The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle all four gospels carry. It is also the scene the earliest Christian art draws most: loaves and a fish appear on the catacomb walls generations before the cross does. The cross was a working method of execution when those walls were painted, and it took the fourth century, and an empire that had stopped using it, to make it an ornament.
The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years · ch. 3