Marcos 11

The ‘triumphal’ entry—Sunday, 03/31/30 AD

1 Now when they were drawing near Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, He sent two of His disciples, 2 saying to them: "Go into the village opposite you; and as soon as you enter it you will find a foal tied, on which no man has sat. Untie and bring it. 3 And if anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it,’ and thereupon he will send it here."*At first glance the rendering, "The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly", looks inviting, but it doesn’t quite fit. The animal would be gone for a number of hours, and one would expect a different verb. The seeming difficulty posed by the change from ‘he’ to ‘they’ (in verse 6) is easily answered: in verse 3 the ‘he’ agrees in number with the preceding ‘anyone’, and the owner of the animal may have been among the bystanders (verses 5 & 6). In any case, the owner evidently knew who ‘the Lord’ was, and had presumably been forewarned—why else was the foal already tied outside?

4 So they went and found the foal tied at the door, out in the street, and they loosed it. 5 Some of those who stood there said to them, "What are you doing, untying the foal?" 6 So they answered them just as Jesus had instructed, and they let them go. 7 Then they brought the foal to Jesus, and they placed their clothes on it, and He sat on it. 8 And many spread their clothes on the road, while others were cutting leafy branches from the trees*Well under 1% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, have ‘fields’ instead of ‘trees’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.). and spreading them on the road. 9 Both those who went in front and those who followed started calling out, saying:

"Hosanna!"

"Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!"*See Psalms 118:26.

10 "Blessed is the Kingdom of our father David

that is coming in the name of the Lord!"*Perhaps 5% of the Greek manuscripts omit ‘in the name of the Lord’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.). Different people were saying different things and Mark records some of the variety (he may well have been there; in fact I suspect that he probably was).

"Hosanna in the highest!"

11 So Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when He had looked around at everything,*He knew what He had to do the next day (clean out the commerce), but there wasn’t enough time to do a proper job just then. the hour being late, He went out to Bethany with the twelve.