of this, and of the way in which the words he uses to describe what Jesus did with the bread fit so neatly into the pattern the early church came to use for its own regular bread-breaking new-Passover meal: he took, blessed, broke and gave it. Equally, the men sit down (we assume there were women and children there, but the numbers in the story refer specifically to males) in groups of a hundred or of fifty. Although the words for ‘company’ and ‘group’ are not specifically military, there is perhaps