It records Jesus' miracles of feeding the five thousand and walking on water, the Bread of Life Discourse, popular rejection of his teaching, and Peter's confession of faith.

[1] The author of the book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that John composed this Gospel.

Swedish-based commentator René Kieffer considers the case for this reordering unproven, but he does recognise that chapter 6 may have been inserted into a putative second edition of the gospel.

[4] H. W. Watkins, in Charles Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers (1905), considered whether "a portion of the Gospel between John 5 and 6 has been lost", but treats this as a "purely arbitrary supposition".

[5] Events recorded in this chapter refer to the following locations in Galilee: Boats which had come from Tiberias and sail onwards to Capernaum are also mentioned (John 6:23–24).

[4] Jesus sees a multitude coming towards him, and wants to feed the crowd and to test his disciples, in this case Philip and Andrew.

[8]After the meal, the fragments of the barley loaves which were left over were collected by the disciples and found to have filled twelve baskets.

Lutheran theologian Harold H. Buls considers that "this event must have been a great source of temptation, and therefore He needed to pray.

[30] The Syriac, Ethiopic, and Persic versions leave out the word "again"; and the latter, contrary to all others, renders it, "Christ departed from the mountain alone".

[33]This was a westward journey which should have allowed them to follow the coast, but for a north wind coming down from the upper Jordan valley, and the disciples are forced out into the sea.

From John 6:22 it seems that this boat carrying the disciples was the only one to make the journey across the sea and the crowd in general remained overnight on the eastern shore.

When the disciples had rowed about twenty five or thirty stadia (three or four miles), and were therefore in "the broadest portion of the lake", they saw Jesus walking on the sea and drawing near their boat.

The Pulpit Commentary notes a number of occasions in the New Testament where ευθεως does not "mean instantaneously, but simply that the next thing to notice or observe".

[38] The following day, the crowd, who had remained on the other side of the lake, noticed that only the one boat had been there, and that Jesus had not embarked on it with the disciples, but that they had in fact gone off by themselves.Plummer considers that "We have here a complicated sentence very unusual in S. John (but compare John 13:1–4); it betrays a certain literary awkwardness, but great historical accuracy ... the structure of the sentence is no argument against the truth of the statements which it contains.

The Pulpit Commentary argues that the distinction reflects their superficial understanding: you did not get beyond the outward seeming, the superficial phenomenon, you revealed, by thus rushing to the conclusion that I was your Prophet and King, that you did not really discern the sign I gave, and ye are seeking me now, not because you have really seen "signs" – but because ye ate of the (those) loaves, and were filled up by this temporary supply of your daily want, expecting today some new, some more impressive, characteristic of the Messianic kingdom than yesterday.

[16] Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette sees the match between "working" and "gift" as a "strange" combination.

The reformer John Calvin wrote of this declaration: The ancient writers have misinterpreted and tortured this passage, by maintaining that Christ is said to be sealed, because he is the stamp and lively image of the Father.

For he does not here enter into abstruse discussions about his eternal essence, but explains what he has been commissioned and enjoined to do, what is his office in relation to us, and what we ought to seek and expect from him.

Meyer comments: Instead of the many ἔργα θεοῦ which they, agreeably to their legal standing-point, had in view, Jesus mentions only one ἔργον, in which, however, all that God requires of them is contained – the work (the moral act) of faith.

[16] The dialogue ends with the Jews asking Jesus, "Lord (or Sir) (Greek: κυριε), give us this bread always" (John 6:34).

[5] "Some have supposed it to refer to an unrecorded conversation (Alford, Westcott), or even to some written sentence which is now a lost fragment of the discourse".

The features of Jesus' teaching which were challenged were: These sayings appear to have stimulated collective debate and intellectual difficulty.

It is best accounted for by the fact that he was evermore looking to the moral, spiritual significance of all the miracles he records, as well as of those to which he vaguely refers.

Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.The New International Version adopts the alternative translation found in some texts: You are the Holy One of God.

Buls instead translates "we have realized ..."[72] The disciples "[take] Peter's answer to [Jesus'] question as delivered in the name of them all, and as expressing their mind and sense".

Jesus can't have called Peter 'a devil'; he must have meant Judas, the obvious traitor – so the editor appears to have reasoned".

[74] The final verse of the chapter is written in the third person style with reference to Jesus because the Evangelist explains the meaning of the previous Word of God.

[75] If the belonging tribe of Judas the Iscariot and of Peter aren't specified, Nathanael's words "can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?"

The same kind of reputation can reasonably be extended to Judas Iscariot, whose unusual epithet was chosen by God ignoring his father's patriarchal right to the lineage, and anyway in order to be distinguished by the most common name of his native and purportedly namesake tribe.

It is a textual comment linking John 6 to other parts of the Old and New Testament, needing a more accurate and complex evaluation of the Holy Scripture.