In course of time the story of this spiritual banquet finding its way into Christian hymns and traditions would be literalized and amplified with variations. As Moses “spread a table” for Israel “in the wilderness,” so also, it would be said, did Jesus of Nazareth when he fed thousands of His followers on divine Bread. The Fish, _which is not mentioned in our Lord’s dialogue with the Disciples_, might naturally he added to the Bread, in the narrative, as a Eucharistic emblem. If the Fish had been mentioned by our Lord in the dialogue under question, my explanation would at once fall to the ground; but it is not mentioned; and the only difficulty is in explaining how Jesus could have spoken metaphorically of the “seven” as well as the “twelve” baskets. We can understand the “twelve”—each one of the twelve Apostles who ministered, receiving a return of spiritual “crumbs”—but whence the “seven?” Here I can but conjecture. You know that seven is what is called “a sacred number.” I find in the Fourth Gospel, xxi. 2-14, a story (evidently emblematic) of a miraculous meal of bread and fishes in which “seven” apostles took part. This may have been based upon some tradition in which seven apostles were recorded as having taken part in a spiritual Eucharistic feeding of the multitude. If that was so, it would follow that in the latter case there would be “seven baskets” of fragments, as in the former case there were “twelve,” corresponding to the number of the ministering apostles: and Jesus, in the dialogue under consideration, would remind His disciples how on two occasions where the bread of life was multiplied for the hungry, the twelve Apostles received the twelve baskets of crumbs, and the seven received the seven.
What is the argument in the words under consideration, according to your interpretation? I presume you would take them thus: “Why do you suppose I am talking about literal bread? Can I not make bread as I please? Do you not remember my two miracles, and how from five loaves for five thousand people there came twelve baskets of fragments, while from seven loaves for four thousand people there came seven baskets?[25] How then can I (or you while you are with me) be in need of literal bread?” But this interpretation is open to one serious objection. It is opposed to the whole tenour of Christ’s life. Nowhere else in the Gospels do we find that Jesus used any miraculous power to exempt Himself and His disciples from hunger. We are even taught that on one occasion He resisted a prompting to turn stones into bread, as being a temptation from the Evil One. For His disciples he might undoubtedly have been willing to do what He would not do for Himself; but that Jesus (like Elisha) so habitually used miraculous powers to shelter His disciples from the inconveniences and hardships of a wandering life, that he could encourage them to believe that he would do so on the present occasion, is a hypothesis quite inconsistent with the Gospel history. Moreover, plausible although this interpretation may appear to us—because we are familiar with the literalizing interpretation of the miracles of the Four Thousand and Five Thousand—it does not, if I may so say, bring out the proportion of the sentence. Surely it does not sound logical to say, “Did I not once supply you with bread for four and five thousand people (literally)? Why then do you not understand that I now speak of ‘leaven’ metaphorically?” Instead of this, should we not rather expect: “Do you not remember how on two previous occasions ‘bread’ was used spiritually? Why then do you not understand that ‘leaven’ is here used spiritually?” Now this is what I believe to have been the original meaning of the words, if genuine. I believe that Jesus intended to remind the Disciples how on two previous occasions the multitude had been fed with the spiritual Bread, the Bread of Life: “You know that that was what I meant before, when I spoke of Bread; how is it then that you do not understand my meaning now when I speak similarly of leaven?”