Said is translated “asked” by Good News Translation and “offered for consideration” by Bibel im heutigen Deutsch, 1st edition; New English Bible translates “replied.”

Although most translators understand bread to mean “food” here, as it often does, the Greek text actually has “loaves of bread,” which is why Barclay and some others translate “loaves.”

Feed translates a verb which means “feed so as to satisfy one’s appetite” (see 5.6; 14.20; 15.37); New American Bible, Moffatt, and Barclay have “satisfy.”

So great a crowd is literally “such a crowd” (Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible), implying a large crowd (Barclay “a crowd like this”). The disciples’ question, Where … to feed so great a crowd?, emphasizes two factors: the total absence of food and the immensity of the crowd.

The question the disciples ask can be “Where are we going to find enough food out here in the desert for all these people?” “Where in this desert will we get enough food (or, bread) to feed a crowd this big?” or “Where in this wilderness are we supposed to get food that will satisfy this many people?”

It is quite likely that the disciples didn’t really think there was any place where they could get bread in that quantity, so their question is not really asking for information. For that reason some translations have used a statement here such as “There is nowhere out here in the desert where we can get enough bread to feed a crowd like this.”

Note that desert really refers to a remote, uninhabited area. See 3.1.

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1988. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .