Caleb Jore recently wrote a good post addressing a common objection to Matthew 21:7. He discusses some problems with a popular Christian alternative to the skeptical interpretation and offers another reading that avoids the problems with that Christian alternative and the skeptical view.
Another recent post on the same blog, by Lucas, discusses some recent trends in scholarship that are favorable to Christianity.
The whole blog is worth following. There's a lot of good material there.
Thanks for the shout-out, Jason!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the plug, Jason!
ReplyDeleteI don't mind the "donkeys as a unit" interpretation, and it may be the best. (Though I don't find the arguments about grammatical parallelism given against the cloaks interpretation to have much weight.) A further interesting question is why Jesus rode on the smaller/younger/unbroken donkey rather than on the larger mother. I just don't know the answer to that question, and it does raise the possibility that at some point on the road he got off and rode the mother if the colt got unmanageable. In any event the fact that the disciples put cloaks on both seems to mean that they didn't know which one he would want to ride or whether at some point he would need to switch to riding the other beast.
ReplyDeleteI do have to object to the phrase "marginally better interpretation" with reference to the cloaks interpretation, comparing it to the "straddling" interpretation. I don't know if this is just a way of speaking so as not to sound extreme or unscholarly or something, but IMO the straddling,circus rider, idea is manifestly absurd, something made up by trollish skeptics to mock the document rather than making a serious attempt to interpret it, so the cloaks idea is a lot more than "marginally" better.