In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, ‘I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way—and some of them have come from a great distance.’ His disciples replied, ‘How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?’ (Mark 8: 1-4)

One of the first rules a novice writer learns is the value of conflict. A good story requires tension. The human mind is fascinated by unresolved tension.

Whether as historian or story-teller we cannot be sure, but Mark regularly draws on a tension caused by the disciples being absolute idiots.

In other gospels the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is the climatic resolution of this tension. But Mark's story is like a detective thriller where the sleuth never really figures out who did it, much less why.

For me Mark's disciples are so stupid that it strains the story's credibility. Have they already forgotten the miracle of the 5000?

But then - considering how blind, dull, frightened, forgetful, and neglectful I have been - Mark may simply be reporting what happened.