Once again, we are by the sea with the messiah, but we know that this is the anointed messiah and not the confused one because his crowds are so much larger, and also that he was teaching them. Many of the parables and stories attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were found in the Nabatean “Dead Sea” scrolls describing the Teacher of Righteousness from about 100 BCE.
It is incomprehensible to believe that someone on a boat at sea – no matter how still – would be readily heard on land for any distance, or past a large, noisy crowd. Perhaps I’m wildly misunderstanding acoustics at the Sea of Galilee, but if I were to guess one reason why his followers didn’t follow him well was because they couldn’t hear him. This is a reminder to the reader that you are reading a story and not witnessing history. There wasn’t really a huge crowd, there wasn’t a messiah on the boat, this is a setting for a presentation about the benefits of Roman culture.
I’m willing to bet that the original author put things like this in the story in order to shake the reader and remind them that this is all just a story, and that the message is in the story.
Is this Jesus sitting in the same boat that Rebel Jesus’s followers had pulled out for him? Or is it something nicer?