Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

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 theglory 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 expressionto 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