May 28, 2020
When describing the story from the gospels about Jesus Feeding the Five Thousand, the Miraculous Feeding of the Multitude, the early church father Irenaeus, writing between 180 and 188 AD, doesn't mention anything about fish, only bread! The historian Eusebius, Arnobius, and some other early Christian writings also never mention "fishes with the loaves", only the loaves. Today, we examine the case of the missing fish, variations between different manuscripts of the New Testament, including the example of a vegetarian saying of Jesus present in the Old Syriac-Aramaic Evangelion Da-Mepharreshe Gospels (Curetonian manuscript) but nowhere to be found in the Greek. This is another installment in a series of podcasts documenting the vegetarianism of the original Jesus Movement (Ebionites, Nasoreans, Grandchildren of the Essenes, Hebrew Christians, The Apostles/Disciples, Christianity-Before-Paul).