John’s Feeding of the Five Thousand: A
Corporeal Depiction of the ‘Bread of Life’

Exegesis Paper on John 6:1-15

The story of the feeding of the five-thousand is situated firmly at the centre of the Gospel of John’s so-called ‘Book of Signs’, which makes up the first half of the Gospel. This paper takes the majority view that the Gospel was written likely in the years 90 to 95 CE. The author is thus most likely not the apostle John, which view has been adopted by tradition and is still held by some. Matters of authorship are not particularly relevant to this paper, except to note that by convention the author will be referred to as ‘John’, by which we do not mean the Apostle necessarily, but whoever composed the text – either individual or group.

​

The Feeding of the Five Thousand is a well-known miracle story, and one of five miracles of Jesus feeding multitudes attested in the canonical gospels. It is found in all three synoptic gospels also and is paralleled by a miracle of the feeding of the four thousand in the gospels of Matthew and Mark. In the Fourth Gospel it is surrounded by miracles and teachings, and notably it is set before the ‘Bread of Life’ Discourse later in the chapter. The image of the feeding of the five thousand with bread becomes a temporal link to the spiritual bread that Jesus refers to in his discourse. The echoes of eucharistic imagery are difficult to ignore, and may reflect a more developed church structure. It is certainly possible that this shows the beginning of a solidifying of cultic and ritual practices in the late first century.

The text by itself is a marvellous story of Jesus’ spiritual power. Just as the five thousand were well fed-on earth, with an abundance of leftover food, so too will the faithful be well-fed in the Kingdom. The people whom he has fed see something of this in Jesus, forcing him to escape to avoid being made king. His time to rule is not yet here, yet the feeding is a symbol of the abundance that is to come.

​

The message of the miracle is a profoundly Christological one on several levels, and the following paragraphs will make the argument that John wants his readers to identify Jesus as a kingly figure and a Mosaic figure. John’s Jesus is unlike any other king, and is greater even than Moses. He can feed the hungry with an abundance of food. However, the bread that feeds the multitude and sustains their mortal life is an earthly, corporeal symbol of the heavenly food that will sustain their eternal life. Greater even than the provision of bread is his provision of the Bread of Life – his own body, through which the faithful gain eternal life.