Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

  The phrase “the Son of Man” (ho huios tou anthropou in Greek) appears some eighty times in the New Testament, and only once, in a positively operatic passage from the book of Acts, does it occur on the lips of anyone other than Jesus. In that passage from Acts, a follower of Jesus named Stephen is about to be stoned to death for proclaiming Jesus to be the promised messiah. As an angry crowd of Jews encircles him, Stephen has a sudden, rapturous vision in which he looks up to the heavens and sees Jesus wrapped in the glory of God. “Look!” Stephen shouts, his arms thrust into the air. “I can see the heavens opening, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (7:56). These are the last words he utters before the stones begin to fly.

  Stephen’s distinctly formulaic use of the title is proof that Christians did in fact refer to Jesus as the Son of Man after his death. But the extreme rarity of the term outside of the gospels, and the fact that it never occurs in the letters of Paul, make it unlikely that the Son of Man was a Christological expression made up by the early church to describe Jesus. On the contrary, this title, which is so ambiguous, and so infrequently found in the Hebrew Scriptures that to this day no one is certain what it actually means, is almost certainly one that Jesus gave himself.

  It should be mentioned, of course, that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Greek, meaning that if the expression “the Son of Man” can indeed be traced back to him, he would have used the phrase bar enash(a), or perhaps its Hebrew equivalent, ben adam, both of which mean “son of a human being.” In other words, saying “son of man” in Hebrew or Aramaic is equivalent to saying “man,” which is exactly how the Hebrew Bible most often uses the term: “God is not a man that he should lie; nor is he a son of man [ben adam] that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19).

  A case could be made that this is also how Jesus used the term—as a common Hebrew/Aramaic idiom for “man.” The idiomatic sense is certainly present in some of the earliest Son of Man sayings in Q and the gospel of Mark:

  “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man [i.e., ‘a man such as I’] has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20 | Luke 9:58).

  “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man [i.e., ‘any man’] it shall be forgiven of him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven, neither in this age nor the one to come” (Matthew 12:32 | Luke 12:10).

  Some have even argued that Jesus deliberately used the expression to emphasize his humanity, that it was a way for him to say, “I am a human being [bar enash].” However, such an explanation is predicated on the assumption that the people of Jesus’s time needed to be reminded that he was in fact “a human being,” as though that were somehow in doubt. It most certainly was not. Modern Christians may consider Jesus to be God incarnate, but such a conception of the messiah is anathema to five thousand years of Jewish scripture, thought, and theology. The idea that Jesus’s audience would have needed constant reminding that he was “just a man” is simply nonsensical.

  In any case, while it is true that the Aramaic phrase in its indefinite form (bar enash rather than the definite bar enasha) can be translated as “a son of man,” or just “man,” the Greek version ho huios tou anthropou can only mean “the son of man.” The difference between the Aramaic and Greek is significant and not likely the result of a poor translation by the evangelists. In employing the definite form of the phrase, Jesus was using it in a wholly new and unprecedented way: as a title, not as an idiom. Simply put, Jesus was not calling himself “a son of man.” He was calling himself the Son of Man.

  Jesus’s idiosyncratic use of this cryptic phrase would have been completely new to his audience. It is often assumed that when Jesus spoke of himself as the Son of Man, the Jews knew what he was talking about. They did not. In fact, the Jews of Jesus’s time had no unified conception of “son of man.” It is not that the Jews were unfamiliar with the phrase, which would have instantly triggered an array of imagery from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, or the Psalms. It is that they would not have recognized it as a title, the way they would have with, say, the Son of God.

  Jesus, too, would have looked to the Hebrew Scriptures to draw his imagery for the Son of Man as a distinct individual rather than as just a byword for “man.” He could have used the book of Ezekiel, wherein the prophet is referred to as “son of man” nearly ninety times: “[God] said to me, ‘Oh, son of man [ben adam], stand on your feet and I will speak to you’ ” (Ezekiel 2:1). Yet if there is one thing scholars agree on, it is that the primary source for Jesus’s particular interpretation of the phrase came from the book of Daniel.

  Written during the reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (175 B.C.E.–164 B.C.E.)—the king who thought he was a god—the book of Daniel records a series of apocalyptic visions the prophet claims to have had while serving as seer for the Babylonian court. In one of these visions, Daniel sees four monstrous beasts rise out of a great sea—each beast representing one of four great kingdoms: Babylon, Persia, Medea, and the Greek kingdom of Antiochus. The four beasts are let loose upon the earth to plunder and trample upon the cities of men. In the midst of the death and destruction, Daniel sees what he describes as “the Ancient of Days” (God) sitting upon a throne made of flames, his clothes white as snow, the hair on his head like pure wool. “A thousand thousands served him,” Daniel writes, “and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.” The Ancient of Days passes judgment on the beasts, killing and burning some with fire, taking dominion and authority away from the rest. Then, as Daniel stands in awe of the spectacle, he sees “one like a son of man [bar enash] coming with the clouds of heaven.”

  “He came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him,” Daniel writes of this mysterious figure. “And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, so that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion shall be everlasting; it shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 7:1–14). Thus, the “one like a son of man,” by which Daniel appears to be referring to a distinct individual, is given sovereignty over the earth and accorded power and authority to rule over all nations and all peoples as king.

  Daniel and Ezekiel are not the only books that use “son of man” to refer to a singular and specific person. The phrase appears in much the same way in the apocryphal books 4 Ezra and 1 Enoch, more specifically in the parables section of Enoch popularly called the Similitudes (1 Enoch 37–72). In the Similitudes, Enoch has a vision in which he looks up to heaven and sees a person he describes as “the son of man to whom belongs righteousness.” He calls this figure “the Chosen One” and suggests that he was appointed by God before creation to come down to earth and judge humanity on God’s behalf. He will be granted eternal power and kingship over the earth and will pass fiery judgment on the kings of this world. The wealthy and the powerful will plead for his mercy, but no mercy shall be shown them. At the end of the passage, the reader discovers that this son of man is actually Enoch himself.

  In 4 Ezra, the son-of-man figure bursts out of the sea, flying on “the clouds of heaven.” As in Daniel and Enoch, Ezra’s son of man also comes to judge the wicked. Tasked with reconstituting the twelve tribes of Israel, he will gather his forces on Mount Zion and destroy the armies of men. But while Ezra’s apocalyptic judge appears as “something like the figure of a man,” he is no mere mortal. He is a preexistent being with supernatural powers who shoots fire out his mouth to consume God’s enemies.

  Both 4 Ezra and the Similitudes of Enoch were written near the end of the first century C.E., after the destruction of Jerusalem and long after Jesus’s death. No doubt these two apocryphal texts influenced the early Christians, who may have latched on to the more spiritual, preexistent son of man ideal described in them to reinterpret Jesus’s mission and identity and help explain why he failed to accomplish any of his messianic functions on earth. The gospel of Matthew in particular, which was written around the same time as the Similitudes and 4 Ezra, seems to have borrowed a great deal of imager
y from them, including the “throne of glory” upon which the Son of Man will sit at the end of time (Matthew 19:28; 1 Enoch 62:5) and the “furnace of fire” into which he will throw all evildoers (Matthew 13:41–42; 1 Enoch 54:3–6)—neither of these phrases appears anywhere else in the New Testament. But there is no way that Jesus of Nazareth, who died more than sixty years before either the Similitudes or 4 Ezra was composed, could have been influenced by either. So while the Enoch/Ezra image of an eternal son of man chosen by God from the beginning of time to judge mankind and rule on earth on God’s behalf does eventually get transposed upon Jesus (so much so that by the time John writes his gospel, the Son of Man is a purely divine figure—the logos—very much like the primal man in 4 Ezra), Jesus himself could not have understood the Son of Man in the same way.

  If one accepts the consensus view that Jesus’s main, if not sole, reference for the Son of Man was the book of Daniel, then one should look to that passage in the gospels in which Jesus’s use of the title most closely echoes Daniel’s in order to uncover what Jesus may have meant by it. As it happens, this particular son-of-man saying, which takes place near the end of Jesus’s life, is one that most scholars agree is authentic and traceable to the historical Jesus.

  According to the gospels, Jesus has been dragged before the Sanhedrin to answer the charges made against him. As one after another, the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes fling accusations his way, Jesus sits impassively, silent, and unresponsive. Finally, the high priest Caiaphas stands and asks Jesus directly, “Are you the messiah?”

  It is here, at the end of the journey that began on the sacred shores of the Jordan River, that the messianic secret is finally peeled away and Jesus’s true nature seemingly revealed.

  “I am,” Jesus answers.

  But then immediately this clearest and most concise statement yet by Jesus of his messianic identity is muddied with an ecstatic exhortation, borrowed directly from the book of Daniel, that once again throws everything into confusion: “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62).

  The first half of Jesus’s response to the high priest is an allusion to the Psalms, in which God promises King David that he shall sit at his right hand, “until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Psalm 110:1). But the phrase “coming with the clouds of heaven” is a direct reference to the son of man of Daniel’s vision (Daniel 7:13).

  This is not the first time that Jesus diverts someone’s declaration of him as messiah into a diatribe about the Son of Man. After Peter’s confession near Caesarea Philippi, Jesus first silences him, then goes on to describe how the Son of Man must suffer and be rejected before being killed and rising again three days later (Mark 8:31). After the transfiguration, Jesus swears the disciples to secrecy, but only until “after the Son of Man is raised from the dead” (Mark 9:9). In both cases, it is clear that Jesus’s conception of the Son of Man is to take precedence over other people’s assertion of his messianic identity. Even at the end of his life, when he stands in the presence of his accusers, he is willing to accept the generic title of messiah only if it can be made to fit his specific interpretation, à la the book of Daniel, of the Son of Man.

  What this suggests is that the key to uncovering the messianic secret, and therefore Jesus’s own sense of self, lies in deciphering his unique interpretation of the “one like a son of man” in Daniel. And here is where one can come closest to discovering who Jesus thought he was. For while the curious son-of-man figure in Daniel is never explicitly identified as messiah, he is clearly and unambiguously called king—one who will rule on behalf of God over all peoples on earth. Could that be what Jesus means when he gives himself the strange title “the Son of Man”? Is he calling himself king?

  To be sure, Jesus speaks at length about the Son of Man, and often in contradictory terms. He is powerful (Mark 14:62) yet suffering (Mark 13:26). He is present on earth (Mark 2:10) yet coming in the future (Mark 8:38). He will be rejected by men (Mark 10:33), yet he will judge over them (Mark 14:62). He is both ruler (Mark 8:38) and servant (Mark 10:45). But what appears on the surface as a set of contradictory statements is in fact fairly consistent with how Jesus describes the Kingdom of God. Indeed, the two ideas—the Son of Man and the Kingdom of God—are often linked together in the gospels, as though they represent one and the same concept. Both are described in startlingly similar terms, and occasionally the two are presented as interchangeable, as when the gospel of Matthew changes the famous verse in Mark 9:1—“I tell you, there are those here who will not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom of God come with power”—to “I tell you there are those standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28).

  By replacing one term with the other, Matthew implies that the kingdom belonging to the Son of Man is one and the same as the Kingdom of God. And since the Kingdom of God is built upon a complete reversal of the present order, wherein the poor become powerful and the meek are made mighty, what better king to rule over it on God’s behalf than one who himself embodies the new social order flipped on its head? A peasant king. A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served. A king riding on a donkey.

  When Jesus calls himself the Son of Man, using the description from Daniel as a title, he is making a clear statement about how he views his identity and his mission. He is associating himself with the paradigm of the Davidic messiah, the king who will rule the earth on God’s behalf, who will gather the twelve tribes of Israel (in Jesus’s case, through his twelve apostles, who will “sit on twelve thrones”) and restore the nation of Israel to its former glory. He is claiming the same position as King David, “at the right hand of the Power.” In short, he is calling himself king. He is stating, albeit in a deliberately cryptic way, that his role is not merely to usher in the Kingdom of God through his miraculous actions; it is to rule that kingdom on God’s behalf.

  Recognizing the obvious danger of his kingly ambitions and wanting to avoid, if at all possible, the fate of the others who dared claim the title, Jesus attempts to restrain all declarations of him as messiah, opting instead for the more ambiguous, less openly charged title “the Son of Man.” The messianic secret was born precisely from the tension that arises between Jesus’s desire to promote his son-of-man identity over the messianic title given to him by his followers.

  Regardless of how Jesus viewed himself, the fact remains that he was never able to establish the Kingdom of God. The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus’s time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted. For those who fell into the latter camp, the apocalyptic imagery of 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, both written long after Jesus’s death, paved a way forward, allowing the early church to replace Jesus’s understanding of himself as king and messiah with a new, post–Jewish Revolt paradigm of the messiah as a preexistent, predetermined, heavenly, and divine Son of Man, one whose “kingdom” was not of this world.

  But Jesus’s kingdom—the Kingdom of God—was very much of this world. And while the idea of a poor Galilean peasant claiming kingship for himself may seem laughable, it is no more absurd than the kingly ambitions of Jesus’s fellow messiahs Judas the Galilean, Menahem, Simon son of Giora, Simon son of Kochba, and the rest. Like them, Jesus’s royal claims were based not on his power or wealth. Like them, Jesus had no great army with which to overturn the kingdoms of men, no fleet to sweep the Roman seas. The sole weapon he had with which to build the Kingdom of God was the one used by all the messiahs who came before or after him, the same weapon used by the rebels and bandits who would eventually push the Roman empire out of the city of God: zeal.

  Now, with the festival of Passover at hand—the commemoration of Israel’s liberation from heathen rule—Jesus will finally take this message to Jerusalem. Armed with zeal as his weapon, he will direc
tly challenge the Temple authorities and their Roman overseers over who truly rules this holy land. But though it may be Passover, Jesus will not be entering the sacred city as a lowly pilgrim. He is Jerusalem’s rightful king; he is coming to stake his claim to God’s throne. And the only way a king would enter Jerusalem is with a praiseful multitude waving palm branches, declaring his victory over God’s enemies, laying their cloaks on the road before him, shouting: “Hosanna! Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord” (Matthew 21:9; Mark 11:9–10; Luke 19:38).

  Chapter Twelve

  No King but Caesar

  He is praying when they finally come for him: an unruly crowd wielding swords, torches, and wooden clubs, sent by the chief priests and elders to seize Jesus from his hideout in the Garden of Gethsemane. The crowd is not unexpected. Jesus had warned his disciples they would come for him. That is why they are hiding in Gethsemane, shrouded in darkness, and armed with swords—just as Jesus had commanded. They are ready for a confrontation. But the arresting party knows precisely where to find them. They have been tipped off by one of the Twelve, Judas Iscariot, who knows their location and can easily identify Jesus. Still, Jesus and his disciples will not be taken easily. One of them draws his sword and a brief melee ensues in which a servant of the high priest is injured. Resistance is useless, however, and the disciples are forced to abandon their master and flee into the night as Jesus is seized, bound, and dragged back to the city to face his accusers.