Though Jesus was the Son of God, his favorite title for himself was the “Son of Man,” Huios tou Anthropou in Greek. It’s a somewhat enigmatic title. But certainly one meaning of it is that Jesus is the perfect human being. Through his life on earth, he shows us what men and women were meant to be before we fell prey to sin. But the title also has messianic connotations and is closely connected with Jesus’ second coming.
Together the titles Son of Man and Son of God express the incredible mystery of the incarnation—that the second person of the Trinity came down from heaven to become one of us so that we could be one with him. When Jesus rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven, not just as God but also as a man. C. S. Lewis remarked on this truth, saying:
“I seldom meet any strong or exultant sense of the continued, never-to-be-abandoned, Humanity of Christ in glory, in eternity. We stress the Humanity too exclusively at Christmas, and the Deity too exclusively after the Resurrection; almost as if Christ once became a man and then presently reverted to being simply God. We think of the Resurrection and Ascension (rightly) as great acts of God; less often as the triumph of Man.”1
Praying to the Son of Man
The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985, was a scholarly think tank that met to discuss the historicity of Jesus. Its members, some of whom were atheists, voted with red, pink, gray, or black beads to try to determine whether the gospels accurately report what Jesus might have said or done. Red beads meant that Jesus said it. Pink meant that a saying is close to what he said. Gray meant he didn’t say it but that the saying contains elements of his teaching. Black meant the saying didn’t come from Jesus at all. The Seminar concluded that of all the words in the Lord’s Prayer as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, the only words that could be conclusively attributed to Jesus were: “Our” and “Father.”
According to the Jesus Seminar, Jesus was nothing more than a humble sage from Nazareth who never claimed to be divine. Instead, they said that New Testament writers and the Gentile church were guilty of inflating his significance. By making such claims, they ignored important evidence to the contrary. Take the passage from Daniel 7 that speaks of Daniel’s dream, in which he saw “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven.” According to a prominent Jewish scholar, people in first century Israel clearly thought of this as a Messianic passage. Furthermore, in contrast to all the other passages that seemed to indicate a purely human Messiah, they understood the passage from Daniel as a reference to a divine Messiah.2
On the night before his death, Jesus attributed this passage to himself, replying to the high priest’s question about whether he was the Son of God: “In the future, you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” At that the high priest tore his clothes and accused him of blasphemy. Why? Because everyone in the room would have understood exactly what Jesus was saying. He was claiming to be the divine Messiah.
Ironically, the group that was supposed to be dedicated to discovering the historical Jesus was guilty of spreading a number of historical inaccuracies about him. It is tempting to dismiss their findings by echoing the words of Albert Einstein, who spoke of people who have “been given a large brain by mistake.”
The gospels tell us that Jesus is both “Son of God” and “Son of Man,” the one who became like us so that we could become like him. He is the one seated on the throne, destined to reign forever.
- C.S. Lewis, “Reflections on the Psalms,” in The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational, 1994), 199.
- David Flusser, The Sage from Galilee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 107-16.
