THE SON OF MAN

It is held by many scholars that the term, ‘the Son of Man’, meant a supernatural, apocalyptic figure and was first applied, as a title, to Jesus by the early Palestinian communities, who signified by its use their belief that Jesus was the dominant figure of an imminent apocalyptic climax. If Jesus used it himself at all, it was only – so this theory goes – with reference to a figure other than himself. It was not by Jesus himself but by Christians in the earliest period after the first Easter that it began to be used to designate Jesus.

Others hold that Jesus did apply the Semitic equivalent of this expression to himself, but only in certain limited connexions, whether as an oblique, idiomatic alternative simply for the first person pronoun – ‘I’ or ‘me’ – or as a more specific indication of himself as a frail mortal. Professor J. W. Bowker of the University of Lancaster, in particular, emphasizes the latter. He observes that, in the Old Testament, ‘Son of man’ occurs mainly in three contexts: in the vocative, as an address to Ezekiel; in Dan. 7, in the special context of that vision; and in a ‘scatter’ of texts such as Num. 23: 19 and Ps. 8: 4, which emphasize the contrast between frail mortal man and the angels, or God himself. This latter sense he is also able to illustrate impressively from Jewish literature outside the Old Testament.