| 61. Jesus, the Son of Man. | ||||
IN Treating of the Relation in which Jesus conceived himself to stand to the Messianic idea, we can distinguish his dicta concerning his own person from those concerning the work he had undertaken. | ||||
The appellation which Jesus commonly gives himself in the Gospels is, the Son, of man, o( ui(oj tou a)nqrwpou. The exactly corresponding Hebrew expression Ben Adam is in the Old Testament a frequent designation of man in general, and thus we might be induced to understand it in the mouth of Jesus. This interpretation would suit some passages; for example, Matt. xii. 8, where Jesus says: The Son of man is lord also of the Sabbath day, kurioj tou sabbatou, words which will fitly enough take a general meaning, such as Grotius affixes to them, namely, that man is lord of the Sabbath, especially if we compare Mark (ii. 27), who introduces them by the proposition, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. But in the majority of cases, the phrase in question is evidently used as a special designation. Thus, Matt. viii. 20, a scribe volunteers to become a disciple of Jesus, and is admonished to count the cost in the words. "The Son of man has not where to lay his head:" here some particular man must be intended, indeed, the particular man into whose companionship the scribe wished to enter, that is, Jesus himself. As a reason for the self-application of this term by Jesus, it has been suggested that he used the third person after the oriental manner, to avoid the term "I. But for a speaker to use the third person {P.294} in reference to himself, is only admissible, if he would be understood, when the designation he employs is precise, and inapplicable to any other person present, as when a father or a king uses his appropriate title of himself; or when, if the designation be not precise, its relation is made clear by a demonstrative pronoun, which limitation is eminently indispensable if an individual speak of himself under the universal designation man. We grant that occasionally a gesture might, supply the place of the demonstrative pronoun; but that Jesus in every instance of his using this habitual expression had recourse to some visible explanatory sign, or that the evangelists would not, in that case, have supplied its necessary absence from a written document by some demonstrative addition, is inconceivable. If both Jesus and the evangelists held such an elucidation superfluous, they must have seen in the expression itself the key to its precise application. Some are of opinion that Jesus intended by it to point himself out as the ideal man-man in the noblest sense of the word; but this is a modern theory, not an historical inference, for there is no trace of such an interpretation of the expression in the time of Jesus, and it would be more easy to show, as others have attempted, that the appellation, Son of man, so frequently used by Jesus, had reference to his lowly and despised condition. Apart however from the objection that this acceptation also would require the addition of the demonstrative pronoun, though it might be adapted to many passages, as Matt. viii. 20, John i. 51, there are others, (such as Matt. xvii. 22, where Jesus, foretelling his violent death, designates himself ui(oj tou a)nqrwpou which demand the contrast of high dignity with an ignominious fate. So in Matt. x. 23. the assurance given to the commissioned disciples that before they had gone over the cities of Israel the Son of Man would come, could have no weight unless this expression denoted a person of importance; and that such was its significance is proved by a comparison of Matt. xvi. 28, where there is also a mention of a coming of the Son of man, but with the addition "on the clouds of heaven." As this addition can only refer to the Messianic kingdom, the Son of Man must be the Messiah. | ||||
How so apparently vague an appellation came to be appropriated to the Messiah, we gather from Matt. xxvi. 64 parall, where the Son of Man is depicted as coming in the clouds of heaven.. This is evidently an allusion to Dan. vii. 13 f. where after having treated of the fall of the four beasts, the writer says: I saw in the might visions, and behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations iznd languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion. The four beasts (v.17ff.) were symbolical of the four great empires, {P.299} the last of which was the Macedonian, with its offshoot, Syria. After their fall, the kingdom was to be given in perpetuity to the People of God, the saints of the Most High: hence, he who was to come with clouds of heaven could only be, either a personification of the holy people, or a leader of heavenly origin under whom they were to achieve their destined triumph, in a word, the Messiah; and this was the customary interpretation among the Jews. Two things are predicated of this personage, that he was like the Son of Man, and that he came with the clouds of heaven; but reformer particular is his distinctive characteristic, and imports either that he had not a superhuman form, that of an angel for instance, though descending from heaven, or else that the kingdom about to be established presented in its humanity a contrast to the inhumanity of its predecessors, of which ferocious beasts were the fitting emblems. At a later period, it is true, the Jews regarded the coming with the clouds of heaven as the more essential attribute of the Messiah, and hence gave him the name Anani, after the Jewish taste of making a merely accessory circumstance the permanent epithet of a person or thing. If, then, the expression "Son of Man" necessarily recalled the above passage in Daniel, generally believed to relate to the Messiah, it is impossible that Jesus could so often use it, and in connection with declarations evidently referring to the Messiah, without intending it as the designation of that personage. | ||||
That by the expression in question Jesus meant himself, without relation to the Messianic dignity, is less probable than the contrary supposition, that he might often mean the Messiah when he spoke of the Son of Man, without relation to his own person. When, Matt. x. 23, on the first mission of the twelve apostles to announce the kingdom of heaven, he comforts them under the prospect of their future persecutions by the assurance that they would not have gone over all the cities of Israel before the coming of the Son of Man, we should rather, taking this declaration alone, think of a third person, whose speedy Messianic appearance Jesus was promising, than of the speaker himself, seeing that he was already come, and it would not be antecedently clear how he could represent his own coming as one still in anticipation. So also when Jesus (Matt. xiii.37ff.) interprets the Sower of the parable to be the Son of Man, who at the end of the world will have a harvest and a tribunal, he might be supposed to refer to the Messiah as a third person distinct from himself. This is equally the case, xvi. 27 f., where, to prove the proposition that the loss of the soul is not to be compensated by the gain of the whole world, he urges the speedy coming{P.296} of the Son of Man, to administer retribution. Lastly, in the connected discourses, Matt. xxiv. xxv. parall., many particulars would be more easily conceived, if the Son of Man whom Jesus describes, were understood to mean another than himself. | ||||
But this explanation is far from being applicable to the majority of instances in which Jesus uses this expression. When he represents the Son of Man, not as one still to be expected, but as one already come and actually present, for example, in Matt. xviii, 11, where he says: The Son of .Man is come to save that which was lost; when he justifies his own acts by the authority with which the Son of Man was invested, as in Matt. ix. 6; when, Mark viii.31ff. comp. Matt. xvi. 22, he speaks of the approaching sufferings and death of the Son of Man, so as to elicit from Peter the exclamation, w y.i t'ffTai (7oi TOV-O, this shall not be to you; in these and similar cases he can only, by the v'wc; TOV avOpw-rov, have intended himself. And even those passages, which, taken singly, we might have found capable of application to a Messianic person, distinct from Jesus, lose this capability when considered in their entire connection. It is possible, however, either that the writer may have misplaced certain expressions, or that the ultimately prevalent conviction that Jesus was the Son of -Mem caused what was originally said merely of the latter, to be viewed in immediate relation to the former. | ||||
Thus besides the fact that Jesus on many occasions called himself the Son of Man, there remains the possibility that on many others, he may have designed another person; and if so, the latter would in the order of time naturally precede the former. Whether this possibility can be heightened to a reality, must depend on the answer to the following question: Is there, in the period of the life of Jexus, from which all his recorded declarations are taken, any fragment which indicates that he had not yet conceived himself to be the Messiah? | ||||