How Many Donkeys?

In a previous post, Apples Are Not Bananas, Theology Is Not History, I discussed what I think is a major problem in either criticizing or defending the Bible. Namely, we shouldn’t be taking the Bible as literal, inerrant history. It was never intended to be read as such. Somehow, inerrantists have decided that there is only one right way to read the Bible, even if that way was not intended by the Biblical authors. That then makes it easy for critical atheists to point out the obvious errors and contradictions in the Bible to claim that Christianity is false.

All it really proves is that inerrancy is false. Let’s look at a specific example.

Matthew 21:1-7

When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:

“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.”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.

Now, I’ve heard a lot of irascible harmonists try to explain away this strange image in several ways. Maybe he was leading the little donkey behind him. Maybe when Matthew says, “he sat on them,” he meant the cloaks, not the donkey and the colt. There must be some reason, because they know the Bible is perfect and Matthew is saying that Jesus is fulfilling prophesy, so we must believe it is exactly so.

Not so fast, because there is a very reasonable explanation for why Matthew has Jesus ride two animals. He misunderstood a passage in Zechariah.

Zechariah 9:9

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!

    Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!

See, your king comes to you;

    triumphant and victorious is he,

humble and riding on a donkey,

    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Zechariah was using a Hebrew poetic form we describe as parallelism where you say the same thing twice in two different ways. In Zechariah, the donkey is also the colt. In Matthew, we have two animals. The hypothesis that Matthew counted wrong while reading Zechariah is supported by the fact that the other gospel writers correctly understood Zechariah.

John 12: 14-15

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:

“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion.
Look, your king is coming,
    sitting on a donkey’s colt!”

Similarly, Mark and Luke have a single colt. I don’t know why Matthew got it wrong, maybe it was his translation. Something similar happened where the Greek in his copy of the Septuagint confused the word virgin for young woman. At this point, the atheists get excited because it proves that Matthew either made up or embellished the story. It didn’t happen like it is written, so therefore, the Bible is not perfect, therefore Christianity is false. In your faces, Jesus freaks.

Again, not so fast.

I agree that Matthew is not reporting an eyewitness event. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest, in fact, it helps me go deeper into our scriptural tradition to understand it as first century Christians would have understood it. Or at least get closer to it since no amount of study will hone my reading instincts into that of a first-century Christian. There are several places where Matthew seems more committed to connecting Jesus to the story of Israel than to getting the facts right. We should feel the same way as Matthew. The theology is what matters in the telling of these stories.

Here are some thought I have about this.

As we approach Easter, we all know the story takes a dark and violent turn. I used to read this story very solemnly, but I’ve come to see a great deal of humor in my Lord Jesus riding a donkey. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, in their book The Last Week, propose a captivating image for Palm Sunday. They describe both Jesus and Pontius Pilate entering Jerusalem at the same time, but through different gates. Pilate was riding a mighty steed and surrounded by his guards. Jesus, a poor nobody, came riding in on a donkey. This is almost like performance art. I’m sure Pilate hated it. Jesus was a theological genius who not only knew Zechariah very well, but he also knew that his followers and the Passover crowds in Jerusalem would immediately get the reference. He was the messiah. But take a step back and imagine how funny this image might have been. This poor, humble nobody on a donkey gets the crowd’s praise, not Pilate. Jesus throws the power structure upside down in an absolutely hilarious moment of political satire that also recalls Zechariah. This story would’ve been told many times over by those who saw it, so it had to find its way into the gospels.

Of course, we have no historical evidence outside of the Bible that this is how it actually happened. I just like to think it must have happened this way because it is consistent with what I know about Jesus. The same guy who whipped moneychangers out of the temple would satirize Pilate’s power by riding a donkey. Maybe that’s what Matthew thought of the story, too. The author — or authors — of Matthew may or may not have been privy to the conversations and events leading up to Passover, but he was convinced the risen Jesus was the Messiah. So, it must have happened that way, right? How could it happen otherwise? With that kind of belief, he incorrectly lifted the number of donkeys out of Zechariah, quite paradoxically because he was trying to get the story exactly right. This is far from the only example of how contemplating the risen Jesus changed early followers’ worldviews and then sent them digging through scripture to try to make sense of it all.

Further, Matthew was writing to a Jewish audience and was looking for familiar parallels with which they would resonate. He wasn’t trying to prove an historical anecdote about Jesus. In fact, because the story is repeated in each gospel – typically in the uni-donkey framework – I think it must have already been a solid part of tradition. He was instead showing how Jesus fit inside existing narratives. The first century community wasn’t expecting eye-witness history out of these stories. They understood the more subtle and sophisticated message. Consider the phrase, “when he quit his job without giving notice, he really burned his bridges.” No bridges were harmed in this story, but we get the meaning. I can imagine first century Christians recalling, “my grandpa still laughs at how Jesus showed up Pilate with Zechariah’s donkey,” and not worrying about the exact details.

I think it’s possible it could’ve gone something like this. This is just one possibility, but I’m providing it to show you that you can be a faithful Christian without having to think the Bible needs to be perfect in every way.

• Jesus’ resurrection turns his follower’s worldview upside down. This is not the messiah story they’d been taught.
• They begin searching their scripture for answers to so many questions.
• Someone finds Zechariah and remembers that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. Or quite likely, they all understood Jesus’ Zechariah callback at the time of the Passover story and shared many laughs over it.
• This story gets passed around a lot – it’s simply too wonderful not to be retold over and over. Naturally it makes its way into all the gospels.
• Matthew’s job was to make a Jewish gospel, so he went back to his version of Zechariah and got details a little bit wrong. I mean if he thought Zechariah had two donkeys, he figured Jesus would’ve tried to make his public performance art match. There must have been two donkeys.
• Or, it’s also possible and not problematic to my faith that Matthew made this entire story up to tell his contemporary readers that Jesus was deeply connected to the story of Israel and defeated the powers of death and Rome.

I hope this gets the point across that you shouldn’t be focused on historical accuracy when reading your scriptures. They weren’t written with that in mind. This goes far beyond Matthew and donkeys but should inform your approach to scripture in total. The message is theological, not historical. The writers of the Bible wanted to convey theological truths about God and where history is involved, it is a theologized history, not a fact-finding mission. The Bible is a record of how our ancestors in faith understood their relationship with the divine, not an inerrant history lesson about how we should behave in all times forever and ever amen.

As this one example from Matthew shows, many different viewpoints are represented in the Bible. The Bible was written over an exceptionally long period by different authors in various historical contexts. These authors likely incorporated existing cultural stories and traditions into their writings, as Jesus might have done in his public performance of the Zechariah passage upon entering Jerusalem and as Matthew later tried to do by inserting a second donkey. These stories don’t all need to agree. In fact, studying the disagreements can deepen our faith by giving us the room to contemplate many different ideas about God. Inspiration doesn’t mean inerrancy; it means God meets you through the text. I’ve only shared my different ideas about Matthew’s two donkeys to illustrate how you can contemplate so many different thoughts about Jesus’ action and ministry through the story, not because I’m convinced that I’m right about any of it. That’s the point, we can’t be exactly right about any of this when even the Biblical authors disagree. But we can use these stories as launching points to understand how wisdom develops through Christianity as we progress through the centuries.

Jesus had symbolism in mind by riding a donkey into the Passover crowds. It symbolized messiahship through Zechariah’s passage and somewhat setaceously symbolized the enormous difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Rome. Likewise, Bible stories employ symbolism that conveys deeper truths. What is important to Matthew is that Jesus is the Messiah, not how many donkeys he rode or if he even rode them at all.