Despite the heavy emphasis on Jesus' own Jewishness in the Gospel of Matthew, some scholars are doubting that Matthew was a Jew. Sometimes cited as evidence is Matthew's interpretation of passages from the Hebrew Bible, particularly Zechariah 9:9, as quoted in Matthew 21:5: "Look your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey."

Anyone who has studied the Jewish Scriptures recognizes the literary form of the passage. Hebrew authors employed a kind of parallelism where the second line of a couplet repeated the ideas of the first line using different words. Here the parallelism is between the "donkey" of the first line and the "colt, the fole of a donkey" in the second.

Matthew, however, appears to have misunderstood the parallelism, or unusually failed to understand it. He seems to have thought that the prophet was speaking of two different animals, one of them a donkey and the other a colt. Therefore, when Jesus prepares to ride into Jerusalem, his followers actually acquire two animals for him, which he straddles for the trip into town (21:5-7; see Mark 11:7 for contrast). Scholars have argued that no educated Jew would have made this kind of mistake about the Zechariah passage and no other Gospel author makes this mistake, so this author could not have been Jewish.

But, many other scholars are not convinced because many of the educated authors from the ancient world also have been known to misread texts that come even from their own context. This includes ancient Jewish interpreters of their own Hebrew Scriptures, some of whom produce interpretations that are just as bizarre as Matthew's interpretation of Zechariah, including late rabbinic sources which also claims Zechariah was referring to two animals.

(Adopted from Bart D. Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, Fourth Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008: p. 118.)

See Peculiarities Of The Gospels