Now that we have reviewed this chapter, let us think a little bit about what the citation of verse 9 in Mark and John implies about early Christians understanding of Jesus and his relationship to prophecy. This verse is cited in both Matthew and John, and in both Gospels the section cited below is either paraphrased or they are citing from a variant form of the text that no longer survives. 

Lo, your king comes to you;

See your king comes to you,

Triumphant and victorious is he,

Righteous and saving is this one

Humble and riding on a donkey,

Gentle and mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt

On a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Within Zechariah, this passage follows a section in which God basically promises to overthrow the might of the Gentiles within the ideal boundaries of a greater kingdom of Israel, to dwell in his house in Jerusalem, to make the Gentiles within that kingdom observe religious proscriptions, and to make them like a clan of Judah, thus incorporating them into both the religious and political fold.  It is followed by the promise to gather up the participants in his covenant into his stronghold, to wield them like a sword against the Greeks, and for God’s might to ensure a victory that bathes the army of the sons of Zion in blood like God’s altar is bathed in the blood of sacrifice.  This ushers in a utopian era of bounty.  

This pairing of worldly military victory with the triumph of God’s might is fairly common in the Hebrew Bible (think about stuff like the walls of Jericho, for example).  Partly this reflects a common assumption in the ancient world that divine favor led to military victory, but there is also a more specific argument being made in parts of the Old Testament that the destruction of the first Temple and the Babylonian exile were the result of insufficient fidelity to God’s covenant.  In this view, the triumph of other nations is not indicative that their gods are superior, but rather that Israel’s God has chosen to punish them.  Zechariah 9 is explicitly describing the remission of the punishment and the restoration of God’s people to divine favor.  

In terms of their political circumstances, early Christians would have found themselves in quite similar circumstances to the authors of Zechariah.  For Christians the empire would have been the Roman Empire, for the authors of Zechariah they would have been subject to either the Persian empire or one of the Hellenistic Kingdoms. In both instances people faithful to the God of Israel were subject to a foreign, polytheistic aristocracy.  

There is clearly some extent to which Jesus’ immediate followers expected him to establish a worldly Kingdom of God, and it is likely that the Gospels at least in part are a revision of this expectation or an apologetic effort to defend Christianity against accusations that they were just failed insurrectionists. For example, one of the disciples mysteriously has a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is crucified as “King of the Jews,” which implies the charge of insurrection, and Luke explicitly contrasts Jesus, who is crucified, with the insurrectionist Barabbas, who is not.  

This expectation for a worldly kingdom has been transmuted into the expectation for a heavenly kingdom by the time the Gospels are written, and the dualism of worldly-divine victory that is demonstrated in the Hebrew Bible generally, and Zechariah 9 specifically, help to facilitate this transition.  Even within the context of Zechariah 9.9 it is not obvious whether the king arriving is a person or God, and it is a short distance to travel from the language in Zechariah 9:14-15 to some of the more apocalyptic language in Matthew, for example.  

We should also consider how Zechariah 9 deals with people outside of the covenant, and what implications that has for later Christianity.  In particular, Zechariah 9:1-8 seems to describe the compulsory faithfulness of people who were previously outside the covenant, whereas Zechariah 9:11-15 seem to suggest that some other people outside the covenant will simply be destroyed.  This idea that people would become faithful by conquest, in essence having become subject to God’s laws in the sense of political subjugation, is quite alien to our current understanding of Christian salvation as the result of a personal relationship to God.  If we view faithfulness in this sense of obedience to the law as subject peoples, there is very little dissonance between the incorporation of conquered peoples within the geographic boundary of the Kingdom of God and the destruction of peoples outside of those boundaries.  

This indicates an important difference between the authors of Zechariah and later Christian thought. The boundaries of God’s kingdom for the authors of Zechariah are essentially the Promised Land (or a maximalist interpretation of those boundaries) whereas for later Christian thinkers the Kingdom of God was understood to be broader and more universal. There is some extent to which this change is possibly driven by political circumstances. The Roman Empire was a much more plausibly universal political unit than either the Persian Empire or the various Hellenistic kingdoms, and Christianity was distributed quite widely across the empire very quickly.  These early Christians seemed to understand the Kingdom of Heaven as something contrasted against the worldly order of Rome and thus similarly universal.  

It is also something of an open question whether early Christians’ understanding of salvation more closely resembled the view in Zechariah 9, our current view of personalized salvation, or something else entirely.  We should not underestimate the extent to which ancient thinkers had a different understanding of religious observance than we do.  Almost every religion at the time the Bible was composed involved ritual sacrifice, for example, a practice which is wholly absent from the most popular religions today.  Similarly, in Zechariah 9 we see the authors seem to assume that through conquest, people will be turned to appropriate religious practice and that this involuntary observance is a perfectly acceptable form of piety. As we continue reading the Bible, we should keep this question of “how did early Christians understand salvation and is it the same as we currently do?” at the top of our minds.