Patristic A.D. 407
“(Hom. xlii. 2.) And let those of us, who are given to pleasure, observe the plain and abstemious eating of those great and wonderful menb. He made the men sit down before the loaves appeared, to teach us that with Him, things that are not are as things that are; as Paul says, Who calleth those things that be not, as though they were. (Rom. 4:17.) The passage proceeds then: And Jesus said, Make the men sit down.”
Catena Aurea: Gospel of John, as excerpted in the Catena Aurea on John 6:1-14
PD · J. H. Newman (Oxford, 1845) ↗