If she says that any pre-Christian Jewish sect, or any part of Hebrew scripture ever used “Son of Man” to refer to the Messiah she is contradicting all Jewish scolarship and, frankly, she’s just flat out wrong. What is her evidence that the Essenes used the phrase in this way? What is a specific example from the Hebew Bible which she thinks is a reference to the Messiah?
Is two thousand years of rabbinical scholarship wrong? (not to mention some basic lingusistic analaysis) Are we to believe that the Jews don’t really know what their own bible means, but that Perkins has it all figured out?
The oldest versions of Enoch do not use “Son of Man” to refer to the Messiah. Enoch has at least twelve layers of emendation and redaction in it, and it is believed by Jewish scholars that the application of “Son of Man” to the Messiah, as quoted above, is a Christian interpolation.
Other references to “Son of Man” in Enoch can only fit the generic “human being” definition.
Perkins may or may not be right, but her position is certainly not “unique,” as Zev has characterized it. I am a student at Wesley Theological Seminary. What she has been described as saying is very much in keeping with what I’ve been taught.
On of my professors, Craig Hill, recently wrote a book which mentions this topic. He is very much in the mainstream of Christian biblical scholarship. He disdains overly speculative or idealogically driven arguments. He tends to dissent from the “scholarly consensus” only where he sees clear evidence that would convince others. I’ll quote breifly from his book. (My comments are in {braces}. All bolding is mine.)
He goes on to provide evidence both for the Jewish nature of the text and an early date of composition. He makes a convincing case that at least some forms of Judaism at the time of Jesus were much closer to Christianity than once suspected, but that after Christianity developed, both religions developed doctrines that helped to separate themselves from the other and to reject doctrines that seemed too close to the opposition.
Alan, let’s just say that the SoM as Messiah is outside the mainstream of Jewish Biblical scholarship and leave it at that.
In any case, the characterization in the Similitudes is unique in Hebrew scripture. The overwhelming usage of SoM in Hebrew and in Aramaic is as an idiom for “man.”
So where did the early Christians get “son of man” as a messianistic title from? Was this strictly an invention of early Christianity, then? It doesn’t have any parallels with any strain of 1st century Jewish thought?
In other words, Jesus used the term in it’s Aramaic sense. Greek translators, misunderstanding the idiom, applied it in a titular manner and it was then strongly associated by early Christians as a title for the Messiah.
If you read many of the sayings of Jesus which refer to the SoM, and substitute “human being” for the term in question, you can often get quite a different (but strikingly sensible) connotation.
(Note: Many Christian theologians would strongly contest the statements made above. The Christian perspective is that SoM = Messiah, that Jesus knew what he was saying, that the translators got it right, and that’s the end of it.)
Perkins’ arguments for that meaning of son of man are precisely the same as those listed by Alan Smithee. As Christianity didn’t come out of a vacuum, Perkins believes that its meaning of “son of man” must be related to that of previous authors of apocalyptic literature like Enoch (she also mentions “The Assumption of Moses” I believe).
You could be like some Bedoin communities and take it literally. The men wear baggy pants (think MC Hammer) because every man has to be reay to give birth to the messiah.
Enoch was Hebrew, not Aramaic. SoM was never applied to the Messiah in Aramaic (and, as I’ve said before, Jewish scholarship doesn’t really buy that Enoch did it in Hebrew). The only usage in Aramaic at the time of Jesus was as a generic refernce to humanity as a whole. The circumstancial evidence is pretty good that SoM was simply misunderstood in the translation.
You’re right that Christianity did not arise in a vaccuum, but most of the apocalyptic/eschatological aspects of it came about after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The Messiah was then reimagined by Christians as a supernatural saviour figure (rather than the human king expected by Judaism) and identified as Christ.
Christians, after the Roman sack of Jerusalem, started to read apocalyptic literature differently than Rabbinic Jews. They interpreted in a way which fit their belief in Christ as a supernatural Messiah, and more than that, as God. The guy in the clouds who was “like the Son of Man” was appealing to them as an image of jesus returning to Kick Roman ass and take names.
It’s not remarkable that the definition of SoM changed when the phrase was taken out of its original Aramaic context and placed into a Greek one. The whole definition of “Messiah” changed changed dramatically as well.
Your ideas intrigue me, Diogenes, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Do you have a cite to show that this is, in fact, the consensus of current Jewish scholarship.
Any Hebrew or Aramaic dictionary will still identify “Ben Adam” or “Bar-Anash” as being synonomous with mankind. It’s hard to google for a cite which states what Judaism doesn’t believe, so all I can say is you won’t find any Jewish scholarship which identifies SoM as the Messiah. My own knowledge of the issue has been largely derived from my own academic background and books, not from linkable internet sites. My attempts to google 'Judaism son of man" seem to turn up a lot of Christian sites, not Jewish ones. I’ve been unsuccessful trying to find a definitive online statement as to the contemporary Jewish definition of SoM. Maybe Zev or one of the other Jewish poster can help provide a decent cite.
I was under the impression that for a Jew to accept Jesus as the messiah he’d have to throw out a big chunk of the Jewish religion, as Jesus is most definitely NOT the Jewish messiah (for one thing, he has not brought peace to the Earth).
DtC, the Jewish Encyclopedia (according to the homepage of the cite you linked to) was published between 1901 and 1906. Biblical scholarship has obviously changed a lot since then, and in that time, it is my impression, Christian and Jewish scholarship have largely converged due to a mutual reliance on neutral principles of historical and textual criticism, the blatant Antisemitism of especially the early German critics notwithstanding. Nevertheless, there are still lingering traces of Antisemtitism in contemporary Christian scholarship (largely the result of reliance upon earlier scholarship without recognizing its biases, NOT the result of current Antisemitic attitudes.) It is possible that this is an area of continued disagreement. I don’t mind looking in a book, so go ahead and tell me your print sources, if you don’t mind. This (well, not this specifically, but this field) is my area of study (Master’s level, so I’m not doing research) and I’d genuinely like to see the data for myself here.
One more point. Lest the argument focus too narrowly on one phrase, it seems clear from Daniel and intertestamental pseudepigrepha that late 2nd Temple Judaism included the idea of some sort of heavenly supernatural or human-divine being as a messiah or an intermediary for God. Post 70 CE rabbis may have discouraged this thinking as aberrant, and may have been right, but it was certainly floating around out there in Jesus’ time. Christians didn’t invent it out of whole cloth.
In Thessalonians, the earliest extant piece of Christian writing, Paul describes Jesus’ second coming: “with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, [he] will descend from heaven” (Th 4:16) This seems very clearly to be related to Matthews text, in which he puts very similar words in Jesus’s own mouth in the context of a Son of Man saying from Daniel: “they will see ‘the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven’ [Dan 7:13] with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels witha loud trumpet call” (Mt 24:30-31).
It seems likely from the above texts that Paul was quoting a saying of Jesus, and that it was originally tied to Daniel’s vision of a messianic figure “like the Son of Man” coming from heaven. If you don’t think that Jesus could possibly have been such a figure, it still makes more sense to argue that the concepts were aready around, and that Jesus thought of himself as such a figure, than to argue that all of Jesus’ closest followers misunderstood (or lied about) his thinking and very soon after his death began falsely saying that he thought himself the messiah, an idea which they supposedly made up out of whole cloth with no precident whatsoever, but which none of his other followers ever objected to.
I know some Apostolic Pentacostals(Christians) that teach that they are “Spiritual Jews” and “Abraham’s seed.” In a couple of the bible studies they gave me, they included these biblical passages. However, it was much more involved.
and
They also do not believe in the trinity, but teach that Jesus is God.
Here and here are bible studies from their incompletewebsite.
Addressing Daniel first:
The part of Daniel you cited is one of the prophesies that Judaism generally accepts as a refernce to the Messiah (but obviously, they don’t think it meant Jesus). When Daniel describes him as a King who is “like a son of man,” he is specifically drawing a contrast to God and defining the Messiah as human. As I’m sure you know, Daniel was written during the Maccabean revolt against Antioch. The Messiah was supposed to be a king who would defeat Antioch and herald in a new and dominant era for Israel. This king was supposed to come only a couple of years after Antioch had placed a statue of Zeus in the temple (167 BCE), so obviously, the Messiah of Daniel’s dream never showed up.
Daniel was definitely seized on and reinterpreted by early Christians and its influence is especially strong in Revelation.
In any case, the “Son of Man” appellation in Daniel is descriptive, not titular. It emphasized that the messiah would be human.
As to the use of the term by Jesus and what the apostles may have thought:
Well, first of all, we really don’t know what his earliest followers thought, since we have no first hand testimony. As I’ve said before, the only Aramaic meaning of “Bar-Anash” was “man.” Personally, I think that Jesus used the term in this manner to teach that man had a moral authority of their own which was distinct from written law. Mark 2:10, for instance, would be a perfect example. Jesus forgives a paralytic, in a cultural context where physical ailments were believed to be God’s punishment for sin, and informed the incredulous crowd (who said that only God could forgive sins) that “the son of man” i.e. human beings, were allowed to forgive anyone that they wanted. Jesus was teaching that compassion could never be a sin.
I don’t know if Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah. I tend to doubt it since he did not attempt to do anything to fulfill the Jewish expectations of the Messiah. It’s possible that his disciples believed it, or came to believe it after the crucifixion. I don’t think they personally would have used the SoM phrase to refer to him.
I believe that Jesus’ SoM sayings were collected in sayings gospels like Q, translated into Greek and then reinterpreted as titular and self-referential by the gospelers and by other NT writers.