The Table Spread

In John the disciples ask for bread from heaven and the request is left on the page. In the Qur'an the same request is made — and answered.

The request

John 6:30–31, the day after the loaves: "What sign will you do, that we may see it and believe you? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness — as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" They wanted manna again, from him. Jesus answers with one phrase seven times in the chapter — bread from heaven (6:32, 33, 41, 50, 51, 58) — and they say, "Sir, give us this bread always" (6:34). John's Jesus sends no table. He turns the request toward the word: "I am the bread of life." The sign they asked for is left unanswered.

The answer

Qur'an 5, al-Māʾida, "The Table Spread." 5:112: the disciples ask, "O Jesus, son of Mary, can your Lord send down to us a table from heaven?" 5:113, their reason — John 6 inside their words: "that we may eat from it, and have our hearts at rest, and know that you have told us the truth, and be witnesses to it." 5:114, Jesus prays: "O God, our Lord, send down to us a table from heaven, a feast for the first of us and the last of us, and a sign from You." 5:115, God: "I will send it down to you; but whoever of you disbelieves after that, I will punish as I have punished no one in the worlds."

The warning is Jesus's own from John 6:49: "your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died." And the man who disbelieved after the bread had a name: "after the morsel, Satan entered him" (John 13:27).

When

John 6 is Passover season (6:4) — the Passover a year before the Last Supper. The Qur'an's "feast for the first of us and the last of us" is what the Last Supper became: a meal kept perpetually. The commentators say the table came down on a Sunday, "and that is why the Christians made Sunday their feast."

How the chapter ends

5:116–118. God asks Jesus whether he told people to take him and his mother as gods. Jesus: "Glory be to You. It is not for me to say what I have no right to say… I said to them only what You commanded me: worship God, my Lord and your Lord… If You punish them, they are Your servants; and if You forgive them, You are the Mighty, the Wise."