Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§16.4 How Did Jesus See His Own Role?
than to Jesus. 139 But all the more significant in these cases is the fact that this reworking
was confined within the Jesus tradition and was conformed to the pattern
of a phrase found only on Jesus' lips. This surely suggests that the pattern itself
was already so firmly fixed within the tradition, from the first, and was from
the first so massively consistent, that tradents and Evangelists naturally maintained
the form in their own performance and editing.
b. A Man Like Me
In the light of this first conclusion, the key question ceases to be whether it was
linguistically possible for Jesus to have spoken of 'the Son of Man'. Rather,
given that he did so speak, the question is how he would have been understood.
The evidence already reviewed indicates that such a usage would have been
meaningful in terms of the traditional Semitic idiom, including the possibility
of an individual or implied self-reference. 140 Here we must recall just how
common the idiom was and how it could be used in the singular with the implication
that the 'man' indicated shared the typical weaknesses of the human
species; the polite English idiom 'one' is sufficiently close to carry the connotation
which we observed earlier in the use of ben 'adam. ul This also means
that we need to disabuse ourselves of any assumption that the phrase itself inevitably
carried an allusion to Dan. 7.13. The Daniel reference was itself a specific
use of the idiom and hardly 'took over' the whole idiom. Notwithstanding
Dan. 7.13, the idiomatic 'son of man' still denoted humankind as a whole or in
its individual typicality.
The key data within the Jesus tradition are the two early references to 'the
son of man' in Mark (Mark 2.10, 28), the intriguing Mark/Q saying on the
unforgiveable sin (Mark 3.28-29/Matt. 12.31-32/Luke 12.10/GTh 44), the Q 'nowhere
to lay his head' saying (Matt. 8.20/Luke 9.58/GTh 86), the 'friend of sinners'
saying (Matt. 11.18-19/Luke 7.33-34), 142 and the several cases where 'the
son of man' is equivalent to T in the parallel tradition. For convenience I repeat
elements of previous fuller citations.
(1) Mark 2.10 pars. 143
139. Matt. 16.28; see also Matt. 26.2/Mark 14.1; Matt. 24.30a added to Mark 13.26.
140. It is worth asking how Paul would have expressed himself had he written 2 Cor.
12.2 in Aramaic — 'I knew a man (anthwpos = bar v nas?) in Christ. ..' — since the large consensus
is that Paul was speaking of himself.
141. See above, nn. 83-85.
142. These passages were already identified by Bultmann as resulting from a misunderstanding
of the Aramaic idiom (Theology 1.30).
143. Mark 2.1-12 is cited in full in §15.7e.
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