to a son of man refers to the form in which He is seen by the prophet (see pp. 645f.), and affirms neither the true humanity nor the superhuman nature of Him who appeared. The superhuman or divine nature of the person seen in the form of a man lies in the coming with the clouds of heaven, since it is true only of God that He makes the clouds His chariot; Psa 104:3, cf. Isa 19:1. But on the other hand, also, the words do not exclude the humanity, as little as the ὅμοιος υἱῷ ἀνθρώπου, Rev 1:13; for, as C. B. Michaelis has remarked, כ non excludit rei veritatem, sed formam ejus quod visum est describit; so that with Oehler (Herz. Realenc.) we may say: The Messiah here appears as a divine being as much as He does a human. The union of the divine and the human natures lies also in the self-designation of Christ as ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, although as to the meaning Jesus unites with it there is diversity of opinion.
That this was a designation of the Messiah common among the Jews in the time of Jesus, we cannot positively affirm, because only Jesus Himself made use of it; His disciples did not, much less did the people so style the Messiah. If, then, Jesus speaks of Himself as the Son of man, He means thereby not merely to say that He was the Messiah, but He wishes to designate Himself as the Messiah of Daniel's prophecy, i.e., as the Son of man coming to the earth in the clouds of heaven. He thereby lays claim at once to a divine original, or a divine pre-existence, as well as to affirm true humanity of His person, and seeks to represent Himself, according to John's expression, as the Logos becoming flesh.[1]
This view of the expression will be confirmed by a comparison of the passages in which Jesus uses it. In Joh 1:51, “Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man,” the divine glory is intimated
- ↑ Meyer justly remarks: “The consciousness from which Jesus appropriates to Himself this designation by Daniel was the antithesis of the God-sonship, the necessary (contrary to Schleiermacher) self-consciousness of a divine pre-existence appearing in the most decided manner in John, the glory (δόχα) of which He had laid aside that He might appear as that ὡς υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου of Daniel in a form not originally appertaining to Him ... . Whatever has, apart from this, been found in the expression, as that Christ hereby designated Himself as the Son of man in the highest sense of the word, as the second Adam, as the ideal of humanity (Böhme, Neander, Ebrard, Olsh., Kahnis, Gess, and Weisse), or as the man whom the whole history of mankind since Adam has in view (Hofm. Schriftbew. ii. 1, p. 81, cf. Thomas. Chr. Pers. u. Werk, ii. p. 15), is introduced unhistorically with reference to Daniel 7.”
