THIS BOOK MIGHT logically (and chronologically) have begun with a close reading of the biblical story of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, paying careful attention to the underlying Greek and Hebrew texts. Recognizing that some readers might find such an opening gambit less than inviting, I have instead postponed consideration of the biblical material until a point in my narrative arc where, I hope, even the most secular reader will be eager to know what the original story actually said. James Nayler's parodic royal progress, indebted in its own way to the same story, provides a hinge on which I can now turn from the triumphal entries and elite Palm Sunday processions of Part 1 to a close reading of the narrative to which they claimed allegiance.

Christian tradition holds that Jesus of Nazareth rode a donkey into Jerusalem five days before his crucifixion, and that the crowd lining the way waved palms. Palms (or branches of other local foliage) were, as we saw in Part 1, a prominent feature of Palm Sunday processions from the earliest mention of such a procession by Egeria. Long a common feature of Roman triumphal entries, they were no less prevalent in the entries of Christian rulers. Live donkeys, by contrast, were absent from Palm Sunday processions until the fifteenth century, and were no less rigorously excluded from triumphal entries that otherwise borrowed freely from the language and iconography of Palm Sunday. Consistent with this bias, the day on which Christ's entry into Jerusalem was commemorated was called Palm (or sometimes Olive or Hosanna) Sunday, but never Donkey Sunday. In this chapter, I suggest that such a bias reversed the biblical evaluation of the crowd's palms and Christ's donkey.

I begin with the donkey, or at least with a fictional question about it. In her novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Carson McCullers wrote: “Leonora Penderton feared neither man, beast, nor the devil; God she had never known. At the very mention of the Lord's name she thought only of her old father who had sometimes read the Bible on a Sunday afternoon.