The chapter
Simply Jesus feeds a crowd of five thousand from five barley loaves and two fish. That night the disciples cross the lake without him and see him walking on the water. The next day the crowd finds him again, and he spends the rest of the chapter explaining what the bread meant. The explanation is harder to take than the miracle: by the end many who had been following him have gone home, and he asks the twelve whether they mean to go as well.
Context This is the longest chapter in the book, seventy-one verses against fifty-nine for the next longest, and it runs on one word. Bread is in the feeding, in the crowd's demand for a sign like the manna, in the sentence I am the bread of life, and in the claim about flesh that empties the room. The turn is at verse 26, where Jesus tells the crowd why they came: not because they saw a sign, but because they ate and were filled.
Verses 1-15
Simply A boy has five barley loaves and two fish. Jesus has the people sit down on the grass, gives thanks, and the food is handed out until everyone has had enough. Twelve baskets of pieces are gathered afterwards, so that nothing is lost. Then the crowd decides to make him king by force, and he goes back up the mountain alone.
Context All four Gospels tell this, and they agree on the count: five loaves, two fish, twelve baskets, about five thousand men. Two details here belong to John alone. He says the loaves were barley and that they came from a boy. Barley is the cheaper grain by this corpus's own reckoning: at 2 Kings 7:1 one measure of fine flour and two measures of barley are priced at the same shekel. John also reports what the crowd tried to do next, which is to take Jesus by force and make him king. Matthew, Mark and Luke all put a king in this part of their story, but the king is Herod. The reader is also told something the crowd is not: verse 6 says Jesus asked Philip the question in order to test him, and already knew what he would do. One thing to watch in verse 11: eight of the thirteen editions here have Jesus give the bread to the disciples and the disciples give it to the people, and five have him hand it to the seated crowd himself, with no one in between.
Verses 16-21
Simply In the evening the disciples go down to the sea and set out for Capernaum without him. It gets dark, the wind rises, and after they have been rowing a while they see him walking on the water and coming near the boat. They are frightened. He tells them it is him and not to be afraid, and as soon as they are willing to take him aboard the boat is at the shore they were heading for.
Context Matthew and Mark tell this too, each straight after their own feeding of the five thousand; Luke does not tell it at all. John's account is the shortest of the three and it leaves out Peter, who in Matthew asks to come across the water and begins to sink. What John adds instead is the last line, that the boat was immediately at the land where they were going. He also gives a distance rather than a round number: twenty-five or thirty stadia.
Verses 22-59
Simply The crowd tracks him down at Capernaum and asks for a sign, the way their ancestors were given manna in the desert. He answers that it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven, and that his Father is giving the true bread now. Then he says he is it. Whoever comes to him will not be hungry. The argument gets sharper until he says that the bread he will give is his own flesh, for the life of the world, and that those who do not eat it have no life in them.
Context The crowd quotes scripture at him, he answers with scripture, and each time the quotation is about bread: they cite the manna, he cites a line about all being taught by God. Two objections are recorded and neither is answered on its own terms. At verse 42 the objection is that they know his father and mother, so the claim to have come down from heaven cannot stand; at verse 52 it is simply how, how can this man give us his flesh to eat. Jesus does not soften either one. The last verse of the section places the whole speech in the synagogue at Capernaum, which is worth holding on to: this is a sermon in a building, not a private word to the twelve.
Tradition Whether this chapter is about the Lord's Supper at all is one of the questions the Western churches divided over, and the four documents in this app can be read on it. Two of them quote this chapter by name. Philaret's catechism, teaching what the communicant receives, quotes verse 56 and verse 54 with their references given, and elsewhere quotes verse 55, my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed, as bread for the soul. The Council of Trent, in the second chapter of its thirteenth session, gives the reason for the sacrament and uses a sentence out of this chapter without naming it, He that eateth me, the same also shall live by me, which is verse 57 in an older English rendering. The Reformed documents speak to the same eating in different terms. Westminster holds that worthy receivers really and indeed feed upon Christ crucified, yet not carnally and corporally but spiritually. The Thirty-Nine Articles put it in one line: the body of Christ is given, taken and eaten only after a heavenly and spiritual manner, and the mean whereby it is received is faith. A reader will notice that verse 63 of this chapter, it is the spirit who gives life, the flesh profits nothing, sits inside the same speech as verse 53. All four documents have to hold both verses, and they do it differently. Every paragraph named here can be opened in full, in its own words, including the sentences these documents aim at each other, which this app reports and does not adopt.
Verses 60-71
Simply Many of the people following him say the saying is hard and that nobody can listen to it, and from that point they stop walking with him. Jesus turns to the twelve and asks whether they want to go too. Peter answers with a question rather than a yes: to whom would we go, you have the words of eternal life. The chapter closes by naming the one of the twelve who will hand him over.
Context Peter's confession in verse 69 does not say the same thing in the editions this app serves, and it is worth knowing which one you are holding. Eight of the thirteen have him say the Christ, the Son of the living God. Three have only the Holy One of God: the Riveduta 1927, the Petrus Canisiusvertaling and the Vietnamese Bible of 1934. Two carry both halves at once, the Christ, the Holy One of God, and one of those two is Louis Segond 1910. That last point is the one a French reader meets in this app without leaving their own language: Segond reads le Christ, le Saint de Dieu, and the Sainte Bible libre pour le monde reads le Christ, le Fils du Dieu vivant. There is something worth noticing about the two divergences in this chapter. The eight editions that give the longer confession here are the same eight that route the bread through the disciples at verse 11, and the five that do not are the same five. The editions are not disagreeing at random; they are following different underlying texts, and this file can report that the pattern holds twice without saying which text is older, because that is a manuscript question the corpus cannot settle. It is the same posture taken at John 5:4.