Second hungry crowd- 8:1-10

This is the second time where Jesus has a conversation with the disciples about a hungry crowd. The time before they brought the matter to his attention, and were advocating sending the crowd away so they could get food. Here Jesus has compassion on the crowd (splanknizomai- a great word) . The disciples response is interesting given they've been here before- 'How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?' I wonder how far we are away from the feeding of the 5000 (more than 5000). Only one and a half chapters away. You'd think no more than a year... There's a whole lot of debate among scholars about this being a duplication of the other feeding- a second take on the same event. This seems unnecessarily sceptical to me- it seems to be part of the problem if you weight form criticism too highly...I suppose without looking at all the intricacies they have, my gut feeling is that we are not as far removed from the events described in the gospels as some of these scholars think. Apart from this, it makes a bit of a mockery of Jesus question to the disciples a few days on, 'Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets did you collect? They said to him '12'. And the seven for the four thousand, how many did you collect? And they said to him '7'. Then he said to them, “Do you still not understand?”