are the 5 loaves for the 5,000 (Matthew 14, Mark 6, Luke 9, John 6)) and the 7 loaves for the 4,000 (Matthew 15, Mark 8).
It takes no effort at all to assume these are two different stories of the same event that got wrote down decades later as two events.
Today I read
Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up?
Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up?
Matthew 16:9-10 (also Mark 8:19-20). Two real different events. Christ says it.
The revisionist can always claim that these passages were made up by a later scribe to account for what they were reading in the scripture. It’s possible. Still, the revisionist is now just as tangled in epicycles, explaining away inconvenient facts, and multiplying entities, as the Bible inerrant literalist is.
If we think the Bible writers could make mistakes, doubly so for the intellectuals.
P.S. Numbers in the Bible can be hard to swallow. The natural inclination with the 5 loaves for 5 thousand is to assume these are not factual data but were picked for the symmetry. 5 and 5. The 4 loaves for the 7 thousand suggests that, no, these are real approximations. (Though I would to hear any ideas about symbolic meanings of the 4 and the 7).
Ivan Wolfe
April 11, 2023
Some “historians” try to claim The Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain or the Parables of the Talents/Pounds are just variations on some original source. For some reason, they can’t conceive of something happening more than once (in a three year ministry, it’s doubtful he said totally different things in every locale he visited). As NT Wright points out, the revisionists and scholars often just lack historical imagination:
“The fact that Jesus was an itinerant prophet meant, clearly, that he went from village to village, saying substantially the same things wherever he went. Local variations would no doubt abound. Novelty would spring up in response to a new situation, or a sharp question or challenge. But the historical likelihood—and it is very likely indeed—is that if he told a parable once he told it dozens of times, probably with minor variations; that if he gave a list of (what we call) ‘beatitudes’ once, he gave such a list, probably with minor variations, dozens of times; that he had regular phrases with which he urged repentance, commended faith, encouraged the desperate, rebuked those he considered hard-hearted, spoke words of healing. The chances of his finding totally new things to say all the time, so that everything he said he said once and once only, must be reckoned at nil. . .
Within the peasant oral culture of his day, Jesus must have left behind him, not one or two isolated traditions, but a veritable mare’s nest of anecdotes, and also of sentences, aphorisms, rhythmic sayings, memorable stories with local variations, and words that were remembered because of their pithy and apposite phrasing, and because of their instantly being repeated by those who had heard them. Again and again he will have said cryptic words about having ears to hear, about the first being last and the last first, about salt and light, and particularly about Israel’s god and his coming kingdom. My guess would be that we have two versions of the great supper parable, two versions of the talents/pounds parable, and two versions of the beatitudes, not because one is adapted from the other, or both from a single common written source, but because these are two out of a dozen or more possible variations that, had one been in Galilee with a tape-recorder, one might have ‘collected’. Anyone who suggests that this is not so must, I think, either be holding on doggedly to the picture of the early church which I criticized in the first volume, or be in thrall to a highly dogmatic view of scripture, or simply have no historical imagination for what an itinerant ministry, within a peasant culture, would look like.”
Wright, N. T.. Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God
Eric
April 14, 2023
In Jesus the Christ, Talmage points out in a couple of places that conflicting information between the various gospels is evidence for their authenticity. Why? Because it shows a lack of collusion between the different writers, who each remember details differently–or heard them second-hand, in the cases of Mark and Luke.