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Dan Copes wrote:

Hi, guys —

  • When Christ fed the five thousand (Matthew 14:13-21) did He perform a miracle?

My priest said on Sunday that he believes the fish and bread did not miraculously multiply but rather the people gathered together (that day) and shared their food and that was the Miracle.

Dan

  { When Christ fed the five thousand was it a miracle or was the miracle the people sharing the food? }

Paul replied:

Dan,

There is no place in Scripture that states people shared their food. This is an added extrapolation of the Scriptural text in order to bring about a point that some people would want to make regarding the ethics of sharing.

With some people of a more cynical bent, it is their way of dismissing the possibility that God could, or did, perform supernatural miracles.

Whatever the motivation, we should avoid placing extra biblical meaning to the text and always stick to how Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium interpret the Scriptures.

Paul

Dan replied:

Hi, Paul —

Thank you for the quick response.

It was a tough homily for me. In one statement, he tries to explain transubstantiation, which is an amazing event, with all its power and glory, and then he switches to how Christ really didn't multiple the fish and bread?

Dan

Paul replied:

Dan,

You make a great point with that comparison.

Paul

John replied:

Hi, Dan —

Unfortunately, the priest in question has spent too much time listening to modern biblical scholars.

Basically, some these guys don't have anything better to do than to sit around and think up stupid theories, like the one you heard from your priest.

The Church defends the historicity of the Gospels. That doesn't mean that we have to believe in the precise chronology of events as recorded by a particular evangelist, but we do believe what they recorded actually happened.

There were two instances in which Jesus fed the multitudes. In one instance, he fed 4,000 (Matthew 15:32-39); in the other he fed 5,000. (Matthew 14:13-21) Each miracle happened on different sides of the Sea of Galilee.

  • If you read the original Greek from the accounts they were written in, you can see that He multiplied different kinds of fish, so why on earth would the Gospel writers include such details, if the incidents didn't happen?

Again, the problem is with some modern critics that fancy themselves as intellectual elites gifted with a special knowledge. They are nothing but a bunch neo-gnostics who can never accept that the text means what it says, and says what it means.

John

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