The Judaism Behind Palm Sunday and Why Jesus Most Likely Did Not Enter Jerusalem During the Passover Week

As we are entering into Palm Sunday tomorrow, I wanted to reflect for a moment on this event as it occurred in the gospels. Christians have long been told that Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem coincided with Passover. The reason for this has profound theological implications; namely, Jesus would be the Passover sacrifice that would save men from their sins. While theologians like to place bets just on how much Jesus actually understood of his mission, more importantly, the question of whether he entered on Passover becomes important to how we can interpret a theology that for Christians relies heavily on this sequencing. But there is another explanation as well: Jesus triumphal entry had nothing to do with a hidden theology that would only be known to the faith community in its soteriological expression and was most likely a confusion of two separate Jewish holidays.

One thing everyone does agree on: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was very much a messianic event. The prophecies attached to Jesus coming into the city are taken from the book of Zechariah. Depending on which account you read (Matthew or Mark), Jesus enters into the city on one or two donkeys (also an allusion to Zechariah). The Christian tradition prefers to understand the messianic prophecies with regard to Passover, so his crucifixion takes on an entirely new meaning. While his sacrifice takes the place of the temple animal sacrifice, the messianic king does not conquer kingdoms, he comes to conquer sins. He does not establish a physical kingdom on earth but a spiritual one. Passover is also associated with the return of Elijah as the messiah. So early Christians must have thought that this would have been the most appropriate time for Jesus’s return. Jesus himself is confronted with this important Jewish belief in a few places in the gospels, a charge which Jesus deflects.

Having said all this, the problem is the tradition of Palm Sunday is probably misplaced in the Jewish calendar and has nothing to do with Passover. Rather it was most likely Sukkoth when Jesus entered Jerusalem, a festival that happens months earlier and would mean that Jesus was not arrested and held for a week, but probably much longer. In fact, it would mean that the Last Supper too would have not been a Passover Seder but rather a common meal.

The textual evidence is as follows: The people who come to greet Jesus do so with shouts of Hosannah and with palm “branches.” Why would so many people have palm branches available to them, especially since this does not show up anywhere in the Passover ritualism or in the prophecies of Zechariah? Where the use of palm fronds DO show up is during Sukkoth (Leviticus 23:40). The lulavim (כפת) are made up of unopened palm fronds used in the construction of the Sukkoth (booths) along with the symbolism of the etrog (citron) as well as other types of wild growing vegetation like myrtle. The praises of Hosanna that Jesus is confronted by as he enters the city are important to Judaism primarily at Sukkoth when the Jewish liturgical prayer cycle called the "Hosanna service" is recited each morning of the festival. Another interesting note with regard to the Last Supper is that during the Passover Seder, matzot would have been eaten, but the gospels tell us that it was bread. While this is unspecific, it might suggest that this was not the unleavened bread eaten by Jews.

So as you prepare for Palm Sunday tomorrow and the traditional Lenten calendar prepares us to enter into the week before Jesus’ execution, by observing a week between Palm Sunday and Easter as well, remember that it might have been a number of months before Jesus was actually sentenced and executed from the time he entered Jerusalem.

Is There Righteousness Outside of Christ? A Reading of Mark 2:17

I want to focus on a particular verse that has caused me to pause for a number of years.

It comes from Mark 2:17 in which Jesus says he has not come to call the righteous but sinners. The call, as it were, is to repentance, the Hebrew meaning t’shuva (to turn).

All the best translations read “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” Only the New Living Translation (NLT) adds the words “who think they are” righteous. If we adopt the plain interpretation, then what this means is that Jesus was indeed acknowledging the righteous in distinction to the unrighteousness of others. How does this verse function?  Almost invariably the focus on this verse is the problem caused by the word “sinners.” Who are the sinners? Are they the tax collectors like Levi who appears in this context? Are they an amalgam of different groups?

When we consider the audience to whom Jesus is addressing his response, we see it is not his disciples, but the perpetual foils of his ministry, the Pharisees. So Jesus appears to be telling the Pharisees that he is not calling them “the righteous” but is calling sinners to salvation. We are of course not to believe that the Pharisees are righteous. After all, they continually antagonize Jesus with questions, which is not at all problematic in the rabbinical haberim tradition, but is often set up this way in the Christian scriptures due to a reading of Jesus’ special authority to make statements that we are to believe are unique even though many are rooted in Judaism. This is not to make a value judgment, but simply to say that Jesus was a rabbi of his time and would have spoken in a language that made sense to the people. This veiled accusation as we may call it pops up again in John, where Jesus heals a blind man but in turn indicts the Pharisees of spiritual blindness.

A common interpretation such as that made by conservative biblical exegete Ben Witherington III is that 17a is ironic. The Pharisees certainly can’t be righteous, but since they think they are righteous (as we can recall the exchange between John the Baptist) because they are born of Abraham, Jesus is calling them out subtly. Yet this interpretation of the data runs into problems. First it seems to create a special condition of unbelief in which Jesus is unable to win over individuals, namely those who are self-deceived. Second, if Jesus who is the embodiment of God’s salvation is not meant for everyone, we are dealing with special election. Saying some people are not even called conflicts with the larger picture of salvation we like to see when we take the New Testament as a whole. Interestingly, the NLT that adopts this reading as those “who think themselves righteous,” adopts a method of dynamic equivalence, i.e., rendering the Greek and Hebrew into “how it would be understood” by an English readership. That means the translators aren’t simply reorganizing the sentence structure to make grammatical sense of the Greek, but they are also imposing their own interpretative gloss. In either case, we’re left with a particularly demanding problem: We have a general sense that salvation is for all, at least in Pauline Christianity, for even Jesus commands his disciples not to go outside of the house of Israel. But now we have a case where we must explain why some are not worthy to be called, and the options left to us are simply that Jesus will simply have nothing to do with these kinds of self-deceived individuals who are in reality sinners themselves are that Jesus recognizes that there is a righteous element outside of his own unique call to salvation. In this second case, Jesus need not at all be speaking directly to the Pharisees, but may be speaking of a general condition of righteousness, which indeed we can see in other examples, especially with the pericope of the rich, young ruler. He acknowledges the Torah, saying that not one jot will perish from it, so that to be serious about this statement is to understand that those dimensions referring to salvation that comes by YHWH must remain real and effectual and unchanging to some extent.

The uniqueness of the salvation that we sense comes by the cross cannot be retroacted into Jesus’ earthly ministry with completely satisfactory results. This is because Jesus still acknowledges righteous behavior and behavior worthy of salvation outside himself. Acknowledging this means that when we read of another righteousness, it is a real righteousness that does indeed make sense of other verses in the theology of the Synoptics.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead - What Did Jesus Really Mean?

This is still one of my favorite explanations of a rather difficult pericope in the New Testaments. I reproduce it here. The essay comes from Gordon Franz but is largely based on work by Byron McCane (Duke University). While I don't agree with Franz's conclusion because it assumes Jesus had already established a soteriological understanding of his own death during the time of his preaching, it opens up an interesting question about different interpretations of the second resurrection in Jewish theology at the time. It may simply be that Jesus did not accept the atonement theory considered by some Jewish thinkers in the decaying flesh, though he did not assume to offer a competing explanation. Or it may be that at least during this time, the forgiveness of sins remained a matter of the Temple sacrifice, and to suggest the decaying flesh atoned for sins competed with this longstanding tradition that any traditional Jew may have rejected.

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LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR OWN DEAD

(MATTHEW 8:22; Luke 9:60)

Gordon Franz

There are two incidents recorded in the Gospels when a disciple requested a leave of absence in order to bury his father (Matt. 8:21-22; Luke 9:59-60). Although the requests appear reasonable, Jesus gave a seemingly harsh reply in each case: Follow Me, let the dead bury their own dead.

This statement is often considered a hard saying of Jesus (Bruce 1983: 161-163). Some critical scholars suggest that Jesus was encouraging His disciples to break the fifth commandment (honor your father and mother) by not giving their fathers a proper burial (Sanders 1985: 252-255). Is He really demanding this? Most commentaries suggest Jesus meant, Leave the (spiritual) dead to bury the (physical) dead (Fitzmyer 1981: 836; Liefeld 1984: 935). This interpretation, though common (Fitzmyer calls it the majority interpretation), is not consistent with the text and with Jewish burial practices of the first century AD.

Problems with the Majority Interpretation

Byron McCane, of Duke University, points out three problems with the majority interpretation (hereafter MI; 1990:38-39). First, it does not give an adequate explanation of the disciples request, Let me first go and bury my father.  The MI sees the request as a conflict of loyalties between the disciples responsibilities to their dead fathers and their commitment to follow Jesus. This minimizes the importance of the adverb first.  In each case, a disciple was requesting time to fulfill his family obligation regarding the burial of his father. Once this was discharged, the disciple would return and follow Jesus. Thus the MI does not explain the disciples request for time.

Secondly, those who follow the MI generally omit the words their own dead, because they want to distinguish between two meanings of the word dead.  Let the spiritually deal bury the physically dead.  However, the text says, their own dead, indicating that both occurrences of dead are connected in a reflexive possessive relation. There is no need to spiritualize the text regarding the dead; both are physically dead!

Finally, the MI goes against first-century Jewish burial customs. In the first century, when a person died, they normally were taken and buried immediately in the family burial cave that had been hewn out of bedrock. [For the archaeology of Jewish tombs during the New Testament period, see Rahmani 1958, 1961, 1982a]. This custom is based on the injunction found in the Mosaic Law, not to leave the corpse on an executed person on the tree overnight (Deut. 21:22-23). Two examples of immediate burials are found in the New Testament: Jesus (John 19:31) and Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:6-10).

Immediately after the burial, the family would separate itself and mourn for seven days. This mourning period was called shiv�ah. It would have been impossible for the disciples to make their request if their father had just died. If they were the eldest sons, they were obligated by custom to immediately bury their fathers. If the MI is correct, the disciples would have been acting contrary to normal first-century Jewish burial practices.

An Interpretation Based on First-Century Jewish Burial Practices

McCane suggests an interpretation that is consistent with first-century Jewish burial practices (1990:40-41). After a body was placed in a burial cave, it was left to decompose. The family mourned for seven days. This initial mourning period was followed by a less intense 30-day period of mourning, called shloshim. However, the entire mourning period was not fully over until the flesh of the deceased had decomposed, usually about a year later. The Jerusalem Talmud states: When the flesh had wasted away, the bones were collected and placed in chests (ossuaries). On that day (the son) mourned, but the following day he was glad, because his forebears rested from judgment (Moed Qatan 1:5).

The final act of mourning, the gathering of the bones into a bone box called an ossuary, was called ossilegium, or secondary burial.  It is this act, I believe, that is in view in our Lord's response. [For a good discussion of secondary burials, see Meyers 1971; Rahmani 1981. On ossuaries, see Rahmani 1982b]. The disciples request and Jesus response makes good sense in light of the Jewish custom of secondary burial. When the disciples requested time to bury their fathers they were actually asking for time to finish the rite of secondary burial. Their father had died, been placed in the family burial cave, and the sons had sat shiv'ah and most likely shloshim. They had requested anywhere from a few weeks to up to 11 months to finish the ritual of ossilegium before they returned to Jesus.

Jesus' sharp answer also fits well with secondary burial. The fathers had been buried in the family burial caves and their bodies were slowly decomposing. In the tombs, along with the fathers, were other family members who had died, some awaiting secondary burial, others already placed in ossuaries. When Jesus stated: Let the dead bury their own dead, He was referring to two different kinds of dead in the tomb: the bones of the deceased which had already been neatly placed in ossuaries and the fathers who had yet to be reburied. The phrase own dead indicates that the fathers were included among the dead.

The Setting of This Saying

The Gospels record two incidents where disciples approached the Lord to request a leave of absence from following Him. The first request is recorded in Matthew 8. Jesus was about to take the Twelve across the Sea of Galilee to the Decapolis city of Gadara. Chronologically, this trip is the first recorded journey of Jesus to minister in Gentile territory. One of His disciples hesitated, probably because he did not want to go to those unclean, non-kosher pagan Gentiles.

So he made an excuse, Let me first go and bury my father.  He most likely appealed to the Jewish burial practice of ossilegium, or secondary burial, which would remove him from following the Lord for up to eleven months. Jesus saw this as an excuse not to minister to the Gentiles. As a result He rebuked him with a statement of irony and challenged the disciple to follow Him. Quite possibly this was Peter because he is known to have had a problem associating with Gentiles (Acts 10:9-22; Gal. 2:11-12).

The second incident is recorded in Luke 9:59-60. Another disciple, possibly one of the 70 (Luke 10:1, 17) was going to Jerusalem for the Feast of Succoth (Tabernacles) during the fall of AD 29. He asked to be excused for the same reason. It may be that this disciple was taking advantage of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to rebury the bones of his father in the Holy City (cf. Meyers 1971-72: 98, 99; Avigad 1962). If so, Jesus felt it was more pressing for him to go with the 70 to Perea than to rebury the bones of his father in Jerusalem.

In each case, the father had died more than a month prior and the Lord rebuked the disciples with the same stern statement.

The Reason for Jesus' Response

Why would Jesus respond in a seemingly harsh manner? The purpose of His response may have been twofold. The first purpose was to encourage the disciples to faithfully follow Him. The second purpose and perhaps more importantly, was to teach correct theology.

The concept of gathering the bones of one's ancestors is deeply embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures and reflected in Israelite burial practices (Gen. 49:29; Judges 2:10; 16:31; I Kings 11:21, 43, etc.). However, by New Testament times, the concept had taken on a new meaning. According to the Rabbinic sources, the decomposition of the flesh atoned for the sins of the dead person (a kind of purgatory) and the final stage of this process was gathering the bones and placing them in an ossuary (Meyers 1971: 80-85). Jesus confronts this contrary theology. Only faith in Christ's redemptive work on the cross can atone for sin, not rotting flesh or any other work or merit of our own (Heb. 9:22, 26; Acts 4:12; Eph. 2:8, 9). Jesus may have rebuked these two disciples rather harshly because they were following the corrupted practice of secondary burial.

Conclusion

An amplified (interpretive) rendering of this statement might be: Look, you have already honored your father by giving him a proper burial in the family sepulcher. Now, instead of waiting for the flesh to decompose, this can never atone for sin, go and preach the Kingdom of God and tell of the only true means of atonement, faith alone in Christ. Let the bones of you dead father's ancestors gather his bones and place them in an ossuary. You follow me! This interpretation allows for Jesus to have upheld the fifth commandment, takes the text at face value, and does justice to the Jewish burial practices of the first century. The interpretation is therefore consistent theologically, Biblically, and historically, and answers the critics accurately.