Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE QUESTION OF JESUS' SELF-UNDERSTANDING §16.4
In short, we are confronted with two clear features. First, 'the Son of Man'
hardly appears in early Christology as a feature independent of the Gospel usage.
Second, the phrase is thoroughly integrated into the Jesus tradition. It is very
hard to credit, therefore, that the phrase might have originated outside the Jesus
tradition and been introduced to the Jesus tradition only after Easter. To hypothesize
that a way of thinking about Jesus was so significant that it could be intruded
thoroughly into the Jesus tradition, and yet have been so insignificant as to leave
virtually no other trace is to push against the manifest weight of the evidence. 136
Much the most obvious deduction is that the usage within the Jesus tradition
originated there. Moreover, the tradition remembers the usage as peculiar to Jesus,
'the son of man' as a characteristic Jesus usage. Here again the deduction is
obvious: it was remembered as a speech usage distinctive of Jesus because that is
precisely what it was. 131 It was Jesus who, if we may put it so, introduced 'the
son of man' phrase into the Jesus tradition. The evidence could hardly point more
plainly to that conclusion.
What of Vielhauer's famous argument: that the failure of the two principal
motifs of the Jesus tradition (kingdom of God, son of man) to intertwine suggests
that one (Son of Man) was inserted later (above, n. 128)? The argument is
hardly so persuasive as first appears. For the feature is just as puzzling on the
hypothesis that 'the Son of Man' was introduced to the tradition some time after
it had been in circulation. Performers/tradents who felt free to introduce 'the
Son of Man' as thoroughly as they did would hardly have been so inhibited as to
fail to intertwine the new motif with the tradition's core motif (kingdom of
God). A simpler explanation is that the two motifs did not naturally lie together:
where 'the son of man' implied only weakness and suffering, kingdom was
hardly an obvious companion; and where 'the son of man' contained any allusion
to Dan. 7.13 it also thereby included an allusion to dominion and kingship,
making further reference to the kingdom of God redundant. 138 Some such explanation
must be offered, whatever the son of man's entry-point into the Jesus
tradition.
This is not to say that all son of man sayings can forthwith be traced back
to Jesus. For there are also clear indications of the tradition being reworked, of
interpretative elaboration, of performative variation, of editorial insertion, where
the son of man reference is strictly speaking to be attributed to the tradent rather
of identification that presupposes a recognized Son of Man concept ("You are the Son of
Man . . .") which we do not find in the Christian tradition' (Dunn, Christology 85).
136. Hare, e.g., notes the illogicality of postulating a Greek-speaking church which developed
the son of man traditions so thoroughly, yet 'found the title of no value whatsoever for
liturgy and confession' (Son of Man 234).
137. Similarly, e.g., Jeremias, Proclamation 266.
138. Cf. Marshall, Jesus 81-83.
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