The Sharing Theory and Why Scholars Set It Aside

The nineteenth century German rationalist Heinrich Eberhard Gottlieb Paulus, committed to explaining every gospel miracle by natural means, proposed that the crowd was not fed by multiplication at all: when Jesus and the disciples began publicly sharing their own provisions, others in the crowd who had been quietly holding back food of their own followed the example, and the combined sharing produced enough for everyone. Albert Schweitzer's landmark 1906 survey of nineteenth century lives of Jesus catalogued this reading as characteristic of an era determined to find a natural event behind every reported miracle, whether or not the text supported it.

Modern historical-critical scholars mostly regard the sharing theory as an invented mechanism with no support in the gospel texts themselves, none of which mention hidden food or a change of heart in the crowd. Rather than reach for a natural substitute, current scholarship debates the episode on different terms: whether it preserves an authentic miracle tradition remembered independently by two separate lines of transmission, or whether it is a later composition modeled on the prophet Elisha feeding a hundred men from twenty loaves in the second Book of Kings, a story early Christian writers knew well and may have used as a template.