I probably don’t need to plaster my blog with too many footnotes. It should be fairly obvious that I’m mainly offering my own opinions and you can make your own judgement on what they are worth. However, I was having a bit of a fruitless hunt for footnotes elsewhere this afternoon which brought the topic to mind.

A friend posted his Palm Sunday sermon text (see Crater Life) and I was intrigued by the idea he mentioned that, at the same time Jesus was riding in on a donkey, the Roman governor was riding in on a warhorse on the opposite side of the city. I should note that is more of an opening gambit than the thrust of Pete’s message but it is a compelling idea. However, having mentioned it to some friends this afternoon and then having felt the need to dig into it a bit more, I’m not sure it is true.

His source was a book from 20 years ago by scholars Borg and Crossan called The Last Week. I don’t know if they came up with the idea but they seem to have been influential in propagating it and AI-supported searches (for what they are worth) suggested it is now the majority view among scholars. However, I couldn’t find any proper references to historical sources backing it up. What I did find was a detailed (and footnoted) blog post from The City Gate, published in 2016. That suggests it is a key idea opening the first chapter but makes the accusation that “…Borg and Crossan provide no reference to any source concerning an imperial procession the very day that Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey.” It also notes other points which make me inclined to treat their ideas cautiously – for example, they seem to hold to the idea that even Mark’s gospel (which they put as the first to be written) wasn’t authored until about 70 idea (which, if true, would devalue them as eyewitness accounts). Another scholar, Luke Timothy Johnson is quoted as suggesting: “The important thing for Borg is that ‘scholarship’ has disqualified the image of Jesus held by traditional faith.” (The Real Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996) which would set them as teachers I would put much stock in.

I did do a bit of independent research but the nearest I could come to Imperial processions was Josephus (a 1st century Jewish-Roman historian widely regarded as a good source for the period) mentioning that Roman soldiers put on a strong display of strength around the temple area at the time of festivals (“.. they always were armed, and kept guard at the festivals, to prevent any innovation which the multitude thus gathered together might make” – Jewish Wars 2.224). Nobody was saying there wasn’t a strong Roman military presence in Jerusalem – the gospels all make this clear themselves – but this is no evidence at all for an annual parade.

The average sermon is not an academic exercise but sadly it isn’t uncommon for them to have lots of claims with little foundation, not just as attention-grabbing openers but sprinkled throughout. If nothing else, that is a message I need to keep to heart myself!