Okay, I've been doing some
Wikipedia-ing this evening.
For one thing, it turns out I always thought the miracle of the loaves and fishes happened at the sermon on the mount. Nope. For the record, that's why I explicitly mentioned Matthew in my last post; as he's the only one that mentions the sermon.
Also, it turns out that the gospels explicitly state that the number (5000 at the first occassion and 4000 on a second occasion mentioned by Mark and Matthew) is only the men and that the women and children were in addition to that number.
So you can ignore my previous posts for the specifics, but they still stand as a general guide for the difficulty of interpretting the
gospel truth.