Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE QUESTION OF JESUS' SELF-UNDERSTANDING §16.5
then there is almost no feature of the Jesus tradition of which we can confidently
assert that Jesus spoke in this way.
b. Beyond that confidence quickly diminishes. As to the possibility of
identifying an Aramaic phrase behind the Gospels' Greek, the negative results of
searches for Aramaic parallels are undeniably a major problem. Nevertheless, I
think the evidence is strong enough to support the conclusion that Jesus did use
Aramaic bar ' e nasa in a general and self-referential way, probably best indicated
by a translation such as 'a man like me', equivalent to the English 'one'. Jesus
the mosel would presumably have been attracted by the phrase's ambiguity between
general reference and self-reference and by the play it made possible between
'men', 'man', 'a man like me'. At any rate such an ambiguous word-play
is evident at various points in the Jesus tradition. That is to say, Jesus was remembered
as using the phrase in that way. It is hardly credible that the ambiguity
and word-play were introduced once the tradition had been put into Greek. It
must have been a feature of the tradition in its Aramaic phase. This usage should
therefore count as evidence for Aramaic usage in pre-70 Palestine and not be dismissed
because clear parallels are lacking elsewhere in our deposit of firstcentury
Aramaic. In which case there seems little cause to deny the usage to Jesus
himself, as the Jesus tradition attests.
c. It can be judged also likely that Jesus' word-play on bar ' e nasa included
at least some reference to 'one like bar ' e nas' in Dan. 7.13. With the possible exception
of Luke 12.8, there is no evidence to speak of supporting the view that
Son of Man was an already established title of or way of referring to a hoped-for
heavenly redeemer figure. Nor is there evidence (apart from Mark 14.62-64 par.
where the Dan. 7.13 allusion is clear) that bar ' e nasa would have caused offence
to Jesus' hearers. A plausible thesis, then, is that it was Jesus himself who saw in
the Danielic bar ' e nas both a further play on the Aramaic idiom and a signal
which give him hope of vindication, whatever happened to him. 226 Because of
the ambiguity of the Aramaic phrase itself, and because Dan. 7.13 was an example
of the idiom ('one like a human being'), such an allusion need not have been
heard as a claim to be the manlike figure, but could be taken simply as an allusion
to the vindication-following-suffering role which the figure represented for
the faithful of Israel. We shall have to return to this possibility in §17.4 below.
d. This last conclusion correlates well with what we can learn in regard to
the Similitudes of Enoch. The likelihood that the Similitudes were introducing a
fresh interpretation of Daniel's vision undermines the counter-argument that they
presuppose a prior interpretation of Dan. 7.13 as referring to a heavenly angelic
judge able to act on Israel's behalf. And the fact that clear indications of influence
from the Similitudes appear only late in the development of the Jesus tradi-
226. Cf. particularly Bietenhard, 'Der Menschensohn' 345-46.
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