The Arrival of the King
Jesus' Triumphal Entry in Mark's Gospel
Celebrated last Sunday in the Western Church, and a little later in the Eastern one, Palm Sunday is one of my favourite feasts of the year. It marks Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem and the beginning of Holy Week, and the narratives of the event – which show up unusually in all four gospels – raise a panoply of knotty historical questions:
Why, for example, does Matthew redact Mark’s account, so that the scene has two donkeys rather than one? Did Jesus actually ride on both? What influence did Zechariah 9:9 bear on the accounts? And how plausible is it that Jesus rode to shouts of acclamation around Passover, one of the most politically volatile times of the year?
The questions that really excite me about this passage, however, are not historical but literary. One of the key aims of this passage is to present Jesus as a king. Yet if Jesus is a king, what does his ‘triumphal entry’ suggest about the nature of his kingship?
In this piece, I want to dig deeper into these questions with reference to Mark, the font of the tradition. I examine how his narrative compares to the ‘arrivals’ of other royal figures, and how it figures in the gospel’s broader characterisation of Jesus’ kingship. As we shall see, Mark is hesitant to claim outright that Jesus is simply another king, and at the end of the piece I probe some reasons for this reluctance.
The Arrival of a King
When Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, he does so as a king. But to see this, we need to take stock of several biblical and extra-biblical traditions which illuminate Mark’s details:
First, Jesus procures a ‘colt that has never been ridden’, which seems like a peculiar request. This may be a subtle reference to unworked animals in the Jewish law, which have been set aside for some special, sacred purpose. Yet more likely, Mark is wanting his readers to think about Zechariah 9:9, where a king enters Jerusalem riding on a ‘young colt’ (πῶλον νέον).
Second, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the donkey, which does not seem an obvious mode of transportation. As mentioned above, the likely background for this action is Zechariah 9:9: ‘Lo, your king comes to you, riding on a donkey.’ In several biblical texts, elite Jewish figures ride on donkeys. For example, David’s son Solomon rides on his own mule in an act of kingly succession (1 Kgs. 1:33).
Third, the crowd lay down their garments and leafy branches for Jesus in a make-shift carpet. This is redolent of a similar detail in the biblical account of King Jehu’s accession to power, where bystanders hurry to place a garment under the king’s feet (2 Kgs. 9:13). While the ‘leafy branches’ or ‘palms’ (Jn. 12:13) might remind readers of Simon’s entrance into the fort of Jerusalem (1 Mac. 13:51).
Fourth, Jesus rides to shouts of acclamation, ‘Hosanna!… Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!’ While Mark falls short of identifying Jesus explicitly as the king of David’s kingdom (cf. Luke 19:38), Jesus is identified as the ‘blessed one’ who ushers in the Davidic Kingdom. It may be significant, in this respect, that Bartimaeus has just identified Jesus as ‘the Son of David’.
Finally, Jesus approaches the city from the Mount of Olives. Some have seen a parallel here to Zechariah 14, in which the LORD himself comes to Jerusalem, after standing on the same hillside outside of Jerusalem. The purpose of the Lord’s coming is so that that ‘the LORD will become king over all the earth’.
Taken together, these Jewish allusions comprise a set of subtle signals that Jesus is a kingly messiah. Yet this fills out only one side of the picture. To grasp how Mark’s readers would have understood Jesus’ arrival into Jerusalem, it is necessary to pay close attention to the way that kings would more conventionally make an entrance.
Arrivals in the Ancient World
There is a wide body of literary and iconographic evidence for the arrival of Greek, Roman and Jewish leaders into cities. These celebratory ‘arrivals’ or parousiai would have been completely familiar to Mark’s audience, and his readers would have likely seen Jesus’ own parousia into Jerusalem as part of a familiar ‘genre’.
Scholars have variously tried to pin-down a precise ‘scheme’ for what took place on these occasions, which has proved notoriously difficult. Yet there are a few common features in many ‘arrival’ narratives. The leader or king is typically greeted near the city gates and hailed by the citizens; he is then escorted into the city, with songs or acclamations; and finally, the procession tends to end at the city’s Temple, where some form of ritual, such as a benevolent sacrifice, will take place.1
Some of this sounds familiar. Jesus is hailed with shouts of acclamation as he rides into the city. He is also Temple-bound. Yet when we inspect the schema a bit more closely, there are several elements to Mark’s story which begin to seem rather odd.
For a start, there is the background to Jesus’ arrival. In an ancient parousia, it is not uncommon for the leader or king to arrive off the back of a military conquest. Yet here, there is no military victory to celebrate. At most, we have Jesus’ triumph over the forces of darkness, symbolised in the (Roman) ‘Legion’ of demons. Yet Jesus does not come as a conquering king with military might; he comes to the city in peace.
Next, there is Jesus’ mode of transportation. We have already noted that mules were not necessarily un-kingly; Solomon rides on David’s mule. Yet when we look at other parousiai, there is no indication in any of our sources that a king would arrive on a donkey. A horse or a chariot was the conventional transport for a military leader. To arrive to the city on a ‘donkey’ verges on satire of the standard imperial practice.
And even more subversive is the way the story ends: ‘Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve’ (v11). In some processions, the concluding ritual was a sign that the figure was ritually appropriating the city.2 Yet here, Jesus inspects the Temple and leaves. He has not been embraced as Jerusalem’s king, nor has he taken the city captive. Once he has looked around, it’s time for bed.
Kingship in Mark’s Gospel
We have seen that Jesus’ arrival subverts royal expectations. Yet this is not an isolated instance of subversion, but part of a wider scheme in which Mark contrasts Jesus with the other kings of the world. Let us take a brief look at three instances where this scheme manifests itself, from the beginning of the gospel all the way to the cross.
a. Omens at his Baptism
The first clear sign of Jesus’ kingship takes place at his baptism. A dove descends on Jesus and a voice from heaven proclaims him as the Son of God. Many scholars have pointed out that the words of the divine voice bear a clear semblance to coronation Psalm 2 ‘You are my son [today I have begotten you…]’ (v7).For Jewish readers, this was the moment that Jesus was declared, and perhaps even ‘adopted’, as God’s royal son.
Yet here is where things get interesting. Michael Peppard has argued persuasively that the declaration of Jesus as God’s son, coupled with the omen of a dove, would indicate to Roman readers that God had adopted Jesus.3 Bird omens were often seen in the rise to power, and Suetonius describes that it was in the context of a dove omen that Julius Caesar knew that he would adopt Octavian – that is, Augustus – as his son.
But what did it mean for Jesus’ reign to be symbolised by a dove? The bird that Augustus, and other Roman emperors, were more typically associated with was not the dove, but the eagle. And in classical literature, the bellicose eagle is often contrasted with the peaceful dove. To have Jesus’ kingship symbolised by the dove was to comment on the nature of Jesus’ kingship – one of peace, not military conquest.
b. Two Kingly Banquets
Later in Mark, we find Jesus’ kingship contrasted again with the rulers of his age. The most intriguing example of this is found in Mark 6. For the first time in Mark’s bíos, the narrative takes a detour away from Jesus, and we are plunged into the middle of Herod’s birthday banquet, which ends with the death of John the Baptist. What immediately follows is the story of Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand.
At first glance, these narratives seem utterly disconnected. The story of Herod perhaps provides a useful bit of information about how John the Baptist was killed. Yet it does not bear much semblance to the story of Jesus’ miracle that follows.
Yet a closer analysis reveals that Mark has deliberately placed these two ‘banquets’ side-by-side. And the key to unlocking this comparison is single word: Basileus – King. Everyone knew that Herod Antipas was not a basileus, but was rather less prestigiously a tetrarch (‘a ruler of a fourth’). When his father King Herod the Great died, he had been allotted only part of his father’s kingdom.
Mark, however, is absolutely insistent that Herod Antipas was a king, calling him basileus no less than six times in this single episode. This cannot be an accident, because Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand is saturated with messianic allusions. Thus, as Helen Bond argues, it seems that Mark is deliberately contrasting the feasts of King Herod and ‘King’ Jesus.4 While Herod celebrates with the elite few and his banquet ends in death, Jesus comes for all and his feast ends in satisfaction.
c. Dressed as a King
Our final presentation of Jesus as a king takes place in his passion narrative. After Jesus is arrested but before his road to Golgotha, he is placed in a purple robe, given a crown of thorns, and satirised by the Roman soldiers: ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ The same expression, ‘King of the Jews’, then appears as a placard upon Jesus’ cross.
For the soldiers who mock him, this is all parody. Jesus does not belong in an expensive purple robe; he does not deserve a crown. Yet for Mark’s readers – who have been ‘in the know’ from the outset that Jesus is the Messiah – Jesus truly is a king. Yet he is a king quite unlike the Roman emperors. He did not come to subject others to imperial power; rather, he came to subject himself to it.
This may be one of the keys to Mark’s motif of the messianic secret: Jesus’ repeated hushing of the notion that he is the Messiah. It is not that Jesus altogether rejects the notion that he is the Messiah, Son of God, or ‘Son of David’. But he is careful not to let people get the wrong impression about what this entails. For Mark, it is only when the Messiah is crucified that he is rightly identified by the centurion as the ‘Son of God’.
For some modern readers of Mark, this proclamation by the centurion is the climax of another procession that has just taken place. In ancient Rome, there was a custom of the ‘Triumph’, in which a military victor draped in purple and laurel crown processed to the Capitoline Hill to celebrate his conquest. Sometimes, this procession would end with a sacrifice to the gods, or with the killing of a foreign king now held captive.
I am not convinced by all of the parallels to the Roman Triumph and Jesus’ procession to the cross. Yet the logic of the Triumph may lie in the background of Mark’s account. Instead of going to the Capitoline Hill (the place of the head, the caput), Jesus is taken to Golgotha, the ‘place of the skull.’ And there he is lifted up. While Roman writers saw crucifixion as a parody of exaltation, Mark’s audience would have seen this as a moment of real glory. Jesus is now exalted, but exalted in his suffering.
Why another sort of King?
In this piece, I have suggested that the logic of that first arrival into Jerusalem is anticipated and mirrored throughout the gospel. Without using the term explicitly, Mark is depicting Jesus as a king, but he is a very different sort of king to the kings who occupied the surrounding Roman world. The question which this leaves us with is – why? Why is Mark so coy about his presentation of Jesus as a kingly figure?
Perhaps the most obvious answer to this question is that Mark does not want us to have an incomplete picture of Jesus. To portray Jesus as a king is to evoke an array of images of conquest and violence that he is explicitly trying to avoid. Yet we know that the historical figure of Jesus was not a royal figure bent on violence. So this only pushes back the question further: why is he so adamant that Jesus was not like this?
Some scholars may account for this by using post-colonial theory. In particular, Homi Bhabha has developed the idea of ‘colonial mimicry’, the idea that oppressed peoples both imitate and adapt the language of their oppressors.5 Applied to Mark’s gospel, we arguably see ‘colonial mimicry’ at play. In some sense, Jesus is presented as a kingly or imperial figure, but importantly he is not a king in the same way.
Yet I think there is also a more specific explanation which relates to Mark’s setting. Mark Lamas Jr has argued that after Nero’s despotic reign, there was a revival of the notion of libertas – ‘freedom’ from kingship.6 This revival lasted from Julius Vindex’s revolt (c. March 68 AD) to 73 AD (the fourth year of Vespasian), the very period when most scholars think that Mark was composing his gospel.
By avoiding any direct portrayal of Jesus as a king, Mark could therefore have tapped into this wider current of libertas. Instead of calling Jesus a king – a term best avoided – he anticipates Jesus’ reign with an omen of peace; he contrasts Jesus with the bloody ‘King’ Herod; he has Jesus arrive in Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war horse or chariot; and when Jesus finally takes on the garb of a king, it is a moment of satire and parody.
In all of these scenes, Mark is re-defining what true kingship looks like. It is not to wage wars, celebrating bloodshed and terror. It is not to take upon the symbol of the eagle, still adopted by great military powers today. It is simply to arrive in peace.
Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed this post, you may like some of my other Easter-related posts:
See Hans Leander, Discourses of Empire: The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial Perspective (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), 257.
See Paul Brooks Duff, ‘The March of the Divine Warrior and the Advent of the Greco-Roman King: Mark’s Account of Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem’, JBL 111 n.1 (1992): 55–71.
Michael Peppard, ‘The Eagle and the Dove: Roman Imperial Sonship and the Baptism of Jesus (Mark 1.9-11)’, NTS 56 n.4 (2010): 431–51.
See Helen K. Bond, The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2020), 146-47. This technique of comparison (synkrisis) was common in ancient biographical literature.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86. For applications of colonial mimicry in Gospel studies, see Benny Tat-siong Liew, Politics of Parousia: Reading Mark Inter(con)textually (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006).
See Mark G. Lamas Jr., ‘Did Mark’s Jesus “Live Like a King?” The Rex and Roman Imperial Ideology in Mark’s Gospel’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2020).