John 6:1-21

Ancient Lens

What's the historical context?

A New Kind of Feast

A mountain, a gathering of thousands, and a great feast make for a classic ancient worship scene.  Add in the frequency of local festivals (in this case, Passover) and the mixing of cultures in the region, and you have the kind of location that an archaeologist could spend a career excavating.  A team of students would uncover the bones, analyze the ashes on the sacrificial altars, scrape the residue from the fragments of empty vessels, and pile up the idols and images that the ancient worshipers had brought to the site...

...except in this case, there were no idols, no sacrifices, no fires, and only the bones of two fish.  Even the…