Luke’s Gospel tells the familiar story of Zacchaeus, a tax collector in first-century Judea who greatly desired to meet Jesus and climbed a tree in order to get a better look at him.
Some of us will remember a song about Zacchaeus that is often sung in Sunday School. It begins, “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, a wee little man was he.” These words are based on Luke 19:3, which says that Zacchaeus “was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature.”
When we read Luke 19 we tend to assume, as in the song, that it was Zacchaeus who was “small in stature.” But because the pronouns “he” and “him” are used for both Zacchaeus and Jesus throughout this account, there is some ambiguity in the text. It could just as well be Jesus who is the short one.
Biblical scholar Isaac Soon points out this ambiguity in a 2023 paper. Soon explains that if Jesus was short, Luke would have had good reason to mention it, since he seems to compare Jesus to two famous people who were known to be vertically challenged.
One of those short people is Aesop, the great teller and collector of fables who lived around 600 BC. Jesus, who was known for his striking parables, can be viewed as a new Aesop. It is interesting that the phrase “Oh, how foolish and slow of heart,” that Jesus says on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:25, also appears in two of Aesop’s fables.
The second short person is the philosopher Socrates, who was sentenced to death for his teachings and was said to have faced death with composure and nobility. Some scholars believe that Luke portrays Jesus’ death in a manner that makes comparisons with the death of Socrates.
Soon also notes that Celsus, a second-century critic of Christianity, charged that Jesus was “little and ugly and undistinguished.” The source of this comment may have been Isaiah 53:2, which describes a servant of God who would have “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” Christians have always seen Isaiah 53 as a prophecy about Jesus, leading to a view that there was nothing special about Jesus’ physical appearance.
It is thus possible that Jesus, rather than Zacchaeus, was the short one in Luke 19:3. Whatever the heights of the two men, Luke emphasizes both Zacchaeus’ desire to know and follow Jesus and Jesus’ openness to sharing fellowship with a tax collector. Tax collectors, as agents of the Roman government, were widely despised in first-century Judea, but Luke shows that even a tax collector could turn to God and receive salvation. The account of Jesus and Zacchaeus reminds us that no one should be considered as beyond redemption.
Dr. Doug Ward is an elder at Church of the Messiah in Xenia and an avid reader.
