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Bible Dictionaries
Little Ones
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or LITTLE ONES.—The phrase ‘one of these little ones’ occurs in the records of our Lord’s discourses in the Synoptic Gospels six times (Matthew 10:42; Matthew 18:6; Matthew 18:10; Matthew 18:14, Mark 9:42, Luke 17:2), although, to satisfy these references, it need not have been employed by our Lord on more than two or three different occasions. It seems to have been used with marked solemnity and to be charged with high emotion. To understand its implications, we shall need to inquire whom our Lord designates as ‘little ones,’ whence the designation was derived, and what its significance is.
1. It seems to be quite generally assumed that at least in some of the instances of its occurrence the phrase designates, quite simply, actual children. Thus, multitudes of Christians appear to be accustomed to read Matthew 18:10 as a declaration that the ‘angels of children’ (whatever these ‘angels’ may be) hold a particularly exalted place in heaven. The connexion of this whole passage with the opening verses of the chapter, where a ‘little child’ is presented as a type of the children of the Kingdom, seems to many to require this interpretation, and the parallel passages, Mark 9:37; Mark 9:42, Luke 9:48; Luke 17:2 to add their support to it. A careful scrutiny of the passages in which the phrase occurs, however, will show that its reference is never to actual children, but in every case to our Lord’s disciples.
The earliest recorded employment of the phrase is reported in Matthew 10:40-42. Our Lord is here bringing to a close His instructions to His Apostles as He sent them forth on their first, their trial, evangelistic tour. His words are words of highest encouragement. ‘He that receiveth you,’ He says, ‘receiveth me; and he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me.’ Our Lord makes common cause with His messengers: that is the general declaration. Then comes the enforcement by illustration. It was a matter of common understanding that ‘he that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet’—that is, not in the name of another prophet, but on this sole ground, that he is a prophet, or, as we should say in our English idiom, as a prophet—‘shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man’—that is, again, merely because he is a righteous man—‘shall receive a righteous man’s reward.’ The broad principle, then, is that the receiver shall be put, in the matter of reward, on the level of the received; by his reception of the prophet or righteous man, he takes his place by his side and becomes sharer in his reward. Now comes the application, marked as such (and not the continuation of the examples) by a change of construction. ‘And whosoever’—perhaps we might paraphrase ‘Likewise whosoever’—‘shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.’ The parallelism of the clauses here with those in the preceding sentences compels us to read ‘one of these little ones’ as a synonym of ‘a disciple.’ The sense is, as the receiver of the prophet shall share the prophet’s reward, and the receiver of the righteous man the righteous man’s reward, so the receiver of the disciple shall share the disciple’s reward. The general purport of the declaration, moreover, demands this sense. Its object was to hearten and encourage the Apostles on their mission. For that, they needed assurance, not that goodness to children would be marked and rewarded, but that they, the Apostles, were under Divine care. The very variations from the phraseology of the earlier sentences which are introduced into the application have their part to play in emphasizing this needed lesson. These variations are five in number. In the first place, instead of the simple ‘he that’ receiveth, we have here the emphasized universal ‘whosoever’; there is no danger of failure here. Next, instead of the simple, comprehensive ‘receiveth,’ the least conceivable benefit is here specified—‘shall give to drink a cup of cold water only’: the slightest goodness to the disciples shall be noted and rewarded. Next, instead of the simple statement that the beneliter shall share the reward of the benefited, we have a solemn asseveration that in no case will a due reward be missed: the nature of the reward is left in large vagueness, and it is hinted only that it shall be appropriate, treated as of obligation, and surely given. Lastly, instead of the cold ‘disciple,’ we have the tender ‘one of these little ones.’ The disciples our Lord has in mind are His own disciples: His own disciples He cherishes with a devoted love; and this love is pledged to their protection. The effect of these variations from the formally exact parallel is to raise the saying to its emotional climax. The lesson conveyed is that Christ’s disciples are under the watchful care of His jealous love.
The case is similar with that in the paragraph Matthew 18:5-14. It is important that the relation of this paragraph to the preceding one (Matthew 18:1-4), and the nature of the transition made at Matthew 18:5 be correctly apprehended. The Apostles had been disputing about their relative claims to greatness in the Kingdom of heaven; and the Lord teaches them a much needed lesson in humility by the example of a little child. Setting a little child in their midst, He exhorts them to see in it a type of the children of the Kingdom, and to seek to become like it if they would be greatest in that Kingdom (cf. art. Children, vol. i. p. 304). With Matthew 18:4, however, this incident closes, and the lesson from it is concluded. The discussion that follows in the succeeding verses is no longer an inculcation of humility. It is an exhilarating pledge of the whole Divine power to the sustaining, protection, and glorification of Christ’s disciples. The connexion between the two paragraphs seems to turn on the idea that, though men enter the Kingdom like helpless infants, they are not therefore abandoned to the adverse forces of the world: the power of God is outstretched for their salvation. ‘Such little children’ (Matthew 18:5) God takes under His own protection, rewarding those who do them benefits, and visiting with the severest punishment those who evil-entreat them; their angels ever behold the Father’s face in heaven; if they go astray everything is left that they may be recovered; the Father’s will is pledged that no one of them shall perish. The force of these great assurances is indefinitely enhanced by the individual note that is thrown into them. Throughout, the stress is laid upon the individual, as distinguished from the class, as the object of the Divine love (Matthew 18:5-6; Matthew 18:10; Matthew 18:12; Matthew 18:14): not a single one of them shall be without the Father’s care, no single one of them shall perish. The passage is in effect just the Synoptic parallel of the seventeenth chapter of John, or the Evangelic parallel of the eighth chapter of Romans. Christ’s ‘little ones’ in it are, in short, just ‘those that believe on him,’ of whom ‘it is not the will of the Father that one should perish,’ whose ‘angels in heaven do always behold the face of the Father which is in heaven.’
The declaration of Mark 9:42 is parallel with that of Matthew 18:6, and is immediately preceded by a verse the thought of which is parallel with that of Matthew 10:42. This passage gives us thus afresh in a single context the two primary statements we have met with in Matthew. The variations of the phraseology in Matthew 10:41 from what we have seen in Matthew 10:42 supply commentaries on the meaning of the phrases in the latter. ‘Little ones’ in the one becomes ‘you,’ that is, Christ’s disciples, in the other: ‘in the name of a disciple’ in the one, ‘in the name that ye are Christ’s’ in the other. Thus the interpretation suggested of the passage in Matthew is confirmed by the very language of the passage in Mark. But this language in Matthew 10:41 settles the meaning also of the phrases in the succeeding verse. The ‘you,’ i.e. the disciples, of Matthew 10:41 is replaced in Matthew 10:42 by ‘these little ones that believe,’ which must, therefore, mean the same thing. This indeed would be independently true, since these ‘little ones’ are specifically defined here not as ‘little ones’ simply, but as those ‘little ones’ ‘that have faith.’ It is quite clear, therefore, that ‘these little ones’ in this passage means not children, but believers.
The only other passage in which the phrase occurs, Luke 17:2, is parallel in its assertion with Matthew 18:6 and Mark 9:42, and repeats in effect their language. There is no allusion to children in the entire context, in which our Lord simply warns His ‘disciples’ against sins against their brethren. In this and the parallel passage in Mk., in other words, we have merely renewed manifestations of the Saviour’s concern for those He calls ‘these little ones.’ He pronounces the sin of causing those for whom His love was thus pledged to stumble, almost too great to be expressed in words.
On every occasion of its occurrence, therefore, the phrase ‘these little ones’ evinces itself independently a designation, not of children, but of the disciples of Christ. In these circumstances, we cannot permit doubt to be thrown on its meaning in the palmary passage, Matthew 18:5 f., by the circumstance that certain passages in Mark (Mark 9:33-37) and Luke (Luke 9:46-48) which are parallel to Matthew 18:1-5 might easily be so read as to make literal children the subject of their declarations (Mark 9:37, Luke 9:48) parallel to Matthew 18:5. The account in Matthew is the fuller, and permits the connexion of the clauses to be more exactly estimated. It seems as if it were merely the compression of Mark’s and Luke’s reports which tempts to the identification of the ‘little child’ of the earlier verses with the ‘one of such little children’ (Mk.), or ‘this little child’ (Lk.) of the closing verse: and the pressing of this language literally is not free from difficulties of its own. In any event, we cannot permit any difficulties that we may feel in explaining Mark 9:37, Luke 9:48 to affect the determination of the meaning of a phrase which does not occur in them, when we meet it in other passages where its sense seems clearly indicated.
We may take it as established, then, that the phrase ‘these little ones’ on the Master’s lips means not ‘children,’ but distinctly and always ‘my disciples.’ The question still remains open, however, whether our Lord means by it all His disciples, or only a specially designated class of them. The latter has been quite commonly supposed, and interpreters have busied themselves defining the characteristic qualities of the particularly designated class. Hahn, for example, argues strenuously that the disciples at large cannot be meant; but that the designation presupposes gradations among the disciples (cf. Luke 7:28), and the essence of the exhortation in Luke 17:2 at least is that the greater must not despise the lesser. Godet similarly supposes that the ‘little ones’ are ‘beginners in the faith,’ ‘those yet weak in the faith.’ Surely, however, such distinctions are foreign to the contexts in which these phrases occur, and even inconsistent with them. In Matthew 10:42, for example, the broad identification of ‘one of these little ones’ with ‘a disciple’ excludes from thought all divisions within the body of disciples; and the definition of ‘these’ as the disciples to whom our Lord was speaking, as He spoke of them as ‘these little ones,’ looks in the same direction. In Mark 9:42, again, the phrase ‘these little ones’ takes up broadly the ‘you’ of the preceding verse, and therefore designates just the disciples at large. ‘These little ones’ are, moreover, defined here as ‘these that believe,’ that is to say, as ‘believers,’ in their essential characteristics as such. Much the same may be said of Luke 17:2, in the context of which there is a distinction between brother and brother but no discrimination between greater and lesser, while the whole drift of Matthew 18:5-14 is to exalt the ‘little ones’ and to identify them with that body of chosen ones to whose salvation the will of the Father is pledged. It may be taken as exegetically certain, then, that by ‘these little ones’ our Lord does not intend to single out a certain section of His disciples,—whether the weakest in faith or the more advanced in that humility of spirit which is the fruit of a great faith,—but means the whole body of His disciples. This is therefore just one of the somewhat numerous general designations which He gives to His disciples by which to express His conception of their character and estate, and the nature of His feelings towards them.
2. Whence this particular designation of His disciples was derived by our Lord remains indeed somewhat obscure. It used to be quite generally supposed that in it He had simply adopted and applied to His own disciples an ordinary designation for their pupils current in the Rabbinical schools. This idea seems traceable to J. J. Wetstein, who illustrates the phrase on its first occurrence (Matthew 10:42) by the following quotation from the Bereshith Rabba (xlii. 4):
‘Where there are no little ones, there are no disciples; where there are no disciples, there are no sages; where there are no sages, there are no elders; where there are no elders, there are no prophets; where there is no prophet, there is no God.’
Following this suggestion, commentators like Bolten, Kuinoel, Bloomfield, Fritzsche have accordingly explained the phrase as simply a Hebraism for ‘disciples.’
It was early pointed out, however (e.g. by Meyer, ed. 2, p. 215 note; Bruno Bauer, ii. 241), that the currency in the Rabbinical schools of such an employment of ‘little ones’ as a designation for ‘disciples’ is neither shown by the citation from the Bereshith Rabba nor supported by any other evidence. Accordingly this notion has quite generally died out (cf. Meyer-Weiss, ed. 8, 1890). Its place has been largely taken by the very natural supposition that our Lord has done for Himself what the Rabbis had been supposed to have done for Him,—applied affectionately to His disciples a designation appropriate literally only to children. The difficulty of this supposition, otherwise most satisfactory, is that the particular designation in question—‘little ones’—is not a Biblical designation of children, and not one which would readily suggest itself as a term of affection. Neither the Hebrew (קמן) nor the Greek (μικρός) lent itself readily to adoption as a term of tenderness; and accordingly neither in the Hebrew nor in the Greek Bible does the term ‘little ones’ (הקמנים, οἱ μικροἰ) ever occur as a periphrasis for children. Where we read of ‘little ones’ in the English Bible in the sense of children, this is an imposition of an English idea upon a totally divergent Hebrew conception (מַף Genesis 34:29; Genesis 43:8; Genesis 46:5 etc.). It is quite true that in Rabbinical Hebrew קמנים has become a standing term for children; but not as a term of affectionate feeling so much as with the simple implication of immaturity. The katan and kĕtanna were to the Rabbis merely the ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ as undeveloped and unripe, in opposition to the mature man and woman. And although this term was occasionally transferred by them metaphorically to their pupils, it was not, if we can trust the lexicographers, in a very pleasant sense. The ‘little one’ among the disciples was just an ‘abortion’—one who disregarded his teacher and set his immaturity against his master’s ripe learning; or one who, while yet fit only to be a learner, wished to set himself up prematurely as a teacher (ef. Levy or Jastrow, sub voce קמן, quoting the tract Sota 22a; but consult Sota 24b, where we are told that Samuel was surnamed הקמן ‘the Little,’—cf. ‘James the Little’ in the NT, and ‘Kleigenes the Little’ in Xenophon,—because he made himself little, that is, bore himself humbly; here a good sense seems to be attached to the metaphorical use of the word). It was assuredly not from this circle of ideas that our Lord derived His use of the phrase, even if we may suppose that this Rabbinical use of it was already developed in His day.
Only two OT passages suggest themselves as offering natural points of departure for the framing of such a phrase as our Lord employs. The one of these is Isaiah 60:22 and the other Zechariah 13:7. In the former, the terms employed, from which our Lord’s phrase may have been derived, are הַקָּמֹן in the first clause and הַצָּעִיר in the second. In the latter the Hebrew term employed is הַצֹּעֲרִים, translated in the LXX Septuagint οἱ μικροί. Both passages are Messianic, though only Zechariah 13:7 is adduced in the NT and given explicit application to Christ (Matthew 26:31, Mark 14:27). In neither is there any allusion to children; but in both the reference of the diminutive term is to the smallness of the beginnings out of which the Lord in the days of the coming blessing shall recreate His Church. If we may believe that the Master had these passages in mind when He called His disciples ‘these little ones,’ then the application of the term to them obviously meant to point them out as those ‘little ones’ who, Zechariah had promised, should be relined as silver and tried as gold, only that they might for ever become the Lord’s people; who, Isaiah had promised, should be the unassuming nucleus out of which by gracious expansion should be developed the newly created city of God which should be to Him an everlasting possession. The consonance of this implication of the term with all the allusions of the contexts in which it occurs, and with all the declarations concerning His ‘little ones’ which our Lord makes, lies on the face of things. And on its assumption all the peculiarities of the form and use of the phrase at once find an adequate explanation.
3. If, now, we ask why and with what meaning our Lord designated His disciples ‘these little ones,’ a twofold answer seems indicated. It is on the one side His chief Messianic designation of His followers: it is on the other side the chief of His hypocoristic designations of them. Other designations of each order exist. When Jesus speaks of His followers as ‘children of the kingdom,’ for example, He is applying to them a Messianic designation; or, to confine ourselves to the circle of ideas most closely related to the passages of the Old Testament supposed to be in His mind in the instance holding our attention, when He calls them His ‘sheep’ (Matthew 26:31) or more pointedly His ‘little flock’ (Luke 12:32), these are Messianic designations which He is applying to them. Similarly His language with reference to them was full of hypocoristies. They were not merely His ‘children’ (Mark 10:24, John 21:5), but His ‘little children’ (John 13:33). They were not merely His ‘flock’ (Matthew 26:31, John 10:16), but His ‘little flock’ (Luke 12:32). They were not merely His ‘sheep’ (Matthew 10:6), but His ‘little sheep’ (John 10:7; John 10:16); not merely His ‘lambs’ (Luke 10:3), but His ‘little lambs’ (John 21:15). In the designation ‘little ones’ both these lines of expression reach their height. In calling His disciples the ‘little ones’ of Isaiah 60:22, Zechariah 13:7, He points to them as the true seed of the Kingdom, the branch of God’s planting, the work of His hands in which He shall be glorified (cf. Schwartzkopff, The Prophecies of Jesus Christ, pp. 199–202). In calling them ‘little ones’ (οἱ μικροί) He applies to them the hypocoristic by way of eminence,—so pure a hypocoristic that the very substantive is lacking, and nothing persists but the bare endearing diminutive. There is combined, therefore, in this designation the expression of our Lord’s deep-reaching tenderness for His disciples and the declaration of His protecting care over them as ‘the remnant of Jacob.’ The ordinary suggestions of the meaning of the phrase as applied to the disciples may doubtless be neglected as artificial. Reuss, for example, thinks they were called ‘little ones’ because they were drawn from the most humble, the least distinguished section of society; de Wette, because they were despised and meanly esteemed for Christ’s sake; Dr. Riddle, in recognition of their weakness in themselves in the midst of the persecution of the world. These are all secondary ideas. Primarily our Lord’s disciples were called by Him ‘little ones’ because this was the natural utterance of the tenderness of Jesus’ love for them, and the strongest mode of expressing the glorious destiny that was in store for them. The passages in which the epithet occurs are full of the note of pledged protection, and they run up into that marvellous declaration that no man and no thing can snatch them out of the Father’s hand. We shall not go far wrong, then, if we say simply that our Saviour calls His disciples ‘these little ones’ because He thinks of them as the peculiar objects of His protecting care, and sees in them already of the travail of His soul that He may be satisfied. The greatness of His love for them, the greatness of their significance as the seed of the Kingdom,—these are the two ideas that combine in this designation.
Benjamin B. Warfield.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Little Ones'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/l/little-ones.html. 1906-1918.
