Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§16.3 How Did Jesus See His Own Role?
says 'that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive
sins' and then to the paralytic 'I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home'
(Mark 2.10-11). Later on Jesus teaches that 'the Son of Man must suffer many
things... and be put to death and rise after three days' (8.31). And in the hearing
before High Priest Caiaphas he says, 'You will see the Son of Man sitting at the
right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven' (14.62). No one for
whom the Gospel of Mark was intended would fail to recognize 'the Son of Man'
as a reference to Jesus himself. So, is this the key for which we have been looking?
Did Jesus speak of himself as the son of man/Son of Man?
Would that it were so straightforward. These initial simple observations
cloak a controversy which has raged (the term is not inappropriate) for more than
a century and shows no sign of abating. Indeed, the ongoing 'Son of Man' debate
is one of the great embarrassments for modern historical scholarship, since it has
been unable to produce any major consensus. 78 Does, then, the fragmentation of
scholarly judgment on this topic simply illustrate the truth of the postmodern critique
of historical method? Given the extent of the motif in the Jesus tradition,
that would be an important conclusion with considerable ramifications.
Broadly speaking, for the last 150 years, the controversy has been between
two principal interpretations — what might be characterized as the human son of
man and the heavenly Son of Man. Traditionally 'the Son of Man' was understood
as an expression of Jesus' humanity and so as a counterpoise to his status
as 'the Son of God', stressing his divinity. But the reference to 'one like a son of
man' coming with the clouds of heaven in Dan. 7.13 was always a problem for
that view, and the publication of 1 Enoch in the first half of the nineteenth century
gave a lasting boost to the heavenly Son of Man interpretation. 79 As linguistic
resources and analytical technique improved through the twentieth century,
these two views have continued to provide the main options, but each with several
variations. 80
The heart of the issue is disagreement on the root of the usage, on the
source of the phrase in the Jesus tradition. There are two main possibilities. The
difficulty has been to see how the two relate to each other within the Jesus tradition.
78. E.g., D. Burkett, The Son of Man Debate: A History and Evaluation (SNTSMS 107;
Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1999) quotes the pessimistic sentiments of A. J. B. Higgins,
R. H. Fuller, and F. H. Borsch (2, 121).
79. Burkett, Son of Man Debate particularly 13-31.
80. W. Horbury, The Messianic Association of "The Son of Man'", JTS 36 (1985) 34-
55, gives a nicely concise review of the twentieth-century discussion (34-36).
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