Zacchaeus of Jerusalem

Zacchaeus of Jerusalem, whose name is also rendered Zacharias in some later lists, was a Jewish Christian of the early second century and the fourth bishop of the church in Jerusalem. Virtually all that can be established about him comes from Eusebius of Caesarea, who in the fourth book of his Ecclesiastical History states that he could find no written chronology of the Jerusalem bishops and that tradition described them as short-lived. From earlier written sources Eusebius compiled a catalogue of fifteen bishops of Hebrew descent who led the Jerusalem community from the apostolic age until the Jewish war under the emperor Hadrian. In that catalogue Zacchaeus stands fourth, succeeding James the so-called brother of the Lord, Symeon, and Justus, and preceding Tobias.

The church over which Zacchaeus presided was still a Hebrew-Christian congregation. Eusebius stresses that until the siege connected with Hadrian the whole church in Jerusalem consisted of believing Hebrews who had continued from the days of the apostles, and that its bishops were of the circumcision and were judged to have received the knowledge of Christ in purity. After the death of James in the sixties of the first century, leadership passed to Symeon son of Clopas, a relative of Jesus, whom Hegesippus reports was martyred at an advanced age in the reign of Trajan. Justus followed Symeon; Zacchaeus followed Justus. Because the remaining bishops of the Hebrew line are described as short-lived, Zacchaeus’s tenure must be placed in the early decades of the second century, between the later years of Trajan and the outbreak of the Bar Kokhba revolt, but no contemporary inscription, letter, or chronicle records the precise dates of his episcopate or of his death.

That Hebrew succession ended with the suppression of the second Jewish revolt against Rome. After 135 Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as the pagan colony of Aelia Capitolina and excluded Jews from the city; thereafter the bishops of Jerusalem were Gentiles and the local church lost its original Jewish-Christian character. Zacchaeus therefore belongs to the last phase of the mother church’s Hebrew episcopate, a line that later historians valued as evidence of continuity between the apostolic Jerusalem community and the later Gentile church of Aelia. No writings, sermons, or acts of Zacchaeus have been preserved, and neither Eusebius nor the later catalogues of Epiphanius of Salamis and the Apostolic Constitutions add any personal anecdote, miracle, or doctrinal stance to his name.

Christian tradition nevertheless numbered him among the saints. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 23 August as the bishop who governed the church of Jerusalem fourth after the apostle James. Eastern liturgical calendars likewise retain his name among the early shepherds of the holy city. His cult is one of ancient veneration rather than of a later formal canonization. Nothing historically reliable is known of his birthplace, family, manner of death, or burial. Chronologies that assign him an episcopate of about 112–116, or a death in 116, are later reconstructions that attempt to fill the gaps Eusebius himself admitted he could not close; they should be treated as conjectural.