Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

and deferential way to refer to oneself, as in when Jesus says, “Foxes
     have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has [that is,
I have
] no place to lay his [
my
] head” (Matthew 8:20 | Luke 9:58). See also P. Maurice Casey,
Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of Daniel 7
(London: SPCK Publishing, 1979). But as Burkett notes, the basic problem with the
     circumlocution theory is that “the idiom requires a demonstrative pronoun (‘this man’)
     which the gospel expression lacks.”
The Son of Man Debate
, 96. Others take the opposite tack, claiming that “Son of Man” does not refer to
     Jesus at all but to some other figure, someone Jesus expected would follow him. “When
     the Son of Man comes in his glory, and the holy angels with him, he shall sit upon
     the throne of his glory” (Matthew 25:31). Prominent proponents of the theory that
     Jesus was referring to someone else as the Son of Man include Julius Wellhausen and
     Rudolf Bultmann. However, that, too, is unlikely; the context of most of Jesus’s Son
     of Man sayings makes it clear that he is speaking about himself, as when he compares
     himself to John the Baptist: “John came neither eating nor drinking and they say,
     ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man [i.e., I] came eating and drinking and they say ‘Look!
     A glutton and drunk’ ” (Matthew 11:18–19 | Luke 7:33–34). Among those who believe
     that “the Son of Man” is an Aramaic idiomatic expression meaning either “a man” in
     general, or more specifically “aman like me,” are Barnabas Lindars,
Jesus Son of Man
, and Reginald Fuller, “The Son of Man: A Reconsideration,”
The Living Texts: Essays in Honor of Ernest W. Saunders
, ed. Dennis E. Groh and Robert Jewett (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America,
     1985), 207–17. These scholars note that God addresses the prophet Ezekiel as
ben adam
, meaning a human being but perhaps implying an ideal human. For the lack of unified
     conception among the Jews of the Son of Man, see Norman Perrin, “Son of Man,”
Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1976), 833–36, and Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Influence of
     Daniel on the New Testament,”
Daniel
, ed. John J. Collins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 90–123.
    Although the “one like a son of man” is never identified as the messiah, it seems
     that the Jewish scholars and rabbis of the first century understood him as such. Whether
     Jesus also understood Daniel’s “one like a son of man” to be a messianic figure is
     unclear. Not all scholars believe that Daniel is referring to a distinct personality
     or a specific individual when he uses the phrase “son of man.” He may be using the
     term as a symbol for Israel as victorious over its enemies. The same is true of Ezekiel,
     where “son of man” may be not a distinct individual named Ezekiel but a symbolic representative
     of the ideal man. In fact, Maurice Casey thinks even the “son of man” in
Enoch
is not a distinct individual but simply a generic “man”; see “The Use of the Term
     ‘Son of Man’ in the Similitudes of Enoch,”
Journal for the Study of Judaism
7.1 (1976): 11–29. I do not disagree with this position, but I do think there is
     a significant difference between the way the generic term is used in, say, Jeremiah
     51:43—“Her cities have become an object of horror, and a land of drought and a desert,
     a land in which no man lives, nor any son of man [
ben adam
] passes”—and the way it is used in Daniel 7:13 to refer to a singular figure.
    Both Enoch and 4 Ezra explicitly identify the son of man figure with the messiah,
     but in 4 Ezra he is also called “my son” by God: “For my son the messiah shall be
     revealed with those who are with him, and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred
     years. And after these years my son the Messiah shall die, and all who draw human
     breath” (4 Ezra 7:28–29). There’s no question that 4 Ezra was written at the end of
     the first century, or perhaps the beginning of the second century C.E . However there has long been a debate over the dating of the
Similitudes
. Because no copies of the
Similitudes
were found among the many copies of Enoch found at Qumran, most scholars are convinced
     that it was not written until well after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E . See Matthew Black,
The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch: A New English Edition with Commentary and