Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadHeinrich Meyer Commentary - John 6:10 - 6:13
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Joh_6:10-13. οἱ ἄνδρες ] They were men only who formally sat down to the meal, as may be explained from the subordinate position of the women and children; but the feeding of these latter, whose presence we must assume from Joh_6:4, is not, as taking place indirectly, excluded.
τὸν ἀριθμόν ] Accusative of closer definition. See Lobeck, Paralip. p. 528.
Joh_6:11. εὐχαρ .] The grace before meat said by the host. See on Mat_14:19. There is no indication that it contained a special petition (“that God would let this little portion feed so many,” Luthardt, comp. Tholuck).
διέδωκε ] He distributed the bread (by the disciples) collectively to those who were sitting; and of the fishes as much as they desired.[226]
Joh_6:12. It is not given as a command of Jesus in the synoptical account. As to the miracle itself,[227] and the methods of explaining it away, wholly or in part, see on Mat_14:20-21, note, and on Luk_9:17, and observe besides on Joh_6:13, that according to John the twelve baskets were filled with fragments of bread only (otherwise in Mar_6:43).
Luthardt, without any sanction from the text, assumes a typical reference in the baskets to the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus will not have anything wasted, and each apostle fills his travelling wallet with the surplus. John indicates nothing further, not even that the Lord wished to provide ἵνα μὴ δόξῃ φαντασία τις τὸ γενόμενον (Euthymius Zigabenus, Erasmus, and most others).
[226] Luther’s translation, “as much as He would,” rests upon an unsupported reading in Erasmus, edd. 1 and 2.
[227] By Ewald (Gesch. Chr. p. 442 sq. ed. 3) apprehended ideally, like the turning of the water into wine at Cana, as a legend, upon the formation of which great influence was excited by the holy feeling of higher satisfaction, which resulted from the participation in the bread of life partaken of by the disciples after Christ’s resurrection. This is incompatible with the personal recollection and testimony of John, whom Hase, indeed, supposes by some accident to have been absent from the scene. With equally laboured and mistaken logic, Schleiermacher (L. J. 234) endeavours to show that ver. 26 excludes this event from the category of σημεῖα . Weizsäcker leaves the fact, which is here the symbol of the blessing of Jesus, in perfect uncertainty; but the description by an eye-witness of the work effected in its miraculous character, which only leaves the how unexplained, does not admit of such an evasion.