A passage has been throwing me for a loop over the past few days. It’s Matthew 24:4-7. Let me lay out the arguments.
- Matthew quotes Zechariah 9:9, directly, in verse 5: ““Say to the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’” (ESV)
- In verse 7, the disciples bring both a donkey and a colt to Jesus.
- Afterall, Zechariah 9:9, as quoted by Matthew, says they will bring both.
- In verse 7, Jesus also performs a miracle – he sits on, “them.” The disciples bring the colt and the donkey, and Jesus simply “sat on them.” Who is this, that even sits on two animals at once?
- The story is recounted in each of the other gospels; in only Matthew’s gospel is a donkey present. In Mark’s gospel, in particular – which is very likely to have been written before Matthew – only a colt is present.
Why is this troubling? It’s because the argument is that Matthew misread the Hebrew of Jeremiah 9:9 (or had a bad Greek version), and misinterpreted the passage. Zechariah 9:9 uses what is very likely a parallel synonymous construction – it says two things, one after another, that reinforces or restates itself – using the linking word “and.” So, the Hebrew in Zechariah 9:9 says something to the effect of, “Behold you king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, AND on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.” But rather than meaning he is mounted on both, the second clause is meant to interpret and reinforced the first clause: “He is humble, and riding on a donkey – that is, a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Note that the ESV quotation above in the bulleted list stylistically omits the AND.
And so we get this argument: “Matthew missed the parallel synonymous construction! Dummy! And because he read it as both – and because Matthew was fixated on precisely fulfilled prophecy for his Jewish audience, he ADDED IN THE DONKEY to the account!”
That’s what they say anyway.
And if that’s true – it’s troubling. It’s troubling for the concept of inspiration, it’s challenging for inerrancy, and it’s downright deadly for infallibility. According to this theory – Matthew simply made up the presence of the donkey – and smoothed over the double animal mess with an awkward, ‘sat on them.’ There was only ever a colt (if anything at all, since this brings into the question the historicity of all the works), but Matthew played fast and loose with the facts to aid his narrative. Shame! This couldn’t be the result of various perspectives or copyist error or cultural interpretation – this would be a straight up provable lie tucked right into the text.
It’s a fairly damning argument. And it’s pretty compelling – it’s logical, sequential, and very smart sounding!
But, as I’ve processed it – and wrestled with it; it has caused lack of sleep – I just can’t get over calling Matthew that much of a dummy. Even ignoring presuppositional inspiration, this argument requires Matthew to A) ignore or misread the parallel synonym, even as the most Jewish of Gospel writers writing to a Jewish audience he would have almost assuredly been familiar with that construction, and B) deliberately add in a false fact, contradicting a pre-existing source from which he was extensively drawing (Mark).
Like many challenges to biblical inerrancy, this tension presupposes that the early readers and writers were idiots.
And I’m simply not going to accept that anymore. Early readers could spot and understand apparent contradictions! They could easily see the two creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2, and have embraced the texts for millennia. We can’t assume earlier readers were simply blind; we need to seek to understand how they interpreted the two side by side texts, rather than dismiss them as myth.
And so how can we understand the presence of a second animal in Matthew 24? Well, “clearly the key to the problem lies in the fact that an unbroken colt (note Mark 11:2, “upon which no one had sat,” which is known to Matthew although omitted by him) was usually introduced into service while accompanied by its parent.”1 And Matthew knew this – or remembered it – and chose to include the donkey as well as the colt, stressing the beast of burden upon which Jesus was sitting as the Suffering Servant.
What about the miraculous fact that Jesus sat on “them?” Well, it’s certainly possible that Jesus sat on the cloaks, which has been placed on the animals. But it’s more likely that Matthew simply used the plural to refer to the two animals at once, figuring, “Surely no one would imagine I would be so silly as to have Jesus sitting simultaneously on two animals as he rode into Jerusalem.”
Clearly, Matthew hadn’t anticipated 21st century Bible critics.
- Hagner, D. A. (1995). Matthew 14–28 (Vol. 33B, p. 594). Word, Incorporated. ↩︎