The Son of Man in First-Century Judaism

Abstract

For much of this century the notion of aMenschensohn, or Son of Man figure, loomed large in scholarly reconstructions of Jewish eschatological expectations in the time of Jesus. The primary Jewish attestation of this figure was found, of course, in Dan 7.13, with complementary appearances in theSimilitudes of Enochand 4 Ezra 13. There was considerable diversity of opinion about the origin and precise nature of this figure. More imaginative scholars, like Sigmund Mowinckel, held that ‘Conceptions of a more or less divine Primordial Man were widespread in the ancient east. Apparently there is a historical connexion between the varying figures of this type, which seem to be derived, directly or indirectly, from Iranian or Indo-Iranian myths.’1The Jewish conception of ‘the Son of Man’ was ‘a Jewish variant of this oriental, cosmological, eschatological myth of Anthropos’,2influenced by a syncretistic fusion of Iranian and Mesopotamian concepts. At the least, the phrase ‘Son of Man’ was thought to be a well-known, readily recognizable title for a messiah of a heavenly type, in contrast to the national, earthly, Davidic messiah. As recently as 1974 Norman Perrin could claim that all the recent studies of the ‘Son of Man Problem’ he had reviewed agreed on one point: ‘there existed in ancient Judaism a defined concept of the apocalyptic Son of Man, the concept of a heavenly redeemer figure whose coming to earth as judge would be a feature of the drama of the End time.’