Son of Man

The Aramaic phrase bar enash (Hebrew ben adam) carries a deliberate two-register weight in the OT. In ordinary use — common across Ezekiel, where the prophet is addressed "son of man" over ninety times (Ezek 2:1 onward) — the phrase signals nothing more than humanness, mortality, creaturely standing before God. Psalm 8:4 uses it in this register: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" But in Daniel 7:13–14 the phrase undergoes a transposition: "one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days… And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom." Here the phrase is attached to a heavenly figure who receives an everlasting kingdom from God himself. Matthew Henry, on Daniel 7, takes this as the decisive OT proof-text for an exalted-yet-human Messiah: the figure is like a man, but his coming on the clouds and his eternal dominion belong to God alone. Edersheim notes that Second-Temple Jewish tradition read Dan 7 messianically, and the rabbinic bar nasha discussion preserves the figure's enigmatic dual register.

Son of Man is Jesus's most-used self-designation — about eighty occurrences across the Gospels — and almost no one else uses it of him (Stephen at Acts 7:56 is the chief exception). The title operates in three registers in his usage. First, ordinary humanness, often paradoxical: "the Son of man hath not where to lay his head" (Mt 8:20). Second, present authority: "the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins" (Mt 9:6); "the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day" (Mt 12:8). Third, eschatological glory citing Daniel 7 directly: "the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels" (Mt 16:27); "ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Mt 26:64) — the Sanhedrin response confirms they heard the Daniel-7 claim. John's Son-of-Man passages press the title toward incarnation and lifting up: "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up" (Jn 3:14).

The title accomplishes what Lightfoot, in his Horae Hebraicae, calls a deliberate veiling-and-unveiling: a phrase ordinary enough to draw no immediate political alarm in Galilean audiences, yet anchored in Daniel 7 in a way that, once perceived, implies a divine-throne claim. Henry observes that Jesus chooses this title precisely because it carries his humanity at the front and his divinity at the depth — he confesses to be the brother of every human creature, and yet at his trial answers the high priest with a Daniel-7 self-identification that ends the trial. Edersheim adds that the title's persistence in the Gospels — and its near absence elsewhere in the NT — points to it as Jesus's own preferred self-designation; the apostolic preaching settles on Christ and Lord and Son of God, but the Gospels preserve the way he spoke of himself. The theological weight, then, is incarnational and royal at once: the Son who is God's eternal Son from before time addresses himself as son of man to bind himself to the human family he came to save.