obstinate problem which since the time of Baldensperger and Weiss had
caused so much trouble to theologians, and wanted to postpone the
historical discussion until the Aramaic experts had settled the linguistic
question. That happened sooner than was expected. In 1898 Dalman declared
in his epoch‐making work (_Die Worte Jesu_) that he could not admit the
linguistic objections to the use of the expression Son of Man by Jesus.
“Biblical Aramaic,” he says, “does not differ in this respect from Hebrew.
The simple אנש and not בן אנש is the term for man.”... It was only later
that the Jewish‐Galilaean dialect, like the Palestinian‐Christian dialect,
used בן אנש for man, though in both idioms the simple אנש occurs in the
sense of “some one.” “In view of the whole facts of the case,” he
continues, “what has to be said is that Jewish‐Palestinian Aramaic of the
earlier period used אנש for ‘man,’ and occasionally to designate a
plurality of men makes use of the expression בני אנשא. The singular בן אנש
was not current, and was only used in imitation of the Hebrew text of the
Bible, where בן אדם belongs to the poetic diction, and is, moreover, not
of very frequent occurrence.” “It is,” he says elsewhere, “by no means a
sign of a sound historical method, instead of working patiently at the
solution of the problem, to hasten like Oort and Lietzmann to the
conclusion that the absence of the expression in the New Testament
Epistles is a proof that Jesus did not use it either, but that there was
somewhere or other a Hellenistic community in the Early Church which had a
predilection for this name, and often made Jesus speak of Himself in the
Gospel narrative in the third person, in order to find an opportunity of
bringing it in.”
So the oxen turned back with the ark into the land of the Philistines. It
was a case of returning to the starting‐point and deciding on historical
grounds in what sense Jesus had used the expression.(206) But the
possibilities were reduced by the way in which Lietzmann had posed the
problem, since the interpretations according to which Jesus had used it in
a veiled ethical Messianic sense, to indicate the ethical and spiritual
transformation of all the eschatological conceptions, were now manifestly
incapable of offering any convincing argument against the radical denial
of the use of the expression. Baldensperger rightly remarked in a review
of the whole discussion that the question which was ultimately at stake in
the combat over the title Son of Man was the question whether Jesus was
the Messiah or no, and that Dalman, by his proof of its linguistic
possibility, had saved the Messiahship of Jesus.(207)
But what kind of Messiahship? Is it any other kind than the future
Messiahship of the apocalyptic Son of Man which Johannes Weiss had
asserted? Did Jesus mean anything different by the Son of Man from that
which was meant by the apocalyptic writers? To put it otherwise: behind
the Son‐of‐Man problem there lies the general question whether Jesus can
have described Himself as a present Messiah; for the fundamental
difficulty is that He, a man upon earth, should give Himself out to be the
Son of Man, and at the same time apparently give to that title a quite
different sense from that which it previously possessed.
The champion of the linguistic possibility of this self‐designation made
the last serious attempt to render the transformation of the conception
historically conceivable. He argues that Jesus cannot have used it as a
mere meaningless expression, a periphrasis for the simple I.(208) On the
other hand, the term cannot have been understood by the disciples as an
exalted title, or at least only in the sense that the title indicative of
exaltation is paradoxically connected with the title indicative of
humility. “We shall be justified in saying, that, for the Synoptic
Evangelists, ‘Man’s Son’ was no title of honour for the Messiah, but—as it
must necessarily appear to a Hellenist—a veiling of His Messiahship under
a name which emphasises the humanity of its bearer.” For them it was not
the references to the sufferings of “Man’s Son” that were paradoxical, but
the references to His exaltation: that “Man’s Son” should be put to death
is not wonderful; what is wonderful is His “coming again upon the clouds
of heaven.”
If Jesus called Himself the Son of Man, the only conclusion which could be
drawn by those that heard Him was, “that for some reason or other He
desired to describe Himself as a Man _par excellence_.” There is no reason
to think of the Heavenly Son of Man of the Similitudes of Enoch and Fourth
Ezra; that conception could hardly be present to the minds of His
auditors.
“How was one who was now walking upon earth, to come from heaven? He would
have needed first to be translated thither. One who had died or been rapt
away from earth might be brought back to earth again in this way, or a
being who had never before been upon earth, might be conceived as
descending thither.”
But if, on the one hand, the title Son of Man was not to be understood
apart from the reference to the passage in Daniel, while on the other
Jesus so designated Himself as a man actually present upon earth, “what
was really implied was that He was the man in whom Daniel’s vision of ‘one
like unto a Son of Man’ was being fulfilled.” He could not certainly
expect from His hearers a complete understanding of the self‐designation.
“We are doubtless justified in saying that in using it, He intentionally
offered them an enigma which challenged further reflection upon His
Person.”
According to Peter’s confession the name was intelligible to the disciples
as coming from Dan. vii. 13, and obviously indicating Him who was destined
to the sovereignty of the world. Jesus calls Himself the Son of Man, “not
as meaning the lowly one, but as a scion of the human race with its human
weakness, whom nevertheless God will make Lord of the world; and it is
very probable that Jesus found the Son of Man of Dan. vii. in Ps. viii. 5
ff. also.” Sayings regarding humiliation and suffering could be attached
to the title just as well as references to exaltation. For since the
“Child of Man” has placed Himself upon the throne of God, He is in reality
no longer a mere man, but ruler over heaven and earth, “the Lord.”
This attempt of Dalman’s has the same significance in regard to the
question of the Messiahship as Bousset’s had for the ethical question.
Just as in Bousset’s view the Kingdom of God was, in a paradoxical way,
after all proclaimed as present, so here the self‐designation “Son of Man”
is retained by a paradox as conveying the sense of a present Messiahship.
But the documents do not give any support to this assumption; on the
contrary they contradict it at every point. According to Dalman it was not
the predictions of the passion of the Son of Man which sounded paradoxical
to the disciples, but the predictions of His exaltation. But we are
distinctly told that when He spoke of His passion they did not understand
the saying. The predictions of His exaltation, however, they understood so
well that without troubling themselves further about the predictions of
the sufferings, they began to dispute who should be greatest in the
Kingdom of Heaven, and who should have his throne closest to the Son of
Man. And if it is once admitted that Jesus took the designation from
Daniel, what ground is there for asserting that the purely eschatological
transcendental significance which the term had taken on in the Similitudes
of Enoch and retains in Fourth Ezra had no existence for Jesus? Thus, by a
long round‐about, criticism has come back to Johannes Weiss.(209) His
eschatological solution of the Son‐of‐Man question—the elements of which
are to be found in Strauss’s first Life of Jesus—is the only possible one.
Dalman expresses the same idea in the form of a question. “How could one
who was actually walking the earth come down from heaven? He would have
needed first to be translated thither. One who had died or been rapt away
from earth might possibly be brought back to earth in this way.” Having
reached this point we have only to observe further that Jesus, from the
“confession of Peter” onwards, always speaks of the Son of Man in
connexion with death and resurrection. That is to say, that once the
disciples know in what relation He stands to the Son of Man, He uses this
title to suggest the manner of His return: as the sequel to His death and
resurrection He will return to the world again as a superhuman
Personality. Thus the purely transcendental use of the term suggested by
Dalman as a possibility turns out to be the historical reality.
Broadly speaking, therefore, the Son‐of‐Man problem is both historically
solvable and has been solved. The authentic passages are those in which
the expression is used in that apocalyptic sense which goes back to
Daniel. But we have to distinguish two different uses of the term
according to the degree of knowledge assumed in the hearers. If the secret
of Jesus is unknown to them, then in that case they understand simply that
Jesus is speaking of the “Son of Man” and His coming without having any
suspicion that He and the Son of Man have any connexion. It would be thus,
for instance, when in sending out the disciples in Matt. x. 23, He
announced the imminence of the appearing of the Son of Man; or when He
pictured the judgment which the Son of Man would hold (Matt. xxv. 31‐46),
if we may imagine it to have been spoken to the people at Jerusalem. Or,
on the other hand, the secret is known to the hearers. In that case they
understand that the term Son of Man points to the position to which He
Himself is to be exalted when the present era passes into the age to come.
It was thus, no doubt, in the case of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi,
and of the High Priest to whom Jesus, after answering his demand with the
simple “Yea” (Mark xiv. 62), goes on immediately to speak of the
exaltation of the Son of Man to the right hand of God, and of His coming
upon the clouds of heaven.
Jesus did not, therefore, veil His Messiahship by using the expression Son
of Man, much less did He transform it, but He used the expression to
refer, in the only possible way, to His Messianic office as destined to be
realised at His “coming,” and did so in such a manner that only the
initiated understood that He was speaking of His own coming, while others
understood Him as referring to the coming of a Son of Man who was other
than Himself.
The passages where the title has not this apocalyptic reference, or where,
previous to the incident at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus in speaking to the
disciples equates the Son of Man with His own “ego,” are to be explained
as of literary origin. This set of secondary occurrences of the title has
nothing to do with “Early Church theology”; it is merely a question of
phenomena of translation and tradition. In the saying about the Sabbath in
Mark ii. 28, and perhaps also in the saying about the right to forgive
sins in Mark ii. 10, Son of Man doubtless stood in the original in the
general sense of “man,” but was later, certainly by our Evangelists,
understood as referring to Jesus as the Son of Man. In other passages
tradition, following the analogy of those passages in which the title is
authentic, put in place of the simple I—expressed in the Aramaic by “the
man”—the self‐designation “Son of Man,” as we can clearly show by
comparing Matt. xvi. 13, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” with
Mark viii. 27, “Who do men say that I am?”
Three passages call for special discussion. In the statement that a man
may be forgiven for blasphemy against the Son of Man, but not for
blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in Matt. xii. 32, the “Son of Man” may
be authentic. But of course it would not, even in that case, give any hint
that “Son of Man designates the Messiah in His humiliation” as Dalman
wished to infer from the passage, but would mean that Jesus was speaking
of the Son of Man, here as elsewhere, in the third person without
reference to Himself, and was thinking of a contemptuous denial of the
Parousia such as might have been uttered by a Sadducee. But if we take
into account the parallel in Mark iii. 28 and 29, where blasphemy against
the Holy Ghost is spoken of without any mention of blasphemy against the
Son of Man, it seems more natural to take the mention of the Son of Man as
a secondary interpolation, derived from the same line of tradition,
perhaps from the same hand, as the “Son of Man” in the question to the
disciples at Caesarea Philippi.
The two other sayings, the one about the Son of Man “who hath not where to
lay His head,” Matt. viii. 20, and that about the Son of Man who must
submit to the reproach of being a glutton and a wine‐bibber, Matt. xi. 19,
belong together. If we assume it to be possible, in conformity with the
saying about the purpose of the parables in Mark iv. 11 and 12, that Jesus
sometimes spoke words which He did not intend to be understood, we may—if
we are unwilling to accept the supposition of a later periphrasis for the
ego, which would certainly be the most natural explanation—recognise in
these sayings two obscure declarations regarding the Son of Man. They
would then be supposed to have meant in the original form, which is no
longer clearly recognisable, that the Son of Man would in some way justify
the conduct of Jesus of Nazareth. But the way in which this idea is
expressed was not such as to make it easy for His hearers to identify Him
with the Son of Man. Moreover, it was for them a conception impossible to
realise, since Jesus was a natural, and the Son of Man a supernatural,
being; and the eschatological scheme of things had not provided for a man
who at the end of the existing era should hint to others that at the great
transformation of all things He would be manifested as the Son of Man.
This case presented itself only in the course of history, and it created a
preparatory stage of eschatology which does not answer to any traditional
scheme.
That act of the self‐consciousness of Jesus by which He recognised Himself
in His earthly existence as the future Messiah is the act in which
eschatology supremely affirms itself. At the same time, since it brings,
spiritually, that which is to come, into the unaltered present, into the
existing era, it is the end of eschatology. For it is its
“spiritualisation,” a spiritualisation of which the ultimate consequence
was to be that all its “supersensuous” elements were to be realised only
spiritually in the present earthly conditions, and all that is affirmed as
supersensuous in the transcendental sense was to be regarded as only the
ruined remains of an eschatological world‐view. The Messianic secret of
Jesus is the basis of Christianity, since it involves the de‐nationalising
and the spiritualisation of Jewish eschatology.
Yet more. It is the primal fact, the starting‐point, of a process which
manifests itself, indeed, in Christianity, but cannot fully work itself
out even here, of a movement in the direction of inwardness which brings
all religious magnitudes into the one indivisible spiritual present, and
which Christian dogmatic has not ventured to carry to its completion. The
Messianic consciousness of the uniquely great Man of Nazareth sets up a
struggle between the present and the beyond, and introduces that resolute
absorption of the beyond by the present, which in looking back we
recognise as the history of Christianity, and of which we are conscious in
ourselves as the essence of religious progress and experience—a process of
which the end is not yet in sight.
In this sense Jesus did “accept the world” and did stand in conflict with
Judaism. Protestantism was a step—a step on which hung weighty
consequences—in the progress of that “acceptance of the world” which was
constantly developing itself from within. By a mighty revolution which was
in harmony with the spirit of that great primal act of the consciousness
of Jesus, though in opposition to some of the most certain of His sayings,
ethics became world‐accepting. But it will be a mightier revolution still
when the last remaining ruins of the supersensuous other‐worldly system of
thought are swept away in order to clear the site for a new spiritual,
purely real and present world. All the inconsistent compromises and
constructions of modern theology are merely an attempt to stave off the
final expulsion of eschatology from religion, an inevitable but a hopeless
attempt. That proleptic Messianic consciousness of Jesus, which was in
reality the only possible actualisation of the Messianic idea, carries
these consequences with it inexorably and unfailingly. At that last cry
upon the cross the whole eschatological supersensuous world fell in upon
itself in ruins, and there remained as a spiritual reality only that
present spiritual world, bound as it is to sense, which Jesus by His all‐
powerful word had called into being within the world which He contemned.
That last cry, with its despairing abandonment of the eschatological
future, is His real acceptance of the world. The “Son of Man” was buried
in the ruins of the falling eschatological world; there remained alive
only Jesus “the Man.” Thus these two Aramaic synonyms include in
themselves, as in a symbol of reality, all that was to come.
If theology has found it so hard a task to arrive at an historical
comprehension of the secret of this self‐designation, this is due to the
fact that the question is not a purely historical one. In this word there
lies the transformation of a whole system of thought, the inexorable
consequence of the elimination of eschatology from religion. It was only
in this future form, not as actual, that Jesus spoke of His Messiahship.
Modern theology keeps on endeavouring to discover in the title of Son of
Man, which is bound up with the future, a humanised present Messiahship.
It does so in the conviction that the recognition of a purely future
reference in the Messianic consciousness of Jesus would lead in the last
result to a modification of the historic basis of our faith, which has
itself become historical, and therefore true and self‐justifying. The
recognition of the claims of eschatology signifies for our dogmatic a
burning of the boats by which it felt itself able to return at any moment
from the time of Jesus direct to the present.
One point that is worthy of notice in this connexion is the
trustworthiness of the tradition. The Evangelists, writing in Greek, and
the Greek‐speaking Early Church, can hardly have retained an understanding
of the purely eschatological character of that self‐designation of Jesus.
It had become for them merely an indirect method of self‐designation. And
nevertheless the Evangelists, especially Mark, record the sayings of Jesus
in such a way that the original significance and application of the
designation in His mouth is still clearly recognisable, and we are able to
determine with certainty the isolated cases in which this self‐designation
in His discourses is of a secondary origin.
Thus the use of the term Son of Man—which, if we admitted the sweeping
proposal of Lietzmann and Wellhausen to cancel it everywhere as an
interpolation of Greek Early Church theology, would throw doubt on the
whole of the Gospel tradition—becomes a proof of the certainty and
trustworthiness of that tradition. We may, in fact, say that the
progressive recognition of the eschatological character of the teaching
and action of Jesus carries with it a progressive justification of the
Gospel tradition. A series of passages and discourses which had been
endangered because from the modern theological point of view which had
been made the criterion of the tradition they appeared to be without
meaning, are now secured. The stone which the critics rejected has become
the corner‐stone of the tradition.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
If Aramaic scholarship appears in regard to the Son‐of‐Man question among
the opponents of the thorough‐going eschatological view, it takes no other
position in connexion with the retranslations and in the application of
illustrative parallels from the Rabbinic literature.
In looking at the earlier works in this department, one is struck with the
smallness of the result in proportion to the labour expended. The names
that call for mention here are those of John Lightfoot, Christian
Schöttgen, Joh. Gerh. Meuschen, J. Jak. Wettstein, F. Nork, Franz
Delitzsch, Carl Siegfried, and A. Wünsche.(210) But even a work like F.
Weber’s _System der altsynagogalen __ palästinensischen Theologie_,(211)
which does not confine itself to single sayings and thoughts, but aims at
exhibiting the Rabbinic system of thought as a whole, throws, in the main,
but little light on the thoughts of Jesus. The Rabbinic parables supply,
according to Jülicher, but little of value for the explanation of the
parables of Jesus.(212) In this method of discourse, Jesus is so pre‐
eminently original, that any other productions of the Jewish parabolic
literature are like stunted undergrowth beside a great tree; though that
has not prevented His originality from being challenged in this very
department, both in earlier times and at the present. As early as 1648,
Robert Sheringham, of Cambridge,(213) suggested that the parables in Matt.
xx. 1 ff., xxv. 1 ff., and Luke xvi., were derived from Talmudic sources,
an opinion against which J. B. Carpzov, the younger, raised a protest; in
1839, F. Nork asserted, in his work on “Rabbinic Sources and Parallels for
the New Testament Writings,” that the best thoughts in the discourses of
Jesus are to be attributed to His Jewish teachers; in 1880 the Dutch
Rabbi, T. Tal, maintained the thesis that the parables of the New
Testament are all borrowed from the Talmud.(214) Theories of this kind
cannot be refuted, because they lack the foundation necessary to any
theory which is to be capable of being rationally discussed—that of plain
common sense.(215)
We possess, however, really scientific attempts to define more closely the
thoughts of Jesus by the aid of the Rabbinic language and Rabbinic ideas
in the works of Arnold Meyer and Dalman. It cannot indeed be said that the
obscure sayings which form the problem of present‐day exegesis are in all
cases made clearer by them, much as we may admire the comprehensive
knowledge of these scholars. Sometimes, indeed, they become more obscure
than before. According to Meyer, for instance, the question of Jesus
whether His disciples can drink of His cup, and be baptized with His
baptism means, if put back into Aramaic, “Can you drink as bitter a drink
as I; can you eat as sharply salted meat as I?”(216) Nor does Dalman’s
Aramaic retranslation help us much with the saying about the violent who
take the Kingdom of Heaven by force. According to him, it is not spoken of
the faithful, but of the rulers of this world, and refers to the epoch of
the Divine rule which has been introduced by the imprisonment of the
Baptist. No one can violently possess himself of the Divine reign, and
Jesus can therefore only mean that violence is done to it in the person of
its subjects.
On this it must be remarked, that if the saying really means this, it is
about as appropriate to its setting as a rock in the sky. Jesus is not
speaking of the imprisonment of the Baptist. By the days of John the
Baptist He means the time of his public ministry.
It is equally open to question whether in putting that crucial question
regarding the Messiah in Mark xii. 37 He really intended to show, as
Dalman thinks, “that physical descent from David was not of decisive
importance—it did not belong to the essence of the Messiahship.”
But a point in regard to which Dalman’s remarks are of great value for the
reconstruction of the life of Jesus is the entry into Jerusalem. Dalman
thinks that the simple “Hosanna, blessed be he that cometh in the name of
the Lord” (Mark xi. 9) was what the people really shouted in acclamation,
and that the additional words in Mark and Matthew are simply an
interpretative expansion. This acclamation did not itself contain any
Messianic reference. This explains “why the entry into Jerusalem was not
made a count in the charge urged against Him before Pilate.” The events of
“Palm Sunday” only received their distinctively Messianic colour later. It
was not the Messiah, but the prophet and wonder‐worker of Galilee whom the
people hailed with rejoicing and accompanied with invocations of
blessing.(217)