⚠ Matthew has two animals, and he is the only one who does. Mark, Luke and John all have a single colt. Matthew has a donkey and a colt with her (v2), brings both (v7), and says he sat "on them." The reason is visible in the quotation he supplies at v5: Zechariah 9:9 in Hebrew uses synonymous parallelism — "on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden" — where the second line restates the first and there is one animal. ⚠ The readings offered: that Matthew has taken the parallelism as two beasts, which is what the plain Greek says and what the whole visual tradition then declines to paint (Giotto's fresco above, like nearly every other, shows one donkey); or that he is being scrupulously literal about a prophecy and the second animal walks alongside; or that a colt still with its mother would have to be brought with her. The library gives the readings and does not choose. What it will not do is quietly translate away one of the two animals, which several modern versions manage by rendering v7's "on them" as "on the cloaks."

"Gentle." Praüs — the same word as the third beatitude, "blessed are the praeis" (5:5), and Matthew's own word for himself at 11:29. KJV reads "meek," which has drifted toward weakness; the point is a king arriving without cavalry.

Hosanna. Not a word of praise, though it has become one. Hōsanna transliterates Hebrew hoshi'a-na — "save, please" — a cry for help, from Psalm 118:25, and the next line the crowd shouts ("Blessed is the one who comes in the name of Jehovah") is verse 26 of the same psalm. ⚠ Note that the shelf divides on whether to translate it or keep it: the KJV ASV NIV all transliterate, while NWT renders the meaning ("save, we pray"). Both are defensible and this translation keeps the transliteration with the sense in the note, because by Matthew's time it plainly functions as an acclamation and the crowd is not asking to be rescued from anything in particular.

The title, one last time from the right sort of people. "Hosanna to the Son of David" — and chapter 20's note said this was coming. The title has been shouted by two blind men (9:27), a Canaanite woman (15:22), two more blind men (20:30), and now by crowds and then by children in the temple (v15) — never once by anyone with standing to confer it, and every time over somebody's objection. Here the objectors are the chief priests.

And a verb Matthew keeps for hinges. "The whole city was shaken" — eseisthē, from seismos, an earthquake. Matthew has used that root of the storm on the lake (8:24) and will use it at the crucifixion and at the empty tomb. Jerusalem does what the sea did.

What was actually being sold, and why it was there. The money-changers (kollybistai) existed because the temple tax had to be paid in a particular coinage and pilgrims arrived with everything else; the dove-sellers existed because the Law prescribes doves as the offering of the poor (Leviticus 12:8). Neither trade was illegitimate in itself, which is what makes the scene hard rather than simple — and Matthew reports no accusation of overcharging. What follows the overturning is the detail Matthew alone adds: "blind and lame people came to him in the temple, and he healed them" (v14). The trading floor is cleared and the people the temple's own regulations kept at a distance walk in.

Two quotations, welded. "My house will be called a house of prayer" is Isaiah 56:7 — and Isaiah's next words, which Matthew does not quote and Mark does, are "for all the peoples." "A cave of bandits" is Jeremiah 7:11, from the Temple Sermon, where the charge is that people commit theft and adultery and murder and then shelter in the temple as if it were a hideout. ⚠ Lēstēs is the point of the second quotation and the shelf mostly loses it: it does not mean a pickpocket or a swindler but a brigand, an armed robber — the word used of the two men crucified beside him (27:38), and the word Josephus uses of insurgents. KJV "den of thieves" and NIV "den of robbers" both suggest commercial dishonesty; the charge is closer to this has become a bandits' hideout. And spēlaion is a cave, not a building.

Children, and a psalm about infants. Against the priests' indignation he quotes Psalm 8:2 — "out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise" — which in the Greek Old Testament reads ainon, praise, where the Hebrew has "strength" (oz). ⚠ Matthew follows the Septuagint, and the argument only works in Greek. That is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over: the quotation as used here depends on the translation Matthew read.

It is the only destructive miracle in the Gospels, and Matthew does not soften it. Mark adds "for it was not the season for figs," which makes the episode stranger, not gentler; Matthew omits that and simply says the tree had nothing but leaves. ⚠ The fig tree is a standing prophetic image for Israel and for its fruitlessness (Jeremiah 8:13, "no figs on the fig tree"; Hosea 9:10; Micah 7:1), and the placement is Matthew's argument — a temple full of activity and no fruit, then a tree full of leaves and no fruit, in that order. Mark makes the point unmissable by wrapping the temple scene inside the fig-tree story; Matthew tells them in sequence and lets the reader do it.

The mountain again. "If you say to this mountain, be lifted up and thrown into the sea" — the same proverb for the impossible as 17:20, where it was a grain of mustard seed against a mountain. Here the qualifier is different and worth noticing: not a little faith but faith "and do not doubt" (diakrithēte, literally to be divided in two, to be at odds with oneself). And they are standing on the Mount of Olives, looking at the Dead Sea.

The word the whole Gospel has been circling. Exousia — authority, the right to act. The crowds noticed it in the very first discourse: he taught "as one having exousia, and not as their scribes" (7:29), and chapter 7's note flagged the word as waiting for the last sentence of the book, "all exousia has been given to me" (28:18). Here the men who hold the official kind of authority ask him to produce his credentials, in the building they administer, the morning after he overturned its furniture.

The counter-question is not evasion; it is a trap with only bad exits. Where was John's baptism from? If from heaven, they have to explain their own unbelief. If from men, they have to say so in front of a crowd that held John to be a prophet — and Matthew tells us the actual reason for their answer in v26: phoboumetha ton ochlon, "we are afraid of the crowd." So "we do not know" is not ignorance, and Matthew has just shown us the calculation behind it. ⚠ Note the shape of the refusal that follows: he does not say I will not tell you; he says "neither do I tell you," which makes the withholding symmetrical. They declined to answer a question they knew the answer to, and get the same treatment.

⚠ The manuscripts cannot agree which son said what, and the answer flips with them. There are three arrangements in the evidence. (1) The first son refuses and then goes; the second agrees and does not — and the answer to "which did the father's will?" is the first. That is the text printed here. (2) The first son agrees and does not go; the second refuses and then goes — answer: the last. (3) A third group has the sons in the second order but gives the answer as "the first," which produces the reading that the son who said yes did the father's will, and is almost certainly a copying error, though some have argued it is a deliberate anti-Jewish or ironic reading. ⚠ The Spanish shelf is the clearest possible demonstration of this: the older RV has the refusing son first and answers "el primero," while the TNM has the agreeing son first and answers "el segundo" — two witnesses, opposite orders, opposite answers, each internally consistent. Whichever arrangement is original, the point survives all three, which is presumably why the scribes felt free: doing beats saying.

The verb, which is not the usual one. The son who turns around metamelētheis — from metamelomai, to regret, to have a change of feeling — not metanoeō, the standard word for repentance that Matthew has used since John's preaching (3:2). It is a softer, more emotional word; it is what Judas does in 27:3. And it lands twice: on the son in v29, and on the priests in v32, who "did not even metamelēthēte afterwards." The charge is not that they failed to reason correctly. It is that nothing moved.

And the second of three. "The tax collectors and the prostitutes are going ahead of you into the kingdom of God" — Matthew's usual phrase is "the kingdom of the heavens," and this is the second of only a handful of departures. Chapter 12's note flagged three (19:24, 21:31, 21:43); the first landed at 19:24, and the remaining two are both in this chapter. ⚠ Note also proagousin — a present tense, "are going ahead," not "will go": it is happening while he says it.

The parable opens by quoting a song. "Planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it and built a tower" is Isaiah 5:1-2 almost word for word from the Greek — the Song of the Vineyard, where the vineyard is explicitly "the house of Israel" and the complaint is that it yielded wild grapes. ⚠ So the audience knows the genre before the plot starts, which is why v45 can say they understood he was speaking about them. Isaiah's version indicts the vineyard; Matthew's indicts the tenants — the leaseholders, not the vines. That shift is the whole parable, and it is the reason v43 says the vineyard is reassigned rather than destroyed.

The stone. Psalm 118:22-23, quoted from the Greek — and note that the crowd's "Hosanna… blessed is the one who comes" at v9 came from verses 25-26 of the same psalm, three verses later. Within one chapter Matthew has the crowd sing the psalm's end and Jesus quote its middle against the authorities. ⚠ Kephalē gōnias is literally "head of the corner," and what that means architecturally is genuinely uncertain: a foundation cornerstone that sets the building's lines, or the capstone at the summit of an arch. The shelf splits — KJV ASV "the head of the corner," NIV "the cornerstone," NWT "the chief corner stone." This translation keeps the literal "head of the corner" and leaves the architecture unsettled, because it is.

"A nation producing its fruits." Ethnos in the singular, and the sentence has carried more freight than almost any other in the Gospel. ⚠ It has been read as the church replacing Israel, and that reading has a long and in places murderous history that this library will name rather than skirt. It has also been read as a change of tenants and not of vineyard — the leaseholders replaced, the vineyard the same — which is what the parable's own machinery says, and as a judgement on a particular leadership rather than a people, which is who v45 says understood themselves to be addressed. The library sets out the readings and does not vote. It does note that the criterion named in the verse is fruit, not identity.

⚠ And a verse that some editions bracket. Verse 44 — "the one who falls on this stone will be shattered; and on whomever it falls, it will crush him to powder" — is missing from a small but early group of witnesses (Codex Bezae, part of the Old Latin, the Sinaitic Syriac), and some editors have judged it an insertion from Luke 20:18. The text this translation follows prints it, and the shelf prints it; the doubt is recorded here rather than in a bracket. It fuses two more stone-passages onto the psalm: Isaiah 8:14's stone of stumbling and Daniel 2:44's stone that grinds the kingdoms to powder.