Best Practices for Donkey Riding

Reflections on the Lectionary for Palm Sunday

Photo by Anthony Rae on Unsplash

Note: Some congregations celebrate Palm Sunday this week, and others celebrate Passion Sunday. My sense is that Palm Sunday is more common, so I am writing about the readings for that day here, but if I have time later this week I will try to write something for Passion Sunday as well.  

After several decades of intense interest and work, I think that we are seeing the downhill side of the peak of interest in Historical Jesus scholarship. That’s not to say that there’s no good scholarship ongoing in that area, or that the public doesn’t continue to be invested in it; there certainly is good ongoing scholarship, and Historical Jesus stuff still does gain a lot of attention. But whereas the Jesus Seminar and other efforts at outlining a historically plausible Jesus could be front-page news in the 1980s and 1990s, rarely does one see that kind of investment today. Historical Jesus scholarship has matured as a field, and its conclusions (always subject to change of course) have been sort of baked into the assumptions and theories of a lot of folks, both scholars and laypeople. We have become accustomed to asking how historically plausible this or that saying of Jesus or story about him might be, and it no longer scandalizes like it once did to suggest that there might have been some artistry or invention going on in the composition of the gospels.

The gospel text for this year’s Palm Sunday liturgy, Matthew 21:1-11, stands out to me as a great example of a place where Historical Jesus scholarship can be useful, and where it really helps us see through the pages of the New Testament to the kinds of concerns that might have been on the minds of the gospel writers. This passage from Matthew is probably familiar to anyone who has spent much time in churches, or even anyone who has seen a decent Jesus movie. It’s the scene where Jesus enters Jerusalem to acclaim and adulation, with a crowd greeting him. (Whether it was a large crowd that greeted Jesus, or simply the better part of the crowd that greeted him, is a matter of translation preference, as both interpretations are plausible). It’s an iconic scene, and one that stands as a point of crescendo in Jesus’ story, before the drama of his arrest, trials, and death begin.

What’s interesting to me about this passage is the donkeys. From a Historical Jesus perspective, the donkeys are a place in the text where the special interests and compositional strategies of the gospel writer really come into focus. In 21:2-7, the story focuses on Jesus’ instructions to two disciples to go and find two donkeys—a donkey and a colt—and borrow them for the procession. Matthew’s text is very clear that there are two donkeys in view here, reiterating it in verses 2, 5, and 7, and even going to the effort to describe in verse 7 how the disciples put their cloaks “on them” and how Jesus “sat on them.” Aside from a few novelty county fair riding exhibits, this is not probably something that many of us have seen done, even if we have spent a lot of time in donkey-riding contexts, because riding two donkeys at once is simply not best donkey-riding practice. This is especially true, I would imagine, if one of the donkeys is a colt, and therefore presumably a lot shorter than the other one. It’s hard enough to imagine riding two donkeys at once in any kind of dignified, kingly, messianic way. It’s another thing still to imagine doing it if one of the donkeys was a foot shorter than the other.

So what’s going on here? Why are there two donkeys? Did Jesus and the disciples not know how donkeys worked? Why is the story told this way?

The answer lies in the citation from Zechariah 9 that’s found in Matthew 21:4-5: “This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, ‘Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’” This is a common thing across the gospels, and it’s especially common in the Gospel of Matthew—to cite a passage from the texts of ancient Israel as part of telling the story of Jesus. In Matthew these are often called “fulfillment citations” by scholars, and they are just that—places where the text cites something from the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible) to make a point about how Jesus was doing or representing the thing that passage said would happen. Matthew does this constantly, dozens of times.

But how do these citations work? Were people following Jesus around, noticing what he was doing, and saying to each other, “aha, he just did that to fulfill that passage of Isaiah!” and writing it down? Or, were the gospel writers sitting down with a copy of the Septuagint and their draft of their gospel, cross-referencing places where Jesus did recognizable stuff? I suppose it’s possible, but it’s much more likely that the gospel writers were consciously writing the narrative of the gospels with an eye to as many fulfillments as possible. That’s not to say that the gospel writers were inventing narratives whole cloth (though I don’t think that possibility should trouble us as much as it seems to). Rather, the gospel writers’ telling of stories about Jesus was probably conditioned by their knowledge of these passages, and they probably told the stories in a way that would capture as many of them as possible.

These donkeys are a great example. Zechariah 9 is a prophetic text, written in the conventions of Hebrew poetry, which is particular genre with its own peculiarities. One of those peculiarities is a doubling of ideas or words. It’s a pattern that you’ll find all through poetic sections of the Hebrew Bible, evident even in English. If a Psalmist or prophet were describing a tree, they might say “a tree, and a tall, tall tree.” If they were describing a person, they might say “Bob, and the son of his father.” It’s a flourish that adds to the imagery and drama of things, and I find it really charming.

But Matthew, reading Zechariah 9, didn’t understand this convention. He might not have known Hebrew (or Aramaic), or he might not have been familiar with the literary conventions of poetry in those languages. Reading the Septuagint (Greek) translation of Zechariah’s oracle, he saw not the poetic flourish, but instead two donkeys: the king would be “mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Reading that, Matthew seems to have thought, “welp, that’s what it says, so that must be how it happened.” And Matthew wrote both into the text of his gospel, going so far as to refer to Jesus riding astride both of them.

What does this have to do with Historical Jesus scholarship? To me, the two donkeys are evidence that when writing stories about Jesus, the gospel writers were not approaching the task with a straightforward mindset of recording historical events, as we might expect from a journalist or historian today. Instead, the gospel writers were guided by theological claims and a desire to link Jesus’ life to the stories and claims of Israel’s past. They were also trying to tell a good, compelling story. I don’t think it should scandalize us to recognize and name this practice; the gospel writers themselves (who were a lot closer in time and proximity to Jesus than we are) don’t seem to have been bothered by it. They were more interested in a theological portrayal of Jesus—and a messianic, kingly portrayal—than they were in anything like we might call a “historical” portrayal in our modern, post-Enlightenment sense.

The result, in this passage from Matthew, is a story that’s theologically on-point at the same time that it’s historically iffy. People don’t really ride two donkeys at once, and Jesus probably wasn’t some kind of equestrian innovator on this front. But that’s not really the thing Matthew is trying to say anyway. Matthew is trying to describe a kingly moment, as part of his agenda to link Jesus to Israel’s expectation of a messiah and all the trappings of that figure. In that—in the thing he was actually trying to do—Matthew was successful. It’s only on the modern question of history—and maybe donkey-riding best practices—that his story falls short.