Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

the generic title of messiah only if it can
     be made to fit his specific interpretation, à la the book of Daniel, of the Son of
     Man.
    What this suggests is that the key to uncovering the messianic secret, and therefore
     Jesus’s own sense of self, lies in deciphering his unique interpretation of the “one
     like a son of man” in Daniel. And here is where one can come closest to discovering
     who Jesus thought he was. For while the curious son-of-man figure in Daniel is never
     explicitly identified as messiah, he is clearly and unambiguously called
king
—one who will rule on behalf of God over all peoples on earth. Could that be what
     Jesus means when he gives himself the strange title “the Son of Man”? Is he calling
     himself king?
    To be sure, Jesus speaks at length about the Son of Man, and often in contradictory
     terms. He is powerful (Mark 14:62) yet suffering (Mark 13:26). He is present on earth
     (Mark 2:10) yet coming in the future (Mark 8:38). He will be rejected by men (Mark
     10:33), yet he will judge over them (Mark 14:62). He is both ruler (Mark 8:38) and
     servant (Mark 10:45). But what appears on the surface as a set of contradictory statements
     is in fact fairly consistent with how Jesus describes the Kingdom of God. Indeed,
     thetwo ideas—the Son of Man and the Kingdom of God—are often linked together in the gospels,
     as though they represent one and the same concept. Both are described in startlingly
     similar terms, and occasionally the two are presented as interchangeable, as when
     the gospel of Matthew changes the famous verse in Mark 9:1—“I tell you, there are
     those here who will not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom of God come with
     power”—to “I tell you there are those standing here who will not taste death until
     they see the Son of Man
coming in his kingdom
” (Matthew 16:28).
    By replacing one term with the other, Matthew implies that the kingdom belonging to
     the Son of Man is one and the same as the Kingdom of God. And since the Kingdom of
     God is built upon a complete reversal of the present order, wherein the poor become
     powerful and the meek are made mighty, what better king to rule over it on God’s behalf
     than one who himself embodies the new social order flipped on its head? A peasant
     king. A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served.
     A king riding on a donkey.
    When Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, using the description from Daniel as a title,
     he is making a clear statement about how he views his identity and his mission. He
     is associating himself with the paradigm of the Davidic messiah, the king who will
     rule the earth on God’s behalf, who will gather the twelve tribes of Israel (in Jesus’s
     case, through his twelve apostles, who will “sit on twelve thrones”) and restore the
     nation of Israel to its former glory. He is claiming the same position as King David,
     “at the right hand of the Power.” In short, he is calling himself king. He is stating,
     albeit in a deliberately cryptic way, that his role is not merely to usher in the
     Kingdom of God through his miraculous actions; it is to rule that kingdom on God’s
     behalf.
    Recognizing the obvious danger of his kingly ambitions and wanting to avoid, if at
     all possible, the fate of the others who dared claim the title, Jesus attempts to
     restrain all declarations of him as messiah, opting instead for the more ambiguous,
     less openlycharged title “the Son of Man.” The messianic secret was born precisely from the tension
     that arises between Jesus’s desire to promote his son-of-man identity over the messianic
     title given to him by his followers.
    Regardless of how Jesus viewed himself, the fact remains that he was never able to
     establish the Kingdom of God. The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus
     was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus’s time expected of the
     messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted. For those who fell into the latter camp,
     the apocalyptic imagery of 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, both written long after Jesus’s death,
     paved a way forward, allowing the early church to replace Jesus’s understanding of
     himself as king and messiah with a new, post–Jewish Revolt paradigm of the messiah
     as a preexistent, predetermined, heavenly, and divine Son of Man, one whose “kingdom”
     was not of this world.
    But Jesus’s kingdom—the Kingdom of