Mark 8:3

And if I send them away fasting to their home, they will faint on the way; and some of them are come from far.

These words were plainly spoken by the Lord in a move to arouse pity in his apostles and to elicit from them a petition for the Lord to relieve the increasingly critical emergency.

Some of them come from far ... Throughout the cities of the Decapolis, as far as Damascus, the people had come; but the fact of their being Gentiles would appear to have blinded the apostles to the urgency of their plight. In Mark 8:17, Christ asked them, "Have ye your heart hardened?"

The apostles, having so recently seen Jesus feed an even greater multitude, should have requested Christ to do the same thing here; and the viewpoint of this interpreter is that they would have done so except for the Gentile character of that multitude. In the light of such an obvious truth, how ridiculous are the allegations of skeptics that the reluctance of the apostles is the ground for denying that two miracles occurred.