Brant Pitre on the Son of Man and Jesus’ divine identity

I have been working through Brant Pitre’s rather too methodical and, in my view, tendentious (I know, the pot calling the kettle black) Jesus and Divine Christology, in which he makes a case for reading divine identity into certain of the words and deeds of Jesus.

Pitre is interested in both the meaning of the passages concerned and the historical plausibility of the divine identity reading, for obvious reasons—it is deeply problematic on Jewish-historical grounds. I have considered only the meaning; broadly, I think my understanding of the passages is nothing like as problematic historically.

The “apocalyptic secret”

Chapter four looks in more detail at the “apocalyptic secret” of Jesus’ divine identity. The first topic considered is the “healing of the paralytic and the heavenly son of man” (172-197). I have already looked at the forgiveness of sins bit in connection with the charge of blasphemy, and since it really hangs on how we understand the giving of authority to the Son of Man on earth, I want to focus on Pitre’s exposition of the Son of Man motif, which in outline runs as follows:

1. Jesus heals the paralytic to demonstrate that, as the Son of Man, he also has the “power” to forgive sins. He is alluding to the vision of the coming of “one like a son of man” and the giving of “authority” to him in Daniel 7:13-14.

2. Apocalyptic operates in two directions. Usually we think in terms of the revelation of future events, but apocalyptically minded Jews may also have been interested in the revelation of hidden present realities—the structures and workings of the cosmos, for example. He then suggests that Jesus may have shared both perspectives and asks, “what heavenly mysteries did Jesus reveal to his disciples?” (171).

3. Whatever the original meaning of the vision, Jewish interpretation from around the time of Jesus understood the “one like a son of man” to be an individual messianic person, not a community (e.g., 1 En. 46:1; 48:3, 10; 52:4; 4 Ezra 13:1-26).

4. The basis for this individualised interpretation is that the four beasts are identified as four kings in Daniel 7:17. Pitre quotes John Collins: “the beasts are not simply collective symbols but can also be understood to represent the rulers” (181).

5. The “one like a son of man” is “indisputably a heavenly figure, who is described as if he is divine. Notably, only God “comes on the clouds of heaven” in Jewish scripture (e.g., Psalm. 68:4).

6. The fact that this person is like a son of man suggests that while he appears to be human, he is in fact a “heavenly being” (182).

7. All peoples and nations will “serve” (7:14, 27) the one like a son of man in the same way that faithful Jews served God alone (3:28; 6:16, 20).

8. That he is a pre-existing heavenly person makes sense of Jesus’ statement that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins (Matt. 9:6; Mk. 2:10; Lk. 5:24).

In conclusion, Pitre writes:

the account of the healing of the paralytic provides us with important evidence in which Jesus appears to claim that he is both a human being (a “son of man”) and a heavenly being (“the Son of Man”). Indeed, by taking the divine prerogative to directly forgive sins as his own, and by implicitly identifying himself as the heavenly “son of man” from the book of Daniel, Jesus both reveals and conceals the apocalyptic secret of his divinity. If so, then the scribal accusation of blasphemy is understandable, for Jesus is indeed claiming to be more than merely human. (185)

All will become clear

I disagree with Pitre’s analysis. In brief, I think that Jesus identifies himself with Daniel’s “one like a son of man,” understanding that the judgment scene represents the future vindication and reward of the righteous in Israel at the climax to a national calamity. He makes himself the pioneer or “firstfruits” of that outcome. Here are my reasons, matching the numbered points above.

1. We can agree that Jesus thought of himself as Daniel’s “son of man” figure and that he inferred from this that he had authority on earth to forgive sins.

2. Daniel’s vision of one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven is not a revelation of how things are in the present. In the present, Israel is under assault from the little horn, which is Antiochus Epiphanes, on the head of the fourth beast, which is Greece. The judgment has not happened yet. The Son of Man vision belongs to the future resolution of the crisis, when the righteous will be vindicated and rewarded:

As I looked, this horn made war with the saints and prevailed over them, until the Ancient of Days came, and judgment was given for the saints of the Most High, and the time came when the saints possessed the kingdom. (Dan. 7:21-22)

Jesus understood this. Israel is again oppressed and divided, the righteous are suffering, and at some point in the future, within a generation, the leadership of Israel, will see what Daniel saw—the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven to be vindicated and rewarded (Matt. 26:64; Mk. 14:62). The authority that the Son of Man exercises in the present is a prophetic anticipation of the authority that he will receive in the future when God acts to judge his people, defeat his enemies, and establish a new kingdom.

3. There is little reason to think that Jesus was influenced by contemporary apocalyptic interpretations of Daniel’s vision. None of the passages cited makes the connection between “son of man” and “coming with the clouds of heaven,” which is so characteristic of Jesus’ use of the motif; and he shows no knowledge of the complex elaborations of the vision that we find in the apocalyptic texts. Jesus speaks and acts as one of the prophets, not as an apocalypticist.

4. Daniel says that the four beasts are four kings, but: they are also kingdoms (Dan. 7:23-24); the Septuagint has “kingdoms” rather than “kings”; the fourth beast has ten horns which are kings and another horn which is Antiochus Epiphanes; and it is not an individual king who will receive the kingdom taken from the fourth beast but “the saints of the Most High”—the community of faithful Jews persecuted by Antiochus Epiphanes (7:18).

Given that Jesus closely associated the fate of his persecuted followers with the eschatological narrative of the Son of Man (e.g., Mk. 8:31-9:1), I think it makes better sense to say that he identified himself with the community symbolically represented by the “one like a son of man.”

5. It is not indisputable that the one like a son of man is a heavenly figure, though the view is well represented in the scholarship. Daniel has been watching the beasts wreak havoc on earth. In the same visionary setting he sees thrones put in place for judgment. This would be unnecessary in heaven, but we are on earth; the thrones have wheels because they are placed on the solid ground of history; a stream of fire flows from the throne over the earth to destroy the cadaver of the fourth beast (7:9-11).

The figure in human form then comes with the clouds of heaven because he is entering the presence of God or making the journey at God’s initiative. Clouds are associated with the comings and goings of people in Jewish and Jewish-Christian writings (e.g., Jos. Ant. 4:326; Acts 1:9; 1 Thess. 4:17; Targum Exod. 19:4).

But in the angel’s interpretation of the vision this is another historical people being brought to receive the dominion, glory, and kingdom that were taken from the fourth beast. The people of the Most High will acquire the rule over the nations of the region that formerly belonged to the Greek kings, the most contemptible of them being Antiochus Epiphanes.

So the meaning of the vision is quite realistic: the old political-religious order of blasphemous and idolatrous Greek domination will be replaced by a new political-religious order of Hebrew domination. Just as the kingdom was passed from Belshazzar the Chaldean to Darius the Mede (Dan. 5:30-31), so the kingdom passed from the Greeks to the saints of the Most High. Goldingay writes:

Now people of all races, nations, and languages acknowledge that this authority is given to the humanlike figure who takes the place of Nebuchadnezzar and succeeding empires.1

The one like a son of man, therefore, is a heavenly figure only insofar as he enters the presence of God in order to receive authority to govern the nations. The four beasts emerge from the sea and exercise dominion; the kingdom of the saints of the Most High will originate from the presence of the Ancient of Days who sits in judgment in the midst of the nations.

I suspect that Jesus extends this idea to include the coming of the Son of Man from the presence of God, having received glory and kingdom, on the one hand, to judge his people, on the other, to vindicate and deliver his emissaries (Matt. 24:30; 26:64; Mk. 13:26; 14:62).

6. This really doesn’t hold up. The figure coming with the clouds of heaven in Daniel’s night vision is “like” a human person in the same way that the first three beasts from the sea in his night vision are “like” a lion, “like” a bear, “like” a leopard (7:2-6). These are kingdoms in the appearance of visionary creatures—three beastly (the fourth is unimaginably monstrous), one human.

7. Is the one like a son of man “worshipped”? This is tricky, and I offer only a few sketchy thoughts here.

• The Aramaic palach is used in Daniel for the cultic “service” done for a deity, as Pitre notes, but the word is used in the Targums for work or service in a more general sense. A good translation might be “honour him.”
• The Septuagint has the verb latreuō in 7:14, which always refers to worship of a deity in the biblical literature but elsewhere also has the general sense of working, serving or being in servitude.
• In 7:27 it is said that authority and kingdom are given to the “holy people of the Most High” and that all authorities “will be subjected to him and obey him,” which would point to a non-religious interpretation of the participle latreuousa in verse 14. In any case, there is no reference to the “one like a son of man” here, and the object of service and obedience would appear to be either the “people” or the Most High.
• Theodotion has only “all peoples, tribes, languages shall be subject him” (7:14 θ); and “all dominions shall be slaves and heed him” (7:27 θ).

So service rendered to the one like a son of man cannot be dissociated from the eventual rule of faithful Israel over the nations formerly oppressed and terrorised by the four beasts. The context suggests that the service of the nations should not be confined to cultic worship but is determined by the wider political relation between subject and ruler.

8. As the Son of Man, Jesus has been given authority on earth to forgive sins in anticipation of the authority he will have at a future judgment of Israel, which will see many destroyed and some retired to fulness of life. The divine prerogative has been devolved to a man on earth, which is what drew the admiration of the crowds (Matt. 9:8).

In the context of the whole New Testament story, Jesus will exercise eschatological authority not on earth but at the right hand of the Father in heaven, so he becomes in that sense a heavenly figure and, in a different thought world, is easily assimilated into the Godhead. But that is not how things are in the Gospels.

• 1

  Goldingay, John. Daniel. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989, 190.