Son of Man

Of all the titles Jesus could have used for himself, the one he used the most by far — about eighty times across the four Gospels, more than every other self-designation combined — is the one that sounds, in English, the least impressive.

The Son of Man.

In English, the phrase has a quiet, almost self-effacing feel. Son of man sounds like a way of saying a human being. I’m just one of you. A guy. And so when modern readers come across it in the Gospels — the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, the Son of Man will be lifted up — we tend to hear it as a kind of humble counterweight to Jesus’s bigger claims. He calls himself Son of God and Messiah sometimes. But mostly, he calls himself Son of Man. The modest version. The one that emphasizes his human side.

That’s almost the exact opposite of what his first audience heard.

To understand why, we have to go back to a particular vision recorded in a particular book that almost every literate first-century Jew would have known well.

The book of Daniel is one of the strangest in the Hebrew Bible. Most of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew. But a long section of Daniel — chapters 2 through 7 — is written in Aramaic, the everyday language of the region. And in Daniel chapter 7, the prophet records a vision. He sees four monstrous beasts rising out of the sea — symbols, the text explains, of four kingdoms that will rise and fall on the earth. He sees a great throne set in place and the Ancient of Days — God himself — taking his seat to judge. And then he sees something else. Let me give it to you in the words of the vision:

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. (Daniel 7:13–14, NIV)

Read that slowly. There’s a figure who looks like a human being. He comes on the clouds of heaven — the kind of arrival the Hebrew Bible reserves for God himself. He approaches the Ancient of Days and is brought into God’s presence. And then God gives him three things: authority, glory, and sovereign power. All nations and peoples of every language worship him. His kingdom is everlasting and indestructible.

That figure — the human-looking one who comes on the clouds, approaches God, and receives the worship of every nation — is called, in the Aramaic of Daniel 7, bar enash. Sometimes the longer form, bar enasha. In Aramaic it literally means a son of man — a human being. The phrase as Daniel uses it points to the fact that this figure looks human, in contrast to the beast-figures earlier in the vision. But it’s also the only place in the entire Hebrew Bible where the phrase appears in Aramaic. Everywhere else in the Old Testament — when Ezekiel is called son of man by God more than ninety times, when the Psalms use it for human frailty — the phrase is in Hebrew, ben adam. Daniel 7 is the singular Aramaic occurrence. The phrase is, in that text, doing something the rest of the Hebrew Bible doesn’t do with it.

And the way Daniel 7 uses the phrase is unmistakable. By the time Jesus came along, that vision had been read and re-read for two centuries. The Jewish people, living under successive foreign rulers, had grown to love the image of one like a son of man coming on the clouds to receive the kingdom that would never end. The Aramaic phrase bar enasha — the son of man — had taken on the weight of that vision. It was no longer just a human being. In that specific context, it had become a title for the heavenly figure Daniel had seen, the one God would send to bring the everlasting kingdom. Other Jewish writings from around this period — the Similitudes of Enoch, 4 Ezra — develop the same image, picturing the son of man as a glorified, divine-or-near-divine messianic figure who would come at the end of the age.

So when Jesus, again and again, calls himself the Son of Man — and especially in Greek, where the definite article is right there in the phrase (ho huios tou anthrōpou, THE Son of Man, not just a son of man) — his Aramaic-speaking audience is hearing something much louder than English carries. He isn’t saying I’m just a guy. He’s invoking Daniel 7. He’s identifying himself as the figure on the clouds. He’s claiming to be the one who will come to the Ancient of Days, receive a kingdom that will never end, and be worshiped by every nation.

You can almost feel the temperature of the title rise. The very same sentences that, in English, sound like humble understatement — the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve; the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head — become something quite different. They’re Daniel 7 sentences. They’re sentences in which a man from Galilee is claiming, every time he opens his mouth, to be the heavenly figure his audience has been waiting for. The understatement is real — no place to lay his head really is a humble thing to say — but the title doing the work in those sentences is anything but modest. It’s the highest title Jesus could have given himself, drawn from the most exalted vision in the prophets, made deliberately ambiguous so that it wouldn’t provoke a riot until he was ready.

The New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham — Senior Scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and one of the leading current voices on the divinity of Jesus in early Christian thought — has written extensively about this. Bauckham’s argument, developed across several books including Jesus and the God of Israel, is that the New Testament writers identify Jesus with what he calls the unique divine identity of the God of Israel — that Jesus does the things the Hebrew Bible reserves for God alone, occupies the places the Hebrew Bible reserves for God alone, and receives the worship the Hebrew Bible reserves for God alone. And the Son of Man image from Daniel 7 is one of the central textual hooks for that identification. The figure on the clouds is given the worship of the nations. He shares the divine throne. He has a kingdom that mirrors God’s own. In the Jewish world Jesus was born into, that figure wasn’t merely a human messiah. He was something stranger and more exalted. And Jesus, by taking the title for himself, was placing himself in exactly that position.

There’s one scene in the Gospels where this comes through unmistakably, even in English — because the people in the room hear what Jesus is claiming, and they react accordingly.

It’s the night of Jesus’s trial before the Jewish ruling council. Mark tells the story in chapter 14. Jesus has been arrested, hauled before the high priest, and questioned. Witnesses contradict each other. Jesus stays silent. Finally the high priest stands up and asks the direct question: Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One? And Jesus answers:

I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven. (Mark 14:62, NIV)

The high priest tears his clothes. He calls it blasphemy. The council condemns Jesus to death.

If Son of Man meant only a human being, that exchange makes no sense. A man saying I’m just a person isn’t blasphemy; it’s the opposite of blasphemy. But that isn’t what Jesus said. He said: you will see the Son of Man — coming on the clouds of heaven. That’s a near-direct quotation of Daniel 7:13. He combined it with Psalm 110, sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One — another text the Jewish tradition associated with a divine-or-near-divine figure who shared God’s throne. The high priest understood the claim instantly. Jesus had identified himself, in front of the Sanhedrin, as Daniel’s heavenly figure coming to the Ancient of Days. The tearing of the high priest’s clothes is the response of a man who has just heard what he believes to be the most exalted self-claim any human could make. Whether or not he believed Jesus, he understood him. And the verdict followed.

This is the moment where the Son of Man title finally comes out of its careful ambiguity. For three years Jesus had been calling himself by a title that, on the surface, sounded modest, but that always had the Daniel 7 echo hidden inside it. On the night before he died, in front of the highest religious authority of his nation, he stripped the ambiguity off. Yes, I am the Messiah. And the Son of Man you are looking at right now is the one Daniel saw coming on the clouds.

Once you can hear that, every other use of Son of Man in the Gospels sits differently. The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins — that’s a Daniel 7 sentence about the figure who can do what God alone does. The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath — Daniel 7 sentence about the figure who has authority over God’s holy day. The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be killed, and after three days rise again — the most extraordinary sentence in the whole set, because it takes the heavenly figure of Daniel 7 and routes him through death. The cross runs through the title. The figure on the clouds, in Jesus’s hands, is also the suffering servant. The exalted Son of Man is the same person as the crucified man.

That second move — taking the most exalted title in the prophets and pulling it down through suffering and death — is what made Jesus’s use of the title so original. He didn’t deny what Daniel had seen. He affirmed it, and added a chapter Daniel hadn’t seen. The Son of Man, when he came, came also to suffer. The clouds of heaven and the wood of the cross belonged to the same figure.

Reading this yourself

The next time you read a Gospel passage with the Son of Man in it, try a small experiment. Hold Daniel 7 in your mind — the one like a son of man coming on the clouds, receiving the worship of every nation, given a kingdom that will never end. Then read the verse you’re sitting with. The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. The Son of Man will be lifted up. The phrase won’t sound modest anymore. It’ll sound like what it was — the most loaded title Jesus ever took, with a divine throne on one end and a Roman cross on the other.

Eighty times in the four Gospels, the Galilean rabbi reaches for the same Aramaic phrase to name himself. Bar enasha. And every time, the title carries the same loaded weight — Daniel’s vision sitting inside it, the Ancient of Days at one end, the cross of Rome at the other, both held in the same self-designation. In English we read the Son of Man and hear humility. In the Aramaic of his audience, the title was the most exalted thing a man could claim. Jesus claimed it again, and again, and again — and on the night the high priest finally asked him directly, he stopped softening it, said yes, and gave them the words from Daniel 7 that left no room for misunderstanding. They killed him for it the next afternoon. And the title, somehow, didn’t die with him. The figure on the clouds, in Christian memory, is also the one who was crucified. The exaltation and the suffering, in the end, belong to the same person — the one who used the title eighty times, never once to soften his claims, always to deepen them.