The Feeding Of The Four Thousand
THE FEEDING OF THE FOUR THOUSAND
MARK 8:1-10
This miracle shows Jesus’ concern for people’s physical wellbeing.
It will not surprise those who are familiar with the vagaries of biblical criticism to find that the majority of critical scholars today believe that the stories of feeding a multitude recorded by Mark are variant versions of one and the same basic story. The reasons for this hypothesis are of differing strength. Apart from the refusal of some scholars to believe that Jesus could ever have said the same thing twice or performed two closely similar acts, the principal difficulty is the dullness of the disciples in not realizing that Jesus could feed the crowds again after what had happened on the previous occasion. This is far from being an insuperable difficulty, for all along Mark has been showing us how very dull and uncomprehending the disciples could be.
The story is very similar to the previous one; the telling of each would influence the form of other, and the often-quoted illustration of how a policeman will use almost identical language in describing two quite different street accidents is a relevant one. Note, however, the differences. On this occasion the compassion of Jesus is linked to his feeding of the crowd. They had been with him three days, a phrase which (as in the resurrection story) need not mean literally seventy-two hours but one whole day and parts of the immediately preceding and following days. As a result they exhausted their supplies of food. The numbers of people and loaves differ, as do the number and type of baskets of crumbs. Here large hampers were used.
The identity of the crowd remains a mystery. The indications are that the miracle took place in Decapolis, and if so, the crowd may have been composed of Gentiles. In this case, the purpose of the story is to show how Jesus fed the Gentiles after he had fed the Jews (cf. 7:27!). This would explain why Mark has used his precious space to report two very similar occurrences, but it must be admitted that the Gentile nature of the crowd remains uncertain.
In 8:10 “Dalmanutha” is a name not otherwise known, and the various manuscripts give different guesses at what the name of the place was. Magdala on the west side of the lake remains the most likely possibility.