The Enthymeme in Luke 19:9 and the Salvation of Zacchaeus

Abstract

Studies on salvation in the Luke 19:1-10 Zacchaean story generally tend to exhibit an underdeveloped analysis of its rhetoric as part of the controversy genre. This paucity reduces salvation to an individual event and ignores the social effect of Lukan salvation in the story. To remedy this, it is here argued that the weight of the controversy genre is felt specifically in the rhetorical use of enthymeme in verse 9, and that Jesus’s enthymemic pronouncement of salvation reveals a social aspect to Zacchaeus’s salvation. The enthymeme supports Zacchaeus’s refutation of the crowd’s position; it insinuates and infers from contrariety and obligates the crowd to distribute honour to Zacchaeus. This function of enthymeme is based on the evidence of first-century rhetors, whose position differs from modern scholarship’s view of the enthymeme as a truncated logical syllogism. Salvation has a social effect. Jesus’s enthymemic pronouncement crowns Zacchaeus’s refutation by calling the crowd to reinterpret Zacchaeus’s social-religious status on the basis of legal precedent.