The Confusing Sayings: Luke 19:10

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

This article is part of a series explaining Jesus’s Confusing Sayings.

If any of Jesus’s verse’s are confusing to you, let me know in a comment and I can analyze its Greek in a future article.

This is a different type of “confusing” saying. If you don’t like puzzles, and most Biblical translators don’t, you will prefer the easy biblical versions. Jesus, however, liked contradictions, paradoxes, and puzzles. At the end of this article, we can see how he might have hidden some of his best wordplay in plain sight.

We can think we understand this saying because of the way it is translated. However, the English is nothing like the Greek, which his listeners had to figure out for themselves, one step at a time. This article will take us through those steps as far as accurate translation can carry us, but the end leaves us a few choices.

Two Versions

The context is Jesus’s encounter with the tax-collector Zacchaeus, where Jesus invites himself to dinner at Zacchaeus’s house. When they are seated for the meal, the Pharisees accuse Jesus of eating with sinners. Zacchaeus then announces that he will give half his possessions to the poor and payback anyone he has cheated four times over. Jesus then says that salvation has come to Zacchaeus’s house.

Here is the modern Biblical translation of what Jesus said next in Luke 19:10:

NIV: For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

This English is easy to understand and totally in line with Jesus’s teaching. However, it is not what Jesus said, which was more like:

Listeners Heard: Because this son of the man shows up to seek and rescue the thing having destroyed [it].

The confusing words here are the final two words and the implied word after them, shown in both versions above in boldface. This is the “punchline.” It comes at the end where Jesus commonly puts his twists of wordplay so they are a surprise to the listener. The English seems easily understandable because the translators didn’t translate what Jesus said at the end.

This problem goes back to the Latin Vulgate, which obscured Jesus’s last two words sixteen hundred years ago. The Vulgate ended this verse with the Latin words that mean “what has vanished” or “what has passed away.” This comes no closer to translating the Greek than the English version. Even the translators of the time preferred a less thought-provoking saying than the one Jesus gave us.

The “Thing”

The Greek words translated as “the lost” mean “the thing having destroyed”. The NIV’s “the lost” sounds like it is a group of people who is being saved, but the Greek words are not in the right form for a group or for people. These two final words describe a singular “thing”.

The verb used means “to destroy,” "to demolish", "to lay waste", and "to lose." In the passive, it can be translated as “are destroyed” or “are lost” but this verb is not passive. It is active, describing a thing that actively destroys. This word is commonly translated as “lose” in the Bible, but it is still used to mean “destroy” as in ”lose” your life” or “lose” your soul. Jesus came to save this destroyer, which is an idea that some might find uncomfortable, but which makes perfect sense in the end. This “destroy” describes a destruction completed in the past, “the one having destroyed.” Whatever this destroyer is, it has already having destroyed something. As we reach the end of the saying, there is not one but two mysteries. What is the destroyer? And what is destroyed?

Jesus has actually just told us what was destroyed, but we don’t always have ears to hear him. A Greek listener assumes the object from the context. What has Jesus mentioned that has been destroyed in the past? Jesus’s listeners would have understood that it was “the house” of Zacchaeus. Jesus just told us that the house was “saved” by saying it came back to salvation, or, as we would say, it was salvaged.

Saving the Destroyer

But Jesus is not saying that he came to seek and rescue the house. He said that he came to find and save the thing that destroyed it. Jesus does not say what that might be. It cannot be Zacchaeus because the form of the phrase is not masculine, describing a person. What thing is the destroyer of houses? Specifically, what destroyed Zacchaeus’s house?

Jesus doesn’t tell us much, only that it is a single thing. We must think about the possibilities, which means pondering Jesus’s past sayings and the words of “things” that he commonly uses. Of course, English speakers cannot be expected to know which Greek words are “things.” So we literally have “nothing”—which happens to be a common neuter Greek word—to think about.

Below are the Greek neuter words that could be “the one having destroyed” Zacchaeus’s house. Which did Jesus come to find and rescue?

Three Destroying Things

One possibility is the Greek word for “spirit,” which Jesus used forty times. It is described as part of every person. It was also a word that Jesus used talking about “saving,” though it is often translated as “life” when he does. For example, in Matthew 16:25, “For whoever will save his life shall lose it.” Jesus also refers to worthless spirits more often than he does the Divine one, which fits this verse. Zacchaeus’s house could have been destroyed by his worthless spirit.

Another possibility is the Greek word for “name.” In Greek, this word refers not only to what people are called, but their reputation and their standing in the community. Here, the man is condemned because he has earned the name of “tax collector,” which is reviled down through history. Jesus uses the Greek word for “name” forty-seven times, even more commonly than “spirit.” The title “tax collector” may be what destroyed Zacchaeus’s house.

However, my favorite candidate is a word that is hiding in plain sight. It is the word usually translated as “it.” In different forms, the same word also means “he,” “she,” “him,” “her,” they,” and “them.” Jesus uses this word hundreds of times. The same word, when used as a noun means “self,” specifically, “the true self.” It is the Greek word auto, which we use in all types of things that run themselves, that is, that are automatic.

Why not use it here? Perhaps it is too much on the nose. To name selfishness as the thing destroying a man’s house fits with Jesus’s sense of fun.