What does 'Son of Man' mean?

'Son of Man' is not a title of humility — it may be the highest thing Jesus ever called himself. The ordinary sense is real: in Ezekiel God repeatedly addresses the prophet as 'son of man,' simply meaning a human being, and it was Jesus' favorite self-designation, appearing about eighty times in the Gospels and almost always on his own lips. But the background he actually invokes is Daniel 7.

It lies in a vision in Daniel 7, where the prophet sees 'one like a son of man' come 'with the clouds of heaven,' approach the Ancient of Days, and receive 'dominion and glory and a kingdom' — everlasting, served by all nations. Coming on the clouds is imagery the Hebrew Bible elsewhere reserves for God's own appearing. Who the figure stands for in Daniel's own vision is debated; what is not debated is that Jesus applied the scene to himself.

That is the background Jesus invokes at his trial. Asked whether he is the Christ, he answers by fusing Daniel 7:13 with Psalm 110:1: 'you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven' (Mark 14:62). The high priest tore his robes and cried blasphemy. Far from the humble title, 'Son of Man' may be the most exalted of all.

The strongest challenge, from the Aramaist Maurice Casey, is that the phrase was only an ordinary idiom for 'a man.' Yet the Gospels use the oddly specific doubly-definite Greek form — 'the Son of the Man,' a strange way to say 'someone.' Casey answers that the definiteness is an artefact of translation into Greek; that exchange, with Owen and Shepherd, is where the dispute genuinely lives, and the full essay states it in both directions. The most economical reading remains that Jesus deliberately took up Daniel's heavenly figure as a veiled self-designation: veiled enough to invite reflection, pointed enough to convict him at his trial.