Can we come at this from a slightly different angle? A more literary or canonical one, perhaps? Maybe it won’t help, but just writing it is helping me get it straight in my head, so here goes… I know some contributors will be out of sympathy with this, but rereading this thread it does feel like a bit of a re-run of the debates about early?/high?/Christology and the ‘historical Jesus’ vs ‘Jesus of the Gospels’ discussion that has been banging around for 20 (150?) years.

So here’s my question: Does Mark think that Son of Man is title? I think that Mark 14.61-64 (amongst other texts) shows that he does and that dependence on Daniel 7 is in Mark’s mind. Most will I hope agree with this rather elementary conclusion…an unsafe assertion, but I’ll try it anyway!

Does this exhaust the son of man references in the gospels? Surely not. Casey seems to me to be absolutely convincing in arguing that texts like healing of the paralytic and the foxes’ holes and birds’ roosts sayings pick up both an individual and general meaning of the Aramaic idiom: Jesus has no home to call his own, neither do human have any ‘natural’ place to sleep; Jesus has authority to forgive sins, so do human beings in general. This is congruent with Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness in eg Mt 6.12-15.

Casey (PMC) likes the second and dismisses the first Danielic cross reference as a later accretion of the evangelists. But at least by the time the Gospel is written these two usages are interfering with one another. So Son of Man is a title which bleeds from the Daniel related saying into the generic ones.

This leaves the question: is this earlier than Mark/dos it go back to Jesus? PMC will say ‘no’, I prefer to say yes. But I’m not sure the answer is really about the/a S/son of M/man, but about the whole question of eary high Christology. PMC thinks that a divine Christ can only emerge in the context of a hellenistic mileu (see Jewish Prophet), an old and established critical position, older than, but strongly supported by, Bultmann and those he influenced in the Myth of God Incarnate discussion.

Sure, Mark never seems to say outright: Jesus is divine/God/the embodiment of the God of Israel (in the way John does just straight out) but he hints at in with some explicit and not so explicit narrative cross references between Jesus’ activites and the actions of the God of Israel (Mk 1.1-3; Mk2.7//Ex 34.34.6-7, Is 43.25; Mk 4.35-41//Ps 107:23-32; Mk 6.34//Ez 34.11-15; Mk 6.45-52//Job 9.4-11 etc. - the bizarre reference to ‘passing by’ in this last pair, noted by Richard Hays, is surely the convincer here). All of which emerges from a thoroughly Jewish and Biblical set of categories.

Could this emerge in Jesus’ ministry? Surely it could (and in my view did) - the question of his reputation for doing nature miracles (Mk 4.41 cf 8.28) prompt an issue of identity where resurrection (John/Prophets) and reincarnation/reappearance? (Elijah) are possible answers. This reputation for miracles goes back to Jesus himself and so does the question: Who is he? The answer that he is the embodiment of the God of Israel is surely not far behind…

Calling Jesus the Son of Man is a minor skirmish in this larger discussion. For those, like me, who are convinced on other grounds of an early high Christology there is not only no problem of seeing a title in the son of man references but the general references with their implied self-references give impetus to rather than detract from the possibility that ‘the Son of Man’ was a self-referential apocalyptic-danielic title.

J de S

^{What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence}