Shiny Happy People!

There’s a boy here who has 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. He’s like, I was on the way home with this. This is my— this is our dinner, man.

My mom’s gonna be mad.

Yeah. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Things are good. Things are good. Uh, I am, I am well fed. All of my loaves and fishes are, are doing well.

All right.

So, uh, we need to see if Factor has a loaves and fishes.

Uh, we need to get some Ezekiel bread. We need to get some loaves and fishes. Yeah, I’m sure there, there are a lot of Bible-based culinary experiences that they are missing out on.

I know. Maybe we’ll get a Bible-based meal planner sponsor. Who knows?

Yeah. We’ll get the high protein Samson plan.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, one of the things we’re talking about today on the show is the feeding of the 5,000, something that Dan, you have been sort of poring over lately.

A little bit, yeah.

On your YouTube channel. But before that, we’re going to do a What Is That about Transfiguration.

Hopefully we can all, by the end of the segment, we’ll all know how to do it, how to look super shiny.

Yeah, your Transfiguration and you.

Or maybe that’s just something for Jesus. It’s an all-New Testament show today. Yep, we’re, uh, we’re, we’re gonna have a bunch of Jesus, so buckle up and let’s dive into What Is That? Okay, so this week’s What’s That? As we said, it’s Transfiguration. It’s, uh, it’s, it’s something looking different than it did. Yes, but in this case, uh, it’s Jesus specifically.

It’s Jesus again.

Oh, that guy.

Yep, that’s what everybody wants to hear come Christmas morning. Oh, it’s Jesus.

He’s got, he’s got main character energy, and that’s what we’re rocking with.

Uh, yes. And, uh, we’ve got 3 different accounts of the Transfiguration. This is a synoptic tradition. This is absent from, uh, Mr. John, uh, the Gospel of John .

So John was out on his own, man. John was doing his own thing. He was feeling, I don’t know, he was feeling himself.

He must have been thinking about whoever it was that song was about. But we’ve got in Mark 9 , in Matthew 17 , and then in Luke 9 , we’ve got the story of the Transfiguration. And interestingly, and not insignificantly, in all three of the Gospels, this comes immediately after Jesus pulls everybody— well, his disciples aside and says, hey, just so you know, I’m gonna die. And then I’m gonna come back to life.

So, and he’s— yeah, it’s a very— it’s a little gruesome. It’s a little— and also, interestingly, so Mark 9 , Mark is— correct me if I’m wrong— Mark, we think, is the earliest of the Gospels.

Yes, that’s pretty widely agreed.

So that’s where we should start when we’re looking at this, right?

And Mark 9 , really, again, again, with the, you know, when they— when the— whoever came up with the chapters and verses, whoever— the versification— why would you start Mark 9 with the last paragraph of the last thing? Mark 8 ends with Jesus talking about how he’s going to die and he’s going to be tortured and all this stuff. And then Mark 9 starts with him saying, “And he said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power. ‘” Yes.

And scene, except this is the first verse of chapter 9.

Yeah, which is so weird.

So you can blame that on— who did the chapter divisions? I think it occurred with the— if it occurred with the verse divisions, well, the verse divisions would be relevant here. That was a dude named Robert Estienne, and I’m sure I’m butchering the pronunciation of that, but Stephanus is the other name that he went by. That was 1551, I believe. The version of the Textus Receptus with versification for the first time ever.

So I think he was sleepy when he worked on this one.

He could have been, yeah. Uh, and yeah, we get verse 2. You’ve got your pilcrow, uh, you’ve got your paragraph marker there in, in, uh, most modern Bibles. Starts off with 6 days later, and interestingly, both Mark and Matthew point out that this happens 6 days after Jesus, well, one says he’s going to die, but also predicts the second coming is going to happen before some of the people standing there passed away.

Right.

So basically said this, this is happening within this generation, which didn’t turn out to be 100% true or even 1% true. But in, in Luke, he changes it. Yeah. About 8 days later. Yeah.

He gets approximate about it.

Yeah. He’s just— he’s just— we’re just going to squint at this a little bit and we’re just going to get a little a little ambiguous just for literary effect. But Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves, and he was transfigured before them. And interestingly, if you look in the Greek, the word for transfigured is basically the word metamorphosis.

Oh, okay, sure.

Yeah, so we’re getting a little Kafkaesque.

Yeah, I was gonna say, with apologies to Franz Kafka. Yeah, and Jesus became a cockroach.

Yeah, but, uh, he was transfigured before them. A couple of things to point out here. 6 days later, the, uh, the previous story is taking place, a place called Caesarea Philippi, which is, uh, right by a place that’s now known as Banias. It’s kind of a very small kind of resorty retreat area, uh, in the very north of, uh, the modern state of Israel. In fact, when you’re driving up there, one side of the road is a fence that says, “Careful, landmines. Syria is on the other side of this fence.” Oh goodness, okay. So you drive up there and Banias is there, and they’ve got Pan’s Cave. There’s a big cave. There used to be some temples and stuff up there. Very cool area. But this is at the base of Mount Hermon. Which the mountaintop is actually in Syria.

Oh, okay.

So there’s an interesting thing going on here. Where did the Transfiguration take place?

Right.

That’s a big question.

And we know it’s on a mountain.

We know it’s on a mountain. At least the text says so. If it actually happened, then it was only on one mountain. What mountain was that? Right around the 3rd century CE, there was a mountain called Mount Tabor, or Tabor in Hebrew, that is further south. In fact, it’s right over the hill from Nazareth. If you’re in Nazareth, Nazareth is kind of in a little bowl surrounded by mountains on all sides. And then there’s a valley floor on the other side of the southern end of Nazareth. And then if you head out of Nazareth to the south and you get to the valley floor and you look to the left, there’s just this little mountain just sticking out from the valley floor, and now that’s Mount Tabor.

Significant because that’s also where we have the Song of Deborah from Judges 5 and the story of Deborah beating Sisera in battle from Judges 4 . So it, it has some significance. But more recently, people have said no, it’s probably Mount Hermon because they were at Caesarea Philippi, which is right at the base of Mount Hermon. Um, and so they, they would have been right there. So maybe it’s that mountain, or maybe it’s just a literary creation and it never happened. So yeah, we don’t know. It’s somewhere in between that.

There’s Anyway, they go up on a mountain.

They go up on a mountain is the main thing here. High on a mountaintop. Yes.

3 dudes walk up a mountain. A rabbi, a fisherman, a rabbi, and I don’t know. I don’t remember what Peter, James, and John did for their— And so it’s 4 dudes.

Yeah. He was transfigured before them, verse 3, and his clothes became dazzling bright, such as no one on earth could brighten them. And this is— the allusion here is to theophanies from the Hebrew Bible, where you’re seeing God and God is so brilliant and shiny that it’s like, you know, whiter than any fuller could get fabric, and it’s shiny and bright and intimidatingly, even deadly so. So this is divinization. This is showing that Jesus is divine. Jesus is, uh, like the Son of Man from Daniel 7 . Jesus is like God from Ezekiel 1 , just really shiny. You’re going to see a very similar thing happen in the Book of Revelation , the first chapter, when the person describes Jesus and his paps.

No mention of the paps here.

No paps this time.

Presumably are encased in the bright white clothing.

Yes, yes, they’re in there somewhere. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. So now we got the two main forerunners of the Christian gospel. Elijah, because Jesus is, you know, Elijah is supposed to return. Is Jesus Elijah? Is John the Baptist Elijah? John the Baptist had just been executed a couple chapters before in most of these stories.

Yeah, I got really confused about the whole Elijah returning thing. Like, there was all this stuff about— I looked at John the Baptist’s death, and there was this stuff about Jesus asking his disciples, “Who is the Messiah?” And they said, “Some say it’s Elijah, some say that it’s John the Baptist.” And anyway, it’s like it got— it’s a— so Elijah is a figure that I don’t understand. He’s a figure that plays prominently in their minds.

And I don’t understand what his position is for them.

So Elijah is supposed to— at the end of the book of Malachi , you have Elijah who’s going to come before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. So you identify that as the eschaton, the end times. And so there’s an expectation that develops in Greco-Roman period Judaism that when Elijah— Elijah will return to usher in the end times. And so some people suggest Elijah is a forerunner to the Messiah. Some people suggest Elijah is the Messiah. Um, so the messianic fervor of this time period sees Elijah as one of the main figures. Elijah is the canary in the coal mine of apocalypticism.

And I assume that this is also to do with— I know I’m not very familiar with modern Jewish tradition, but there is a Jewish tradition of like, is it Elijah that’s to come and visit on Passover or something like that?

Well, there’s the— you leave the chair empty and the door open for— and that’s for Elijah, right?

So, so yeah, this is all, this is all me just sort of piecing vague, fuzzy notions together in my little brain.

And then, okay, so, and then you have Elijah’s there. Yep, Moses is there, right?

Moses is there. And Moses— obviously Jesus is the new Moses. Like Deuteronomy 18 , one like Moses, you know, a prophet like Moses. Oh, that’s Jesus. What did Moses do? Went up a mountain, brought down the law. You also have Exodus 34 . What happens when Moses comes down off the mountain? His face is so shiny. This is divine imagery. That’s what’s going on here. Moses has been divinized. And that’s why he’s got to put the veil over his face, because he’s giving off divine vibes and it’s freaking the people out. So this is taking a bunch of different traditions associated with divine mediation, with messianism, with the mountain of God, with all of these things, and it’s all shoving it together in this one event. So this is a— this is a highly allusive, highly kind of referentially rich event.

And so you can find all kinds of things to read into here with Elijah and Moses talking to Jesus. But part of the idea is, look, these two are signing off on Jesus, basically. That Jesus’s identification with them, with their missions, the fulfillment of their missions, they’re okay with it, they’re signing off. So it’s a way to endorse, authorize Jesus as the new Moses, as the new Elijah, all this kind of stuff.

Then we get weird.

Yeah, well, I mean, what we get is these two, the three of them, Elijah, Moses, and Jesus are having a chat. They seem to be separate from Peter, James, and John.

We will get to James and John getting sleepy, but they’re not sleepy yet. Not in this version.

Right.

And Peter has a big idea, which is, hey, there’s 3 dudes here up on a mountain. He says, it’s good, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us set up 3 tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Okay, first of all, do we have a sense of— there are different versions of the ‘he did not know what to say.’ I think in Luke it’s like, uh, it says something about because he was dumb or something. Like, I’m not—.

I got classic Peter.

But one of what I think what’s mo— and, and there’s even, there’s even this idea that this has to do with kind of Greco-Roman ideas of, uh, metamorphosis and Greco-Roman ideas of, um, epiphany. Because you— what do you do where gods appear? You build ritual sites. You build cultic installations for them. So there could be a degree to which that’s going on in the background where Peter’s like, “Let’s build a shrine,” and it could be going, “No, no, no, no, no, no, we don’t do that. " I think more likely the idea is, “Well, they need a place to dwell. Let’s get them a place to dwell. " But the author of the story is going, “This is temporary. " Because maybe Peter thinks this is the second coming. Maybe Peter thinks this is everybody coming back. This is the beginning of the, uh, of the end days. And Peter has to be corrected.

No, no, this is just a brief drop-by visit.

This is, uh, yeah, the vibe that I got was that Peter was like, hey, we should turn this into Comic-Con. We’ll get each of you a booth. People can come up, they can talk to each one of you, they can get your signature, your autograph, and your headshot.

We’re gonna do numbers today.

Yeah, um, uh, but, uh, someone— there is an objection, uh, to this plan, specifically from a cloud.

Yes, uh, because a lot of cloud stuff to do.

Yeah, so a cloud comes in and overshadows them. Yeah.

And, and this is also, this is also referential because this happens on Mount Sinai, right? Cloud of smoke on Mount Sinai. That’s how, that’s where Moses encounters God. But yeah, and, and the cloud represents God’s presence because this voice is God’s voice, right?

And so the voice comes and says, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him,” which is, I guess, as sort of stands in counterpoise to the idea, “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased,” or whatever.

Now it’s saying, “Hey, pay attention. " Yeah, so it’s kind of re-upping the same thing that happens at the baptism of Jesus in Mark 1:11 , where you hear the voice from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. " And so, according to the traditional rendering. So we’ve got God once again. I think it is the only two times in the entire Gospel of Mark where you hear the Father’s voice.

And it’s at the baptism and the transfiguration, which are probably also prefiguring or foreshadowing the resurrection, when Jesus again is going to be divine, clouds of glory, um, cats and dogs, uh, living together. Yes, uh, total pandemonium. So, uh, you’ve got a lot of pandemonium.

Really? Not mass hysteria?

Mass hysteria, that’s what it— God, you know, you know, it’s—.

You’re the reference guy. I don’t know, when I call you out, you know something’s gone horribly wrong. You’ve had a, you’ve had a rough day, I know.

Well, as one great poet once said, I have approximate knowledge of many things. It may not be exact, but yeah, we’re looking backward and we’re also looking forward in this, but this is big time. But it is not quite the actual second coming. We’re not quite ushering in what we’re looking forward to. It’s not what Jesus promised. When, you know, he said there will be some still standing here today who will not have tasted death before the Son of Man comes in the clouds of glory. And so this is not that, okay? Despite a lot of folks who say it is that because they don’t want it to be the second coming, because that means— that means it’s wrong. And we’ve already talked about that. It’s just wrong. Let it be wrong. And, and then you have verse 8. Suddenly, when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore but only Jesus.

And Jesus is like, what’s going on, guys? Let’s go.

And they’re like, where’d Moses and Elijah go? Yeah.

And then what I think is funny is God says, listen to him. And then he doesn’t say anything. And then it goes on to say, as they were coming down the mountain, uh, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. Now, one of the things that’s probably going on here, uh, we’ve already had Jesus say, oh, I’m gonna die and then come back to life, and now we’ve got him saying, don’t tell anybody about this until I have come back to life. There’s no hint of this until up until this point in the Gospel of Mark . And I and other scholars think that the historical Jesus had no idea he was going to die, uh, and it wasn’t until after he’s dead and then we start to get reports of him being alive again that everybody goes sprinting back to the drawing board and goes to find ways to reinterpret the messianic expectation to have a suffering, dying, resurrecting Messiah.

And so this gets written into the narrative of Jesus’s life as if to say, oh yeah, they knew it was going to happen. Nobody said anything until after the resurrection because Jesus told them not to. So they were, they were in on it, right? No, like, you know, historically we know that nobody seemed to have had a clue, but in reality we know there was a secret. Jesus told them he was going to die and nobody talked about it until after his resurrection because Jesus ordered them not to, right after God said ‘Listen to what he says,’ right?

Okay, yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, Mark, the first of these gospels, was probably written, what, 20 years after Jesus’s death?

Uh, no, probably 40. So it is— yeah, I think most scholars would say this is either months before or months to a year or two after the destruction of the temple in summer of 70 CE.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, so if, uh, because it basically predicts the destruction of the temple, uh, but it’s not yet so far away that it’s not possible for someone to still be alive from Jesus’s generation. And so most likely that is somebody who can read the writing on the wall right before Rome is about to destroy the temple, or it’s someone writing after Rome has destroyed the temple.

Okay, fair enough. Now there’s one more thing I wanted to cover while we’re in Mark. Okay, before we get to, uh, Matthew and Luke. And that is just that, because this doesn’t exist in either of those other gospels, but it’s what comes immediately after. As they’re walking down the mountain, the apostles, they say, the disciples, whatever, they say to Jesus, first of all, in verse 10, it says, so they came to— so they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean. So that’s interesting that that’s how they’ve framed, you know, these two figures appearing as rising from the dead. I guess that makes sense. They’re dead. And then it says, then they asked him, what, why did these scribes, why did the scribes say that Elijah must come first? He then said to them, Elijah is indeed coming first to restore all things.

How then is it written about the Son of Man that he is to go through many sufferings and be treated with contempt. But I tell you that Elijah has come. And they did to him whatever they pleased, as it was written about him. So who— wait, Elijah has come, or Elijah is coming? Like, I— like, it’s very confusing to me. And also, did— when he says Elijah has come, is he referring to Elijah appearing to them on the mountain, or what? What are we referring to?

So I think the— so Jesus is first talking about traditions about the Son of Man and about Elijah saying, right, this is what’s expected. And but it’s not really what’s expected, because it says, how’s it written about the Son of Man that he is to go through many sufferings and be treated with contempt? That’s not really anywhere about the Son of Man. So just like talked about how the expectation was not that the Messiah would suffer and die and then rise from the dead. That seems to be a revisionist take on things. They’re retconning the Son of Man. And so it seems like Mark’s already doing that and having Jesus say, “Oh yeah, Son of Man’s going to suffer.” And you’re like, “I don’t remember that part of the tradition.” And the same is about Elijah. Elijah was certainly persecuted in his life, but the reappearance of Elijah was not supposed to be associated with suffering and stuff like that.

I think we’re probably kind of in a not totally clear way identifying Elijah with John the Baptist, because John the Baptist is the one who just suffered execution at the hands of Herod Antipas, one of the Herods. Well, no, it wasn’t Philip. It was another Herod, but it was Philip’s wife Herodias, and Salome, I think, was the one who said, “Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a plate.” So I think it’s kind of a further reference to John the Baptist. If we’ve got to identify Elijah with somebody, I think that’s the most likely candidate. But yeah, it is kind of a veiled, kind of ambiguous, “Yeah, the tradition was like this, and you know, it’s been fulfilled.” It’s like, “The tradition is not like that.” But Jesus is just like, “Hey, God said to listen to me, so just shut up.” So yeah, they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written about him.

It’s not really written about him, but they did do whatever they pleased to John the Baptist, and he had a bad time. I think that’s probably what’s going on there.

I’m open to being corrected though. If there are any other folks out there who know better than me who are listening, um, by all means, yeah, write in.

Um, as in terms of differences between the gospels, it doesn’t seem to me that there are many differences, uh, as I read through them all. Other than, uh, Luke having, um, James and John being sleepy.

Uh, which was so weird to me, which I think is probably prefiguring the Gethsemane, uh, event where they are sleepy there and they don’t— and Jesus is like, you couldn’t even stay awake with me. Um, I’m gonna eat all the pizza. The movie’s not even over yet. You couldn’t stay awake.

Um, that sounds like a personal life, uh, thing that’s happened to you many times.

There are a couple of differences. An interesting one in Matthew says Jesus’s face shone like the sun.

Oh yeah, not just his clothes but his face.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that’s more directly— I mentioned that Moses came down from the mountain and was all shiny. It was his face that was shining. So Matthew is like, come on, Mark, let’s get more specific. We’re talking about this, right? So let’s get all Exodus 34 .

Well, and then John— or sorry, Luke one-ups him and says, uh, his face looked different and his clothes, uh, became as bright as a flash of lightning.

Yes. Yeah. So, and then his, his breath was pleasing. Um, yeah, he— there, there are expansions that are going on because all— it probably— Mark was first, Matthew was second, Luke was third. Everybody is making use of the, the gospel that came before, but they’re probably going, well, I gotta one-up him. I can’t be like, “You know, I can’t— I got to show up to this discussion.” So they’re expanding on things. And we’ve already talked about how Luke is like, “Oh, it was, I don’t know, like 8 or something days later. It was in the rough vicinity.” And but yeah, we’re also looking forward to Gethsemane, looking forward to the resurrection, looking forward to Jesus’s glorification as a resurrected being, looking forward even to the Second Coming when Jesus will come as the Son of Man in the clouds of glory and all shiny and everything. So, so we’re looking backwards, we’re looking forward. It’s a, it’s a big literary pivot point in the gospel story.

All right, well, I think that that about covers the Transfiguration. Uh, somebody get Jesus some powder so he’s not quite so shiny, and we will move on. So let’s just dive into it with chapter and verse. This week’s chapter and verse comes from all four of the Gospels. Woo!

This is, apart from the resurrection, the only miracle that is attested in all four Gospels.

Just so you’re aware. Yes. Significant.

There you go.

Get at it, John.

Finally.

Finally, John gets into the fray.

Yeah. Shows up, gets on the board.

Yeah, exactly.

And this, our earliest account of this, and we are, it is the official position of the Data Over Dogma podcast, if I may just declare it so that Mark is the first gospel, Matthew is the second, Luke is the third, and John is the fourth in order of initial composition, even though I think Luke underwent some revisions in the second century CE, mainly to add the first two chapters.

Neither here nor there.

We’re in Mark 6 , starting in verse 30, for the beginning of the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000. And as we’re going to see, where exactly we are is not totally clear.

Not only is it not clear, it feels like, uh, different authors have a different conception of where this is.

Yes, there is a bit of a divergence, a bit of a contradiction, if you will, uh, regarding where this miracle took place. And the biggest division is going to be between the Synoptics and the Gospel of John .

Yeah, okay.

Because one of the Synoptics actually says this is where it took place, another one doesn’t really agree with that, and John really doesn’t agree with that.

John just blows the whole thing up.

Yeah, yeah. But let’s just fire away and we’ll talk about the details as events warrant, as needs must.

We’re somewhere on Galilee, right?

We’re in the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, yes.

And we have just gotten back—Jesus has sent his disciples off. He has empowered them to forgive sins, to cast out demons. And then we hear about the death of John the Baptist. And the very next verse after this is where we begin the story. The apostles gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught. Yeah. So they’re excited about, hey, it all worked. Check this out. He said it all worked.

Yeah. Congratulations. You got John killed. You got the Baptist killed. Yeah. I will say it was an abrupt transition between—.

Yeah. Yeah.

Between John the Baptist’s death. And then I feel like we’re missing something. I feel like there’s something in the middle that should be between them. But anyway.

Yeah. And you see Matthew kind of provide that segue. Because in Matthew it says, now when Jesus heard this, referring to John the Baptist, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.

That’s right.

Yeah. So in Matthew, Matthew’s like, come on, guys, we’re not giving Jesus any treatment here. We’re going to let Jesus mourn his buddy, his friend. So Matthew does that, whereas Mark is just like, and the apostles came back and they were like, cool, look at this I can do things. Yeah. He said to them, come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while. So ultimately we end up in a deserted place, whether it’s because Jesus is like, I just got to clear my head, or he’s like, hey, let’s go. Let’s go do a little staycation. We’re just going to go rest.

Well, you say we end up in a deserted place, but we don’t. Everybody gets on a boat and they just—they head toward what they think will be a deserted place. But then all the people in the nearby villages see this boat headed toward that deserted place.

And beat it there.

Yeah. Well, and in Mark, they’re leaving crowds and other crowds end up beating them to where they’re headed.

Right.

Because the end of Mark 6:31 says, for many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat. And this is parallel to something that happens in Mark 3:20 , where they’re in Capernaum, they’re at what scholars think probably was Jesus’s actual house in Capernaum. And it says that they were crowding around so much that they didn’t even have space to eat. So same issue, you got these people crowding around and they’re like, “This party’s dead anyway, man. Let’s get outta here.” Let’s get outta here. And then verse 32, they went away in a boat to a deserted place by themselves. And this probably just means they were like, we’re going to go down the shoreline a piece, right, where there’s not a village or there’s not a crowd of people. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them.

This is your moment to remind—to remember that Galilee is not a sea, but rather a lake.

A lake.

And not very big, like, you know, it’s like 1/7 the size of Tahoe. I know this because I looked it up and tried to compare it to lakes that I know.

So like, oh yeah, it’s still like a decent-sized lake, but yeah, it’s not, it’s not enormous.

If you’re a Utah person, uh, just think of Utah Lake but cut it in half. It’s a, it’s a decent size, but it’s not, it’s not big.

And apparently you can beat a boat to a desert, deserted place from wherever you are on foot?

I think the circumference of the Sea of Galilee is like, it might be what, 28 miles? 32 to 33 miles. So that’s the circumference of the Sea of Galilee.

But it’s not like they had roads back then and you could just hike down the road. It would have been, the shoreline would have been pretty problematic to navigate. But yeah, so they’re sprinting down ahead of him. Uh, as he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. This is important. And he began to teach them many things. When it grew— so he’s on the shore, like he’s gotten off the boat. Yeah, he’s just like, gather round, my people, um, and I will sing you the song of my people.

I feel bad for the crowd in Mark because other crowds get to be healed by him, but yeah, this crowd just gets to be lectured.

Yeah, they get a lecture. Uh, when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, this is a deserted place and the hour is now very late. Send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat. So they’re, they’re on the shore somewhere. They’re not near much, but there are villages, uh, scattered around, roundabout. Yeah, yeah. But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” Which is just what you expect from Jesus.

No, no, keep them here, but like, you guys feed them.

Yeah, he hit them with, uh, I’m rubber, you’re glue. Um, they said to him, “Are we to go and buy 200 denarii worth of bread and give it to them to eat?” And 200 denarii would be like, uh, a half year’s wages. Oh, okay. A lot of people requiring a lot of bread. Yeah, it would be 6 months’ wages to pay for it all. And he said to them, how many loaves have you? Go and see. When they had found out, they said, 5 and 2 fishies. Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. And this is a— this is another interesting detail. Why would you say the grass is green? Like narratively, the Gospel of Mark is pretty sparse about detail. When the author of the Gospel of Mark provides detail, there’s a reason for it. And some people use this as an indication that this is historical. This is a true historical memory.

Why would he say the grass is green unless it was actually green? Well, I see green grass almost every day. I don’t tell stories where I say, “The grass, it was green!” Can’t you see I’m telling the truth?

I mean, Israel is not the greenest of places, uh, in the world.

Well, the Galilee is the most humid, and the most, uh, that’s where most of the water falls, uh, and, and also the, uh, the sources for the Sea of Galilee, um, are closer to Galilee. And yeah, so anyway, um, it, it could indicate that it happened in the spring or early summer. And so some people use that to indicate this happened at Passover, which is one of these undesigned coincidences, magical ways to prove that Mark and John agree with each other without colluding. But the real purpose of identifying the grass as green has to do with the fact that Jesus was like, “Huh, look at them. They’re like a sheep without a shepherd.” I’ll be that shepherd. I’ll be the good shepherd. I will be the good shepherd who causes them to lie down in green pastures, just like it says in Psalms 23 .

So this is a literary allusion to things going on elsewhere, and specifically the green grass, the sheep without a shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. So we’ve got Psalms 23 being alluded to with these details that otherwise don’t really mean much.

So other than green grass is more comfortable to sit on than brown grass.

Yeah. Yeah, we’ll just, we’ll just go with that. So, but, but there’s an— there’s another allusion here, um, that we can talk about now. Uh, the idea of feeding somebody, feeding a crowd of people with not adequate amount of food and getting everybody and even having stuff left over. That doesn’t come from— that’s not original to this story. That’s actually an allusion to something that happens way back in 2 Kings 4 , where we have Elisha, who’s dealing with all kinds of different folks and doing all kinds of different magic tricks.

But his servant said, how can I set this before 100 people? So he repeated, give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord, they shall eat and have some left. He set it before them, they ate and had some left according to the word of the Lord. So we’ve got a miracle where food is mysteriously and magically multiplied. And so we’re doing the same thing here.

Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. First of all, okay, I hear— I very clearly see a reference there. But Elisha’s miracle, can we just say, everybody still gets what, a fifth of a loaf of bread? When you’re dividing 20 loaves among 100 people, you’re still getting a good amount of bread. Yeah, depending on the size of the loaf. It seems like that seems less miraculous.

Uh, so a good meal. So that’s a Simpsons reference that I think only my wife would get.

Oh no, somebody is about to comment. Someone’s already in the comments in YouTube, uh, telling me, telling us that they caught that reference.

Okay, good.

Uh, anywho, and matter of fact, many people.

Go do it, do it. Make that comment, please. Also, so, okay, Jesus has 5 loaves, not 20, and 5,000 people. Can I just mention, by the way, I did a little Googling just to figure out how many people probably lived in the surrounding villages and whatever.

It seems really difficult to get 5,000. You know, a fishing village is probably 100 to 300 people, a bigger village maybe up to 500 people, but like getting 5,000— and it says that they’re men too.

It says 5,000 men. If there are women and children there, then that’s— then it’s—.

Then they’re ancillary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it’s like— so like 5,000 seems like an incredible number of people to have all gathered.

Uh, yes.

Just on a random Tuesday.

Yeah, yeah. It’s like all of northern Galilee is— has gathered around the seashore in this deserted place.

So it is. And so it’s taking the miracle of Elisha and it’s just multiplying it by 50. Right. And saying, we’re going to— we’re going to escalate things here. Yeah. We’ve got less food. We got far more people. And it says in verse 20, and all ate and were filled.

So it’s not that they, uh, they weren’t rationing it out. Everybody ate as much as they wanted, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, 12 basketfuls. So we’ve got— it’s not just that, hey, there’s some scraps left over, it’s we got plenty of food left over. Far more is left over than we started with.

Right, right. Now we’ve got 15 fish and 32 loaves left.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, something ridiculous. So the idea is to really eclipse the previous miracle.

So that’s that.

Elisha.

Well, I was in— I was in— I somehow scooted over to Matthew. He looked up to heaven, blessed and broke. They took up 12 baskets full. Yeah. So they still get the 12 baskets full, divided the fish among them all. Also, think about this. How long would it take you to break up bread and hand bread and fish to 5,000 people?

Well, I will tell you, I was a Mormon deacon once. I was in charge of distribution of broken bread. If you’re really, really on the ball, you can get it done pretty quick. You can, you can. But no, you’re right.

But that’s just, that’s just one little tiny thumb-sized piece of bread per person, right? Yeah. And yeah, half a swallow of water.

Yeah, it’s funny. I’ve heard many sort of either apologetic or explanatory takes on how this miracle could have happened. And, and, you know, I think, I think it’s very funny to me when people do that, because it’s supposed to be a miracle. So it’s just so like, yeah, everybody got fed and there was a bunch left. I, but like, I remember being a kid and being told that what probably happened was that everybody passed the basket around and nobody— and they pretended to eat, but nobody actually took anything.

Sorry, I was just going to push on, push back on that 5,000 because Matthew says, and I don’t know how to interpret this, Matthew says, and those who ate were about 5,000 men besides women and children. So does that mean that there were women and children there?

Yes. Yes. Matthew is— Mark doesn’t say that explicitly. Matthew is like, I will say that.

Yeah, it sounds like Matthew’s like, oh, Mark just said there are only men. We can, we can make this miracle double. Yeah, if we just say there were also women and children there that we’re just not even counting in the 5,000.

Yeah, yeah, that makes it even more escalated, even more miracle-ier. So, so here’s, so here’s something interesting. The very next verse of Mark 6 , it says, immediately Jesus told them to get in the boat. And they headed across to Bethsaida. Yeah. So Bethsaida is a city that is somewhere on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. There’s kind of the traditional site of Bethsaida, which is up the little feeder river a little bit. And then within the last few years, scholars are pretty sure they’ve identified the actual site of Bethsaida, a place called El-Araj.

And it’s closer to the shore. And it’s just an archaeological site that’s smaller than the more traditionally identified site of Bethsaida, but it’s on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. According to Mark, they are across the Sea of Galilee, or at least at some distance from Bethsaida, and they hop in the boats to head to Bethsaida.

Right.

So that’s going to be significant when we look at the other tellings. Matthew, we already pointed out, Jesus was in his feelings and needed to go off by himself.

Uh-huh.

But when the crowds heard it, followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. So yeah, Matthew, they get— they get, uh, sick people get cured. And then, uh, when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, this is a deserted place and the hour is now late. Send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves. And then Jesus said to them, they need not go away. You give them something to eat. They replied, we have nothing here but 5 loaves and 2 fish. And he said, bring them here to me. Ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Matthew is kind of balking at the Psalms 23 reference of Mark, and it’s just like, they just sat down on the grass, it’s no big deal. He breaks, he blesses, he gives them to the disciples, the disciples give them to the crowd. So maybe Matthew’s like, look, it’s unreasonable to have Jesus handing stuff to 5,000 people, so we’re going to divide it up a little bit. All ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over, broken pieces, 12 baskets full. And those who ate were about 5,000 men besides women and children.

No hint of, of where this is taking place in this telling, because I think— and I think you do not have— it does say immediately he made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side while he dismissed the crowds. But it doesn’t say anything about where they were headed.

Right.

And then after he dismissed the crowds, he went up to the mountain by himself to pray. And yeah, this— and, and in Mark and Matthew, this is where we then get the, uh, stilling, the calming the storm story, and the walking on water. Uh, Luke—.

And we’re gonna have to do that at some point because I read ahead on that and I was like, wait, what’s the time frame? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s late at night, it’s in the morning, it’s all the things. So yeah, eventually. And also walking on water is a pretty cool trick, so we should talk about that.

Now we get to Luke, and then the story starts differently. On their return, the apostles told Jesus all they had done. Then, taking them along, he slipped quietly into a city called Bethsaida. Yeah, we’re being quiet. And, and, uh, and so this contradicts Mark.

Yeah, it seems like he misread Mark and was just like, and, and was just like, oh yeah, they’re in Bethsaida. He did. He just wasn’t reading carefully, and he just saw the word Bethsaida and was like, okay. So that’s–.

Well, I think there’s a reason for Bethsaida, and we’ll get to it in just a second, because the rest of the story is more or less following after what Mark says. When the crowds found out about it, they followed him, and he welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God and healed those who needed to be cured. So, so he’s not only teaching, he’s also healing. So Mark says teaching, Matthew says healing, Luke says teaching and healing. Why not both, right? Um, the day was drawing to a close, and the Twelve came to him and said, send the crowd away so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside to lodge and get provisions, for we are here in a deserted place. I thought we were in Bethsaida, right?

Now we’re in a deserted place. Not only a deserted place, a deserted place that has villages and countrysides in between the deserted place and Bethsaida. So either he likes to do an awful lot of walking or maybe sprinting while he’s healing and teaching, or Luke has messed something up. So I think what’s going on here is Luke is basically repeating what he’s found in Mark and Matthew with little changes here and there. But for whatever reason, he throws Bethsaida in. And I think there’s a reason he threw Bethsaida in.

And it is that there’s another part of Luke where Jesus says, woe to you, Chorazin, and woe to you, Bethsaida. If the miracles that had been performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes. Here’s the thing. So in Mark, there’s a miracle that happens in Bethsaida. In fact, it’s a couple chapters later. He heals a blind man in Bethsaida quite explicitly.

So when Mark says, woe to you, Bethsaida, because of these miracles you didn’t repent, we know what he’s talking about. Oh, the blind man got healed in Bethsaida. That’s the story. In Matthew, you’ve got the woe to you, Chorazin and Bethsaida, but there’s no miracle that happens in Bethsaida. Luke is probably looking at this and going, I don’t have anything happening in Bethsaida. I need– because he does not include Mark’s story of the blind man being healed in Bethsaida. I got to have something going on in Bethsaida. So he probably just like, uh, uh, uh, here, and has this occurring in Bethsaida so that it makes sense for Jesus to condemn Bethsaida for not repenting despite the miracles that were done there. So I think that’s what’s going on with the inclusion of Bethsaida. But yeah, that does seem to contradict Mark. So, and then the story kind of basically follows the same outline. There were 5,000 men, they sit down. Oh, and something we didn’t talk about, they sit down in groups in Mark, they sit in groups of, I think, 50s and hundreds.

And Luke says they sit down in groups of about 50 each. This has reference to Jesus as Moses leading the people, because there are groups of tens, fifties, hundreds in the story of the Exodus. That’s how they divide up into their companies in the wilderness in the Exodus narrative. So you’ve got an additional allusion there. And then all the details are pretty much the same there. And then did you have anything you wanted to say about Luke?

I don’t know. Yeah, not really. Okay, the main– yeah, I noticed that Luke, uh, yeah, the Bethsaida thing is the main thing about Luke. Let’s get to John.

John. Yeah, and I love this story in John because, uh, John 6:1 says, after this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. Yeah, fair enough, except the verse right before that – the story right before that is Jesus sermonizing in Jerusalem. Oh, so this is, this is a pretty significant literary seam where John is probably, you know, he’s editing, he’s, he’s moving things around, and for whatever reason he’s in Jerusalem. And the next verse says, then he went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. A large crowd kept following him because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Now here’s John’s main contradiction. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now, if you recall, in the Synoptics, it’s all happening on the seashore. Yeah. Yeah, Jesus sells seashells to 5,000 men on the seashore.

Now, and then we get this verse. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. So an odd detail.

Just some world building. It’s fine. That’s good.

But this is something that some people identify as an indication that, oh, Mark says it was green grass. That’s because that happens around the Passover. So this is these, you know, interlocking puzzle pieces. It all fits together except for the fact that John is the only gospel that says Jesus’s ministry was 3 years long. The Synoptics all have Jesus’s ministry lasting about 1 year, culminating in the Passover.

Right.

So it makes no sense to— in order to read an additional Passover into the Synoptics, you have to just ignore the fact that most scholars think there was no additional Passover in the Synoptics. You’re basically begging the question. So, so no, we’ve got, we’ve got another contradiction here between John and these Synoptic Gospels. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming towards him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ He said this to test him, for he knew himself what he was going to do. Philip answered, ‘200 denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.’ One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, ‘There is a boy here who has 5 barley loaves and 2 fish, but what are they among so many people?’ And then we have the blessing.

I love this.

The blessing and the breaking, not the breast thing.

There’s a— yeah, it’s very interesting to me that now we’ve got a boy. Before it was just like, hey, what do you have? I don’t know, what’s on the boat? Uh, we got— I don’t know. And now there’s—.

Now there’s a kid who’s like, yeah, I was on the way home with this. This is my— this is our dinner, man.

My mom’s gonna be mad.

Yeah, but, uh, but people make a big deal out of the fact that Philip is a character now who speaks in the story, and Philip does not speak and plays no role in any narratives in any of the synoptic gospels.

Oh, at all?

At all.

His name is mentioned once, and that is in listing off disciples. Okay, that’s it. Now there’s another Philip, uh, who is mentioned, and that is, uh, one of Herod’s sons.

Of course there’s another Philip. There’s always— there there’s no character that has the— that is the only one of his name.

So there are 4 times in the Gospel of John where the narrative talks about Philip.

Oh wow.

So Philip is a, is a figure in the Gospel of John . Now some people will say, oh, Philip, according to John chapter 1, another place where John is talking about Philip, says he’s from Bethsaida. That’s where he lives. And so you have some folks going, hmm, interesting that he would be asking the local where they’re going to get the food. So that’s another thing that people will point to as an indication that we’ve got these undesigned coincidences that are really— even if you accept them as undesigned coincidences, at best it just demonstrates that they’re all working from a shared source of some kind. Could be actual historical events, could be a text, could be an oral tradition.

I watched your video about the guy talking about undesigned coincidences, and I’m suddenly realizing, like, what is a designed coincidence?

Yeah, that would be like an author like, oh, he says this, I’m gonna write something that fits that. So even if you do have something that is a coincidence where it’s like, yeah, these things fit together, they all were literarily dependent upon the preceding Gospels. So there’s not really a way to say this coincidence was not designed. Like, they can all be designed.

Yeah. Well, and all of these were written, and therefore there is a designer who is— like, maybe they’re not— maybe they don’t intend the coincidence, and maybe they do. I don’t know.

So hard to say.

Hard, hard to say indeed. Hard to prove. But that does not stop people from insisting, uh, that’s the case, right? Um, so Jesus takes the loaves, gives thanks, distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, gather up the fragments left over so that nothing may be lost. So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the 5 barley loaves left by those who had eaten, they filled 12 baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, this is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world. When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

Quiet.

One— there was a video one time I was tagged in some, like, 50 times. Oh, and I didn’t really want to respond to it, but I ultimately did because I thought it was a cool thing. It was of a woman talking about how Jesus served sushi. In the New Testament. And people were like, what? And it’s this story. It’s like they didn’t— it’s not cooked. They never talk about cooking it. Yeah, they just talk about dividing it up. And, uh, and I— and that’s a clever way to understand the story. But really, this is salted and dried fish. That’s how they— that’s how they, uh, preserve the fish at the time. Salt it, dry it. Fish jerky, basically.

Um, and then it lasted much longer if it wasn’t just fresh. It could have just come fresh out of the Well, no, that would be the sushi part of it, and they didn’t cook it. It would have been, yeah, dried and salted.

That makes more sense.

All right. Well, there you go. Jesus withdrawing himself into a mountain is where John ends it. John is by far the best storyteller of the gospel writers.

I think, yeah, John is really stretching his kind of literary legs. Uh, when it comes to some of the details here. Yeah, he’s had the longest time to, to think about it. Everybody else had to get there. Everybody else was on a stricter deadline. They got their manuscripts in decades before John.

Yeah. Uh, all right, well, there you go. Um, 5,000 people, 5 loaves of fishes— that’s, uh, loaves and fishes. It’s, it’s a lot.

It’s a lot.

It’s a miracle is what it is.

But, you know, 5,000 people can’t be wrong.

That’s right.

All right. What I heard.

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Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology