It would depend on who was in power 2000 years ago. What was Zootopia’s equivalent of the Roman Empire? Was it a herd of “Prey” animals who used their numbers and size to steamroll the world, or was it a coalition of “Predators” who used their violence to cow the masses?
“For consider your calling, brothers and sisters, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the insignificant things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no human may boast before God.”
1 Corinthians 1:26-29 NASB2020
https://bible.com/bible/2692/1co.1.27.NASB2020
Christ came to shame the powers that be and take the unjust power structures caused by sin and undo them by defeating sin itself. To do so, He had to come as someone socially and politically weak. He could not fight the principalities and powers with their own weapons—He had to break the game.
Zootopia’s central theme is the way racism and unjust social dynamics can lead to misery and the rise of evil people to power. And so Zootopia’s Incarnation of the Word had to be the opposite of the power structures of the world at the time, in order to undo their version of the Fall.
If Zootopia’s Roman Empire was dominated by (probably large) Prey animals, the Word would have to be incarnate as a Lion, since such a person would be considered a credible threat to the power structure, leading to the sacrificial death. If it was Predator-dominated, the Word would take the form of a weak Lamb/Ram, since the powers trusted idolatrously in their violent strength.
There are hints that historically, the violence of Predators in the Zootopia universe was so fundamental to their existence that it could be considered central to Zootopia’s Fall, and that the dominance of Prey animals was due to numerical superiority that could only have evolved within democratic, not aristocratic, social systems. The villain’s scheme seems almost like the concept of “reverse racism,” unjust revenge taken against a historically dominant group. Therefore, Predator Roman Empire seems most likely and the Word therefore would likely have come as a Lamb.
Nevertheless, since C.S. Lewis gave the Word the form of the Lion in The Chronicles of Narnia, I still hold out hope that the Roman Empire was an empire of megafauna, the kinds of Prey that would be large and strong enough with large enough numbers to steamroll the known world, and that the Word was a Lion named Aslan.
