Note 58 — Chapter X · THE TRANSFIGURATION OF JESUS, AND HIS LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM.

But how was Matthew led into this singular statement? Its true source has been pointed out, though in a curious manner, by those who conjecture, that Jesus in his instructions to the two disciples, and Matthew in his original writing, following the passage of Zechariah (ix. 9), made use of several expressions for the one idea of the ass, which expressions were by the Greek translator of the first gospel misconstrued to mean more than one animal.58 Undoubtedly it was the accumulated designations of the ass in the above passage: ‏הֲמוֹר וְעַיִר בֶּן־אֲתֹנות‎, ὑποζύγιον καὶ πωλον νέον, LXX. which occasioned the duplication of it in the first gospel; for the and which in the Hebrew was intended in an explanatory sense, was erroneously understood to denote an addition, and hence instead of: an ass, that is, an ass’s foal, was substituted: an ass together with an ass’s foal.59 But this mistake cannot have originated with the Greek translator, who, if he had found throughout Matthew’s narrative but one ass, would scarcely have doubled it purely on the strength of the prophetic passage, and as often as his original spoke of one ass, have added a second, or introduced the plural number instead of the singular; it must rather have been made by one whose only written source was the prophetic passage, out of which, with the aid of oral tradition, he spun his entire narrative, i.e. the author of the first gospel; who hereby, as recent criticism correctly maintains, irrecoverably forfeits the reputation of an eye-witness?60