Note 300 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

But how are we to represent such a miracle to ourselves, and in what stage of the event must it be placed? In relation to the latter point, three opinions are possible, corresponding to the number of the groups that act in our narrative; for the multiplication may have taken place either in the hands of Jesus, or in those of the disciples who dispensed the food, or in those of the people who received it. The last idea appears, on the one hand, puerile even to extravagance, if we are to imagine Jesus and the apostles distributing, with great carefulness, that there might be enough for all, little crumbs which in the hands of the recipients swelled into considerable pieces: on the other hand, it would have been scarcely a possible task, to get a particle, however small, for every individual in a multitude of five thousand men, out of five loaves, which, according to Hebrew custom, and particularly as they were carried by a boy, cannot have been very large; and still less out of two fishes. Of the two other opinions I think, with Olshausen, the one most suitable is that which supposes that the food was augmented under the creative hands of Jesus, and that he time after time dispensed new quantities to the disciples. We may then endeavour to represent the matter to ourselves in two ways: first we may suppose that as fast as one loaf or fish was gone, a new one came out of the hands of Jesus, or secondly, that the single loaves and fishes grew, so that as one piece was broken off, its loss was repaired, until on a calculation the turn came for the next loaf or fish. The first conception appears to be opposed to the text, which as it speaks of fragments ἐκ τῶν πέντε ἄρτων, of the five loaves (John vi. 13), can hardly be held to presuppose an increase of this number; thus there remains only the second, by the poetical description of which Lavater has done but a poor service to the orthodox view.300 For this miracle belongs to the class which can only appear in any degree credible so long as they can be retained in the obscurity of an indefinite conception:301 no sooner does the light shine on them, so that they can be examined in all their parts, than they dissolve like the unsubstantial creations of the mist. Loaves, which in the hands of the distributors expand like wetted sponges,—broiled fish, in which the severed parts are replaced instantaneously, as in the living crab gradually,—plainly belong to quite another domain than that of reality.