Religion is not about thinking things but about doing things that change you at a profound level.

Karen Armstrong

The Messianic Meal 1

Eating with Publicans and Sinners
Mass Feedings

Abstract

Jesus has a reputation of being a wine bibber and glutton, always entertaining, eating and drinking. It is the Christian way of disguising that Jesus always conducted “masses” with his converts in the form of the messianic meal, called by Christians, the Eucharist. But, early on, it degenerated. Years after the Last Supper no miraculous event had occurred and the messianic meal of the Essenes degenerated among gentiles into a free meal and a chance to get drunk. Paul had to give them a deeply venerable way of thinking about it. Urging decorum, he told them it was a sacred meal involving the body of Christ, and falsely explained its origins at the Last Supper. He gave as his new interpretation of old Essene liturgy that Jesus told his disciples to break bread and pass a cup “in remembrance of him”.

Eating with Publicans and Sinners

Levi, son of Alphaeus is recruited sitting at the receipt of custom and therefore assumed to be a the tax-collector, although for all anyone knows he might have been waiting in a queue to pay his tax. However, since Jesus was aiming to save lost Jews, it is reasonable to assume that Levi was indeed the publican. It mirrors the recruitment of the earlier apostles by the Sea of Galilee, the command by Jesus being obeyed hypnotically by the disciple. We can conclude that it is written thus for harmony and it was not the real recruitment of Levi, which we take to have been the incident of the paralytic. It is added here to provide an explicit link to the next story which is about Jesus dining with sinners because Levi in the previous pericope was depicted as a physical paralytic and so could not have also held down a responsible job. In reality he could well have been a tax collector because his paralysis was metaphorical.

A tax collector here is a customs official collecting duty for Herod Antipas. (If we are in Judaea he is collecting tribute.) Coin was unclean and Levi was therefore a Herodian or a Sadduccee and therefore not well regarded by the Jews in general and the Pharisees and Essenes in particular. Tax collectors were dishonest, keeping a proportion of the taxes collected for themselves and extorting money from people. Someone like Levi must have been regarded as the lowest of the low and certainly, as a collaborator with the foreign ruler, an impossible man to recruit for the Jewish nationalist cause. Whence his paralysis in the previous story.

References to tax collectors (or publicans) and sinners in the gospels mean respectively collaborating Jews and Hellenised and therefore apostate Jews. Jesus wanted to give them a last chance to enter God’s kingdom before it suddenly arrived and its gates were shut to all except the righteous.

As Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him. And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
Mark 2:15-2:17

Taxgatherers were agents of the High Priest, supporters of the Sadducee party of collaborators with the Herodians and the Roman rulers of Judaea. They were among the most hated people in the land yet Jesus, the prospective leader of God’s revolution was dining with them and evidently urging them to join the Nazarenes. The sinners were ordinary Jews, the men of the land, who were not fastidiously observant of the law of Moses, and perhaps also those who were influenced by Greek culture and fashions.

Pharisees shunned such people. Pious Jews in general did not consort with the impious. Essenes and Pharisees alike felt this way in particular because both regarded themselves as separated out. For Jesus impenitent publicans were just as bad as the gentiles (in Mt 18:17, he equates the two), but they were still God’s chosen and therefore worth saving. When C G Montefiore, a Jewish scholar, wrote:

He did not avoid sinners, but sought them out—they were still children of God,

he expressed the sentiment of the Nazarene militants led by Jesus and before him by John, but these sinners had to repent and be baptized to be accepted by the Nazarenes—they could not continue their sinful work. Levi and the publicans and sinners in this episode had repented and had been baptized into God’s army. The meat they were eating was the bread and wine of the messianic meal of the Essenes which signified acceptance among the elect of God.

Mark has placed this episode after the recruitment of Levi to make it sound as if Jesus simply entertained the tax-collector, taking him home to dinner with masses of his friends. Jesus must have had a huge house and resources for a poor man. Can anyone seriously believe that this was merely a banquet? This is a separate incident depicting, not a feast but the messianic meal, called by Christians, the eucharist. It is an instance, like the mass feedings, of the spiritual filling of his converts, not charity or gluttony. Jesus explains:

I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

Jesus is not charitably feeding down and outs in his mansion but converting Jews who had abandoned their religion by offering them spiritual food, the messianic meal in anticipation of the coming kingdom. The house will have been an Essene communal refrectory—a Bethsaida (House of Food). In the corresponding part of Matthew 9:13 Jesus adds:

I will have mercy and not sacrifice,

quoting Hosea 6:6:

For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings,

as if to demonstrate that he was an Essene, for whom this and Proverbs 15:8:

The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord: but the prayer of the upright is his delight,

a quotation which appears several times in the scrolls, express their beliefs. Matthew repeats the quotation from Hosea later (Mt 12:7). Now Jesus could only have given this quotation in answer to some question. As it is, it is a non sequitur. Some of the repentant, possibly Sadducees, wanted to know why the sinners were not offering a suitable sacrifice of purification—a sin offering—rather than having a simple meal.

Jesus’s reply fully and concisely expresses the Nazarene attitude to the sinners of the children of Israel and it is expressed in a way which perfectly explains the healing miracles as metaphors for those who have repented of their sins. They are healed metaphorically and the physical sicknesses which are healed are really spiritual sicknesses. By winning over some of the opposition your foes are weakened and your own cause is strengthened. Jesus’s mission was to win over the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He wanted as many people among the elect as he could get both to save the lost sheep and to succeed in establishing God’s kingdom. Although it is absent in Mark and placed in different parts of the other gospels (Mt 18:11-14; Lk 15:1-10), the parable of the lost sheep should be placed here: the shepherd rejoices when he finds the one sheep that had strayed of his flock of a hundred. The ninety nine which did not stray are the righteous. They are already in the fold. Luke attaches to his version an equivalent parable, that of the woman who lost one of her ten pieces of silver and sought it diligently until it was found.

The righteous are the elect—the Essenes, who are already saved and will enter the kingdom. There is no need to convert them—they already are prepared. Jesus wanted to save some of those—as many as possible—who were heading for the fires of Gehenna. They were children of God and they were potential fighters for the kingdom in the coming struggle. God would win the war but the immediate battle had first to be won and that needed soldiers—Jews who had repented their sins and were ready to fight for God’s cause.

Luke elsewhere (19:1-10) tries to indicate that Jesus was forgiving the sins of those who continued in the sinful way of collaboration, with his story about Zacchaeus the head of taxgatherers in Jericho, which interpreted correctly has quite a different meaning from that related. Zacchaeus is observing Jesus from a sycomore, a Pharaoh’s fig-tree. The fig-tree in the gospels is a symbol for Rome—Zacchaeus had climbed high in the service of the oppressors. Jesus invites himself to the house of this very rich publican and gives him salvation simply for giving half his goods to the poor and offering reparations to those he has robbed. Yet half was insufficient—it had to be all as Luke himself had already told us (18:21)—and so it remained after the crucifixion—that was still the rule in the Acts of the Apostles. The watering down of the ordinances of the original Jerusalem church is demonstrated here clearly in Luke. The aim was to make Jesus seem tolerant of the friends of Rome and to make Christianity acceptable to rich gentiles in the wider Empire. The story is made into a rehash of the recruitment of Levi.

The scribes and the Pharisees could not have been present in the house with these sinners so one looks at this phrase with suspicion. In reality we can see here dissension in the camp of the Nazarenes. Jesus is recruiting lots of Hellenized Jews, people who were despised by more orthodox Jews. Yet some of Jesus’s followers were orthodox Jews. It is these who question the attention Jesus is paying to the sinners. Thus the question comes to Jesus from members of his own party not from the Pharisaic party. Later it was changed to conform with Christian vilification of Judaism.

Mass Feedings

In Mark, the return of the disciples from their mission is dismissed in a single verse. In fact the woes to the unrepentant cities belong here.

Mark also tells us that Jesus becomes one of the barjonim, having escaped hurriedly to the desert in a boat. To get to the desert by boat from Galilee implies crossing the Sea of Galilee to Decapolis as he had done earlier to cure the Demoniac of Gerasa. But the word used for a lonely or desert place is used in the Septuagint to mean the wilderness which usually meant the Judaean wilderness. If it is considered that the gospel sets the story in Galilee to account for Jesus and his followers being called Galilaeans—rebel followers of the philosophy of Judas the Galilaean—then we can conclude that some of the Galilaean ministry probably happened elsewhere. As an Essene Jesus would have trained his new volunteers at Qumran.

Many people, the simple of Ephraim, had responded to the appeal of the Nazarenes—they had repented and accepted baptism. In the feeding of the five thousand we are told they came out to the desert, probably the wilderness of Judaea, to join his band—they had to be introduced to Essene disciplines. The miracle of the loaves and fishes, an explicit allegory of a training camp, follows. The crowd assemble in companies, they sit down in ranks by hundreds and by fifties an expression reminiscent of the Essenes who, following Exodus 18:21,25, spoke of their ranks as “by thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens”. The Greek implies they look like a well tended vegetable patch, in other words neatly paraded in rows according to military discipline. There is nothing symbolic here—the crowd is explicitly drawn up in military order.

Later, in Mark 8:1-10, is the feeding of the four thousand. There are too many similarities in the two stories to be accidental, not just with the action described but with the whole arrangement of their respective sections—Mark 8:1 to 26 is an almost exact reflection of Mark 6:35 to 7:37. It is just as if some pages of an earlier draft by mishap had been gathered with a later one and have remained there ever since because no one felt able to change the holy book.

These two feeding incidents look like the same one slightly distorted in the telling, especially since the disciples on the second occasion behave as if it had never happened before. In Christian tradition, they are so stupid that even though they had just taken part in an identical miracle, they had forgotten all about it—struck with collective amnesia. Only the stupid could believe such stupidity.

The second account has no mention of assembling in military-like ranks as the other did suggesting deliberate editing. Writing around the time of the Jewish War, Mark would not have wanted to implicate Jesus in soldiering and the edited version was circulated. A few years later after the Jewish capital had been destroyed feelings were not running so high and the fuller version could be reintroduced with no concern about the implication of soldiering because the first Christians had established Jesus’s character as pacific. An editor of Mark found himself with both accounts of a mass messianic meal in the desert, and by intention or error both were bound into the gospel. The authors of the later gospels found mustering in ranks too explicitly military and out of character for their Jesus, so again they omitted it, except in the vestigial form of Luke 9:14.

Once introduced, the second miraculous feeding had to be given a meaning and subsequent editors made sense out of the two by introducing minor symbolic differences, and adding a spurious quizzing—which must be an invention if the two accounts are of the same incident—of the disciples about them by Jesus (Mk 8:14-21). They were made to indicate that Israel, the party to God’s Old Covenant, had been superseded. In its place was the Christian church, party to God’s New Covenant—later translated as New Testament—represented by the seven churches of Asia. The numbers of hampers filled were written in explicitly, and a different Greek word was used for the hamper in each miracle, to imply a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference. After the five thousand were fed twelve hampers of crumbs were gathered. In the parallel feeding of the four thousand, seven hampers of crumbs were gathered. The reading was that the five loaves were the five books of the Torah and the twelve baskets were the twelve tribes of Israel. In the second miracle, theologians deliberately changed both to the number seven symbolically representing the seven churches of Asia and the seventy gentile nations of earth.

The result of the feedings is that more bread remained than they began with. How did Jesus do it? He did not—they weren’t miracles. Though it is something of a convention to denote miracles or other remarkable events with expressions of astonishment, the gospel gives us none—Mark does not explicitly tag the feedings as miraculous. On completion of the muster, Jesus conducted a mass communion. The massed volunteers were received into the company of Essenes with their sacred meal—the messianic meal in which everyone received a small portion of bread and the 4000 or 5000 were spiritually filled. The original incident has been adapted along the lines of 2 Kings 4:43-44 where Elisha carries out a miracle in which small quantities of food suffice for many, with some remaining.

Mark is describing the Pentecostal Essene festival of the renewal of the covenant. This occurred on the feast of weeks, the feast of the new wheat, the Jewish Shavuot, which for Essenes was held on Sunday on the fifteenth day of the third month, Sivan (about the end of May). It celebrated the ingathering of the wheat harvest and naturally would be symbolized by ceremonies involving loaves. The two feedings in the gospel just might represent two separate annual Pentecostal festivals of the renewal of the covenant, suggesting that Jesus campaigned for over one year but less than three years. There is no mention of wine—unless the fish were originally jars of wine—possibly because Christians suppressed it as being too allied in characteristics to the eucharist. However, the vine harvest was not yet due for several more weeks which might account for the absence of wine—Essenes using only grape juice. When unfermented wine was out of season the Essenes, who had immense faith in the purifying power of water, will have used water instead of wine.

The Essenes treated wine with some disdain as a Nazarite sect would. When they made their scriptural interpretations, the Essenes read hyyn which is wine as hwn which is wealth. As they were the poor, they rejected wine as having connotations of wealth, substituting water normally or grape juice in season. The miracle of Cana, given only in John, is a trace of this—because grape juice was unseasonal, water was ritually converted into new wine for ceremonial purposes (the wedding was the eschatological symbol of the uniting of God with Israel). For most of its first four centuries the Christian eucharist was celebrated with bread and water not wine! In 140 AD, Justin Martyr relates how the deacons administer the eucharist to the faithful, giving them bread and water representing the body and blood of Christ! The early Christians were continuing the traditions of of the Essenes whose new wine often meant water.

The association of the Essenes and bread (hw’) is clear in their choice of this festival as their principle one. The Essenes were preparing for the cosmic battle that would inaugurate the kingdom of God by way of God’s miracle on the mount of Olives. The whole event was seen as a re-run of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt into the Promised Land under Moses and completed by Joshua. In this story, the Israelites were nourished by the manna from heaven, a bread of life supernaturally sent by God from heaven. Bread symbolizes life and we can be certain that it is a metaphor for the new life to come in God’s kingdom. John repeatedly (Jn 6:33;35;48;51) has Jesus calling himself the bread of life.

Now, not only does Paul confirm this in 1 Corinthians 10:1-5, where he begins by alluding to Moses, making a reference to the supernatural food and drink provided to the Israelites in the wilderness (Ex 13:21; 14:22; 16:4-35; 17:6; Num 14:29-30; 20:7-11), but quickly turning to Christ, referred to as a rock because he was the “corner stone.” He amazingly concludes with:

For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ. But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted.

Christian commentators claim the Christ mentioned here is the pre-existent Christ but it is much more reasonably taken as the real Jesus. Paul seeks to distance himself and the Christian converts from rumours of the Nazarene followers of Jesus who were overthrown when the Romans counter attacked. Paul relieves Jesus of the blame and puts it on his followers who lusted after evil things.

At the feast of the renewal of the covenant, the mass feedings, the people gathered were being fed in a purely spiritual way as a sacrament. It is identical to the Last Supper but written large—both are descriptions of a symbolic Essene messianic meal. A tiny fragment of bread would serve for a symbolic spiritual feeding, just as it does in the Christian eucharist, and the recipients would have been satisfied because they had been spiritually filled—received into the company of the Nazarenes and the elect of God. The spiritual nature of the feeding is even clear in one of the Christian gospels. Matthew has:

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.
Mt 5:6

The mass feeding was to fill the Nazarenes’ hunger for righteousness, not to fill their bellies. The clergy have known this for at least a hundred years (since Albert Schweitzer) but they are not keen to tell it to their flock—it would spoil the miracle.

In feeding the five thousand there are two fish. The feeding of the four thousand merely says some fish implying that the number is unimportant, and, since legendary information accumulates with time, confirming that the feeding of the 4000 is the earlier tradition. Nor does Jesus mention fish in the parabolic passage (Mk 8:17-21). He mentions only the five loaves, five thousand and twelve hampers, and the seven loaves, four thousand and seven hampers. “Having eyes, see ye not; having ears, hear ye not?”, Jesus asks them—but does not explain. Apparently the fish do not matter. The symbol of the fish became important to Christians later and is being imported anachronistically into Mark’s gospel. At some stage in the tradition the original seven loaves are varied into five loaves and two fish possibly because someone who saw no symbolism in the feeding felt it inconceivable that fishermen in Galilee would have no fish. Curiously fish and grain in Hebrew are closely related words, possibly inviting confusion. John 6:9 adds the detail that the loaves were of barley, the grain of the poor, tying in with the Ebionim, though the festival was that of wheat.

The twelve baskets of crumbs (morsels of bread, akin to the wafers of the eucharist) were present at the start of the feeding. God had divided His people into twelve tribes and Jesus reflected this in his choice of twelve apostles. It signifies the children of Israel, the original chosen of God—the Old Covenant. Jesus, conducting the ritual, brandishes seven loaves, representing the perfect of God—the New Covenant. The loaves and baskets were explained by Jesus in terms of the end of the world, and using the analogy of Elisha. The twelve tribes of Israel reach the kingdom of God (everlasting life) portrayed as bread provided in twelve baskets, by the action of the remnant of Israel, the elect of God, the Essenes, indicated by the seven loaves. Seven is the Old Testament number of perfection and so represents the Essenes, who attempted to be perfect like God—the New Covenant. They would have noticed that 5 + 7 = 12 meaning that the Pentateuch and the perfect of God—the law and the prophets (it seems Essenes also thought of themselves as prophets)—added up to the saving of the children of Israel in the kingdom to come. At some stage the perfect number seven became implicit and the Pentateuch explicit leading to the variant tradition which is recorded in the earlier feeding. Soon afterwards the Nazarenes had appointed seven deacons (Acts 6:3), and later the Christians had seven churches.

Note, though they were supposed to be at a lonely place in the desert to the east of the lake, people were able to walk there quicker than Jesus could get there by boat, and they were sufficiently near some adequate source of food because the disciples offered to go buy some. These are Mark’s way of decorating the story. He had no knowledge of the area or assumed his readers had none.

Among the scrolls the rules of the festival of the renewal of the covenant have not survived, and so we do not know what the proceedings were in detail. But we know the elect were mustered and had to account for themselves, finally being assessed and regraded. It must have taken several days. Here there is the suggestion that the ritual feeding takes place after three days (Mk 8:2), not a long time for assessing 4000 people, assuming that the feeding was the termination of the proceedings, unless the assessment was perfunctory for most. Since the kingdom was imminent, the grading will have become perfunctory, sincere repentance being acceptable to the Master and to God. If people were not sincere, God would judge them accordingly.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.