262. Much of the use of the title by Jesus, however, is completely foreign
to the ideas suggested by Enoch and Daniel. Besides apocalyptic sayings
like those in Enoch (Mark viii. 38 and often), the name occurs in
predictions of his sufferings and death (Mark viii. 31 and often), and in
claims to extraordinary if not essentially divine authority (Mark ii. 10,
28 and parallels); it is also used sometimes simply as an emphatic "I"
(Matt. xi. 19 and often). Whatever relation Jesus bore to the Enoch
writings, therefore, the name "the Son of Man" as he used it was his own
creation.
263. Students of Aramaic have in recent years asserted that it was not
customary in the dialect which Jesus spoke to make distinction between
"the son of man" and "man," since the expression commonly used for "man"
would be literally translated "son of man." It is asserted, moreover, that
if our gospels be read substituting "man" for "the Son of Man" wherever it
appears, it will be found that many supposed Messianic claims become
general statements of Jesus' conception of the high prerogatives of man,
while in other places the name stands simply as an emphatic substitute for
the personal pronoun. Thus, for instance, Jesus is found to assert that
authority on earth to forgive sins belongs to man (Mark ii. 10), and,
toward the end of his course, to have taught simply that he himself must
meet with suffering (Mark viii. 31), and will come on the clouds to judge
the world (Mark viii. 38). The proportion of cases in which the general
reference is possible is, however, very small; and even if the
equivalence of "man" and "son of man" should be established, most of the
statements of Jesus in which our gospels use the latter expression exhibit
a conception of himself which challenges attention, transcending that
which would be tolerated in any other man. The debate concerning the usage
in the language spoken by Jesus is not yet closed, however, and Dr. Gustaf
Dalman (WJ I. 191-197) has recently argued that the equivalence of the two
expressions holds only in poetic passages, precisely as it does in Hebrew,
and that our gospels represent correctly a distinction observed by Jesus
when they report him, for instance, as saying in one sentence, "the
Sabbath was made for man" (Mark ii. 27), and in the next, "the Son of Man
is lord even of the Sabbath." The antecedent probability is so great that
the dialect of Jesus' time would be capable of expressing a distinction
found in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and in the Syriac of the
second-century version of the New Testament, that Dalman's opinion carries
much weight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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