The Son of Man
The Son of Man
Even on a minimalist approach to the evidence about the historical Jesus, while we do not much find Jesus calling Himself Son of David, nor does He ever cite 2 Samuel 7, scholars are clear about Jesus referring to Himself as Son of Man, and His speaking of an everlasting kingdom which He is inaugurating. The question that begs to be asked is, “What kind of person thinks he can personally reign forever—not him and his offspring but just him?” Or again, what sort of person thinks he can bring the eschatological saving reign of God upon the earth, the one that eclipses and replaces all previous human attempts at dominion?
My answer is, “A person who thought he was both human and divine.” And here is the interesting bit. The title “Son of Man,” not the title “Messiah” or some other more familiar ones, has the potential to convey the notion of both humanness and more than humanness. And interestingly, the title Son of Man was not all that much used in early Jewish messianic speculation, and so Jesus was free to fill it with the content He had in mind without being pigeonholed by other people's preconceived notion of what a Savior or Messiah must be, and do. In short, Jesus, in His prevalent use of these two concepts conveyed an exalted image of who He is and what He came to do and be, and this and a few other things Jesus said likely led to exclusive claims being made about Him by His first followers, claims such as Jesus being the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to God except through Jesus. While that claim is found in John 14, in essence the same sort of claim is made by Jesus in Matthew 11 where Jesus says that no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals God. Notice the language of special revelation. Jesus claims to have special revelation from God that others do not have. This saying, if authentic, places Jesus in the category of a remarkable seer. Do we have other evidence that suggests this as well? In fact we do.
The earliest form of the story of Jesus' baptism is in Mark's Gospel, a story which all stripes of scholars believe contains historical substance, not least because you don't make up a story about your messianic figure being baptized by another remarkable prophetic figure if you want people to think Jesus is more important than John the Baptizer. In order to understand the account fully in Mark 1, we need to say something about the history of prophecy.
Prophecy in the ancient Near East (ANE), including in the biblical tradition, was a complex phenomenon. One of the features which rose to prominence in biblical prophecy during the exile was apocalyptic prophecy, which is to say prophecy based on visions. Sometimes these were day visions; sometimes they came in the form of night visions or dreams, but in either case they were different from the earlier oracular forms of prophecy which were a matter of the prophet's listening and then repeating verbatim what he believed the deity was saying. With visionary prophecy a whole new element was added to the picture—namely, what the prophet had seen in a vision. I need to be clear at this juncture that visions, whether waking or in dreams, were not seen as purely subjective phenomena in antiquity—not something generated, for example, by an overactive imagination or wish projection. No, these were seen as one form of revelation from God; and increasingly during and after the Babylonian exile (sixth century BC), they were seen as the main form of revelation from God.
Scholars have often remarked on the fact that Jesus does not use the oracular formula “thus says Yahweh,” nor does He quote God, so to speak. On this basis some scholars have concluded that Jesus was not a prophet in the Old Testamental sense. This, however, is incorrect as it involves mistaking the part for the whole. Jesus clearly was not an oracular prophet like Isaiah or Amos. Rather, He was a visionary prophet like Daniel or Zechariah. It is no accident that Jesus was indebted to these two sources for His sense of calling and self-understanding. He, too, was a visionary prophet like those earlier Jewish figures.
In the Markan account of the baptism, we find several major features of a visionary account. The sky is said to split open (cf. Rev 1:4); the Spirit of God descends, which is described in typical apocalyptic diction (“it was like …”); and then and only then, Jesus hears the divine voice speaking directly to Him, saying, “You are my beloved Son.” Mark's account differs clearly enough from Matthew's in that it recounts a public occasion but a private vision that happened on that public occasion. The voice from above did not speak to everyone but only to Jesus. The Matthean account makes it a more public affair. We need to stick with the earlier account.
What we can say about what happened on this occasion, besides Jesus' being baptized by John, is that Jesus received identity confirmation, an indirect commissioning, and indeed an empowering for ministry. Only after this event the ministry is said to begin. We are told in Mark 1:15 that Jesus begins with a proclamation John himself could have made: “Repent for the Dominion of God is at hand.”
Less often noticed than some of these features of the story is the connection it has with the sequel. Mark 1:12 is emphatic: the Spirit cast Jesus out into the Judean wilderness, and He spent 40 days there being tempted by Satan. He is with the wild animals, and angels attend him. What is less seldom noticed is that having just been called God's Son, He is now tested as a royal figure in a fashion like the king was tested in Daniel when he was out in the fields with the animals or as Solomon was tested in Wisdom of Solomon (one of the apocryphal books included in the Septuagint). But here again we are still in the realm of vision, visions that Jesus saw while in the wilderness.