Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (22 page)

The problem for the early church is that Jesus did not fit any of the messianic paradigms
offered in the Hebrew Bible, nor did he fulfill a single requirement expected of the
messiah. Jesus spoke about the end of days, but it did not come to pass, not even
after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and defiled God’s Temple. He promised that God
would liberate the Jews from bondage, but God did no such thing. He vowed that the
twelve tribes of Israel would be reconstituted and the nation restored; instead, the
Romans expropriated the Promised Land, slaughtered its inhabitants, and exiled the
survivors. The Kingdom of God that Jesus predicted never arrived; the new world order
he described never took shape. According to the standards of the Jewish cult and the
Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was as successful in his messianic aspirations as any of
the other would-be messiahs.

The early church obviously recognized this dilemma and, as will become apparent, made
a conscious decision to change those messianic standards. They mixed and matched the
different depictions of the messiah found in the Hebrew Bible to create a candidate
that transcended any particular messianic model or expectation. Jesus may not have
been prophet, liberator, or king. But that is because he rose above such simple messianic
paradigms. As the transfiguration proved, Jesus was greater than Elijah (the prophet),
greater than Moses (the liberator), even greater than David (the king).

That may have been how the early church understood Jesus’s identity. But it does not
appear to be how Jesus himself understood it. After all, in the entire first gospel
there exists not a single definitive messianic statement from Jesus himself, not even
at the very
end when he stands before the high priest Caiaphas and somewhat passively accepts
the title that others keep foisting upon him (Mark 14:62). The same is true for the
early
Q
source material, which also contains not a single messianic statement by Jesus.

Perhaps Jesus was loath to take on the multiple expectations the Jews had of the messiah.
Perhaps he rejected the designation outright. Either way, the fact remains that, especially
in Mark, every time someone tries to ascribe the title of messiah to him—whether a
demon, or a supplicant, or one of the disciples, or even God himself—Jesus brushes
it off or, at best, accepts it reluctantly and always with a caveat.

However Jesus understood his mission and identity—whether he himself believed he was
the messiah—what the evidence from the earliest gospel suggests is that, for whatever
reason, Jesus of Nazareth did not openly refer to himself as messiah. Nor, by the
way, did Jesus call himself “Son of God,” another title that others seem to have ascribed
to him. (Contrary to Christian conceptions, the title “Son of God” was not a description
of Jesus’s filial connection to God but rather the traditional designation for Israel’s
kings. Numerous figures are called “Son of God” in the Bible, none more often than
David, the greatest king—2 Samuel 7:14; Psalms 2:7, 89:26; Isaiah 42:1). Rather, when
it came to referring to himself, Jesus used an altogether different title, one so
enigmatic and unique that for centuries scholars have been desperately trying to figure
out what he could have possibly meant by it. Jesus called himself “the Son of Man.”

The phrase “the Son of Man” (
ho huios tou anthropou
in Greek) appears some eighty times in the New Testament, and only once, in a positively
operatic passage from the book of Acts, does it occur on the lips of anyone other
than Jesus. In that passage from Acts, a follower of Jesus named Stephen is about
to be stoned to death for proclaiming Jesus to be the promised messiah. As an angry
crowd of Jews encircles him, Stephen has a sudden, rapturous vision in which he looks
up to the heavens and sees Jesus wrapped in the
glory of God. “Look!” Stephen shouts, his arms thrust into the air. “I can see the
heavens opening, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (7:56). These
are the last words he utters before the stones begin to fly.

Stephen’s distinctly formulaic use of the title is proof that Christians did in fact
refer to Jesus as the Son of Man after his death. But the extreme rarity of the term
outside of the gospels, and the fact that it never occurs in the letters of Paul,
make it unlikely that the Son of Man was a Christological expression made up by the
early church to describe Jesus. On the contrary, this title, which is so ambiguous,
and so infrequently found in the Hebrew Scriptures that to this day no one is certain
what it actually means, is almost certainly one that Jesus gave himself.

It should be mentioned, of course, that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Greek, meaning that
if the expression “the Son of Man” can indeed be traced back to him, he would have
used the phrase
bar enash(a)
, or perhaps its Hebrew equivalent,
ben adam
, both of which mean “son of a human being.” In other words, saying “son of man” in
Hebrew or Aramaic is equivalent to saying “man,” which is exactly how the Hebrew Bible
most often uses the term: “God is not a man that he should lie; nor is he a son of
man [
ben adam
] that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19).

A case could be made that this is also how Jesus used the term—as a common Hebrew/Aramaic
idiom for “man.” The idiomatic sense is certainly present in some of the earliest
Son of Man sayings in
Q
and the gospel of Mark:

“Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man [i.e., ‘a man
such as I’] has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20 | Luke 9:58).

“Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man [i.e., ‘any man’] it shall be forgiven
of him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven, neither
in this age nor the one to come” (Matthew 12:32 | Luke 12:10).

Some have even argued that Jesus deliberately used the expression
to emphasize his humanity, that it was a way for him to say, “I am a human being [
bar enash
].” However, such an explanation is predicated on the assumption that the people of
Jesus’s time needed to be reminded that he was in fact “a human being,” as though
that were somehow in doubt. It most certainly was not. Modern Christians may consider
Jesus to be God incarnate, but such a conception of the messiah is anathema to five
thousand years of Jewish scripture, thought, and theology. The idea that Jesus’s audience
would have needed constant reminding that he was “just a man” is simply nonsensical.

In any case, while it is true that the Aramaic phrase in its indefinite form (
bar enash
rather than the definite
bar enasha
) can be translated as “
a
son of man,” or just “man,” the Greek version
ho huios tou anthropou
can only mean “the son of man.” The difference between the Aramaic and Greek is significant
and not likely the result of a poor translation by the evangelists. In employing the
definite form of the phrase, Jesus was using it in a wholly new and unprecedented
way: as a
title
, not as an idiom. Simply put, Jesus was not calling himself “a son of man.” He was
calling himself the Son of Man.

Jesus’s idiosyncratic use of this cryptic phrase would have been completely new to
his audience. It is often assumed that when Jesus spoke of himself as the Son of Man,
the Jews knew what he was talking about. They did not. In fact, the Jews of Jesus’s
time had no unified conception of “son of man.” It is not that the Jews were unfamiliar
with the phrase, which would have instantly triggered an array of imagery from the
books of Ezekiel, Daniel, or the Psalms. It is that they would not have recognized
it as a title, the way they would have with, say, the Son of God.

Jesus, too, would have looked to the Hebrew Scriptures to draw his imagery for the
Son of Man as a distinct individual rather than as just a byword for “man.” He could
have used the book of Ezekiel, wherein the prophet is referred to as “son of man”
nearly ninety times: “[God] said to me, ‘Oh, son of man [
ben adam
], stand
on your feet and I will speak to you’ ” (Ezekiel 2:1). Yet if there is one thing scholars
agree on, it is that the primary source for Jesus’s particular interpretation of the
phrase came from the book of Daniel.

Written during the reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (175
B.C.E
.–164
B.C.E
.)—the king who thought he was a god—the book of Daniel records a series of apocalyptic
visions the prophet claims to have had while serving as seer for the Babylonian court.
In one of these visions, Daniel sees four monstrous beasts rise out of a great sea—each
beast representing one of four great kingdoms: Babylon, Persia, Medea, and the Greek
kingdom of Antiochus. The four beasts are let loose upon the earth to plunder and
trample upon the cities of men. In the midst of the death and destruction, Daniel
sees what he describes as “the Ancient of Days” (God) sitting upon a throne made of
flames, his clothes white as snow, the hair on his head like pure wool. “A thousand
thousands served him,” Daniel writes, “and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending
him.” The Ancient of Days passes judgment on the beasts, killing and burning some
with fire, taking dominion and authority away from the rest. Then, as Daniel stands
in awe of the spectacle, he sees “one like a son of man [
bar enash
] coming with the clouds of heaven.”

“He came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him,” Daniel writes of this
mysterious figure. “And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, so that
all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion shall be everlasting;
it shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 7:1–14). Thus, the “one like a son of man,” by
which Daniel appears to be referring to a distinct individual, is given sovereignty
over the earth and accorded power and authority to rule over all nations and all peoples
as king
.

Daniel and Ezekiel are not the only books that use “son of man” to refer to a singular
and specific person. The phrase appears in much the same way in the apocryphal books
4 Ezra and 1 Enoch, more specifically in the parables section of Enoch popularly called
the
Similitudes
(1 Enoch 37–72). In the
Similitudes
, Enoch has a vision in which he looks up to heaven and sees a person he describes
as “the son of man to whom belongs righteousness.” He calls this figure “the Chosen
One” and suggests that he was appointed by God before creation to come down to earth
and judge humanity on God’s behalf. He will be granted eternal power and kingship
over the earth and will pass fiery judgment on the kings of this world. The wealthy
and the powerful will plead for his mercy, but no mercy shall be shown them. At the
end of the passage, the reader discovers that this son of man is actually Enoch himself.

In 4 Ezra, the son-of-man figure bursts out of the sea, flying on “the clouds of heaven.”
As in Daniel and Enoch, Ezra’s son of man also comes to judge the wicked. Tasked with
reconstituting the twelve tribes of Israel, he will gather his forces on Mount Zion
and destroy the armies of men. But while Ezra’s apocalyptic judge appears as “something
like the figure of a man,” he is no mere mortal. He is a preexistent being with supernatural
powers who shoots fire out his mouth to consume God’s enemies.

Both 4 Ezra and the
Similitudes
of Enoch were written near the end of the first century
C.E
., after the destruction of Jerusalem and long after Jesus’s death. No doubt these
two apocryphal texts influenced the early Christians, who may have latched on to the
more spiritual, preexistent son of man ideal described in them to reinterpret Jesus’s
mission and identity and help explain why he failed to accomplish any of his messianic
functions on earth. The gospel of Matthew in particular, which was written around
the same time as the
Similitudes
and 4 Ezra, seems to have borrowed a great deal of imagery from them, including the
“throne of glory” upon which the Son of Man will sit at the end of time (Matthew 19:28;
1 Enoch 62:5) and the “furnace of fire” into which he will throw all evildoers (Matthew
13:41–42; 1 Enoch 54:3–6)—neither of these phrases appears anywhere else in the New
Testament. But there is no way that Jesus of Nazareth, who died more than sixty years
before either the
Similitudes
or 4 Ezra was composed, could have
been influenced by either. So while the Enoch/Ezra image of an eternal son of man
chosen by God from the beginning of time to judge mankind and rule on earth on God’s
behalf does eventually get transposed upon Jesus (so much so that by the time John
writes his gospel, the Son of Man is a purely divine figure—the
logos—
very much like the primal man in 4 Ezra), Jesus himself could not have understood
the Son of Man in the same way.

If one accepts the consensus view that Jesus’s main, if not sole, reference for the
Son of Man was the book of Daniel, then one should look to that passage in the gospels
in which Jesus’s use of the title most closely echoes Daniel’s in order to uncover
what Jesus may have meant by it. As it happens, this particular son-of-man saying,
which takes place near the end of Jesus’s life, is one that most scholars agree is
authentic and traceable to the historical Jesus.

According to the gospels, Jesus has been dragged before the Sanhedrin to answer the
charges made against him. As one after another, the chief priests, the elders, and
the scribes fling accusations his way, Jesus sits impassively, silent, and unresponsive.
Finally, the high priest Caiaphas stands and asks Jesus directly, “Are you the messiah?”

It is here, at the end of the journey that began on the sacred shores of the Jordan
River, that the messianic secret is finally peeled away and Jesus’s true nature seemingly
revealed.

“I am,” Jesus answers.