Palm Sunday

I'm listening to Radio 4's religious round up programme, Sunday.  They have just had a piece about the shortage of donkeys for the Palm Sunday procession.   Everyone wants one,  the price has gone up, and owners of donkeys who have refused cash offers for them from shifty characters, find the next morning that their donkey has been stolen.

Some scholars have gone back to the scriptures and found that, though tradition holds that Christ was taken in  to Jerusalem on a donkey, in the verses that describe this it can be translated as "pack animal".  So now happy-clappy vicars go and borrow llamas for the procession.  

A vicar of the old school was fairly unamused about the use of a South American animal in ancient Judaea, saying that you have to draw a line somewhere. 

Of course if Jesus Christ lived today it's clear what means of transport he would have used.

(It occurs to me that this could be an April Fool.)

Comments

[Rosie]

I put this on Facebook and got this comment:-

Not a bike, a Plymouth Fury apparently: The actual Bible verse that tells us the Lord did indeed drive a Plymouth Fury is Jeremiah, chapter 32. Verse 37 reads "Behold, I will gather them out of all countries, whither I have driven them in mine anger, and in my Fury, and in great wrath; and I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely:" This passage leaves no doubt that the Lord did in fact drive a Fury."

[LC]

I heard this too, and about 10 minutes later it occurred to me that it was April Fools' Day.

[Rosie]

It took me about the same time. I was telling this to a friend who was an English academic, and when I got to the bit about the translation of donkey as "pack animal" she started hunting round her flat for translations of the bible.