Richard Bauckham. “Son of Man,” Volume One: Early Jewish Literature. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023. Hardcover. 447 pp. $44.99.
Some years ago now, I took an eye-opening course on “the Historical Jesus.” In this first real exposure to the world of New Testament Studies, many things caught my attention, not least that there seemed to be no aspect of the Historical Jesus that had not come up for high-pitched debate among scholars at some point. By my lights, among the most surprising of the controvertible items was the meaning of the term “Son of Man” as it appeared in the Gospel accounts and other biblical passages. To me, the issue had always seemed straightforward: the gospel references to the “Son of Man” plainly alluded to the vision of Daniel 7, where “one like a son of man” (v. 13) receives power and honor from the more patently divine “Ancient of Days.” Jesus had obviously used this allusion to Daniel as a subtler alternative to “Messiah.” Case closed—or so I thought. In reality, the semantics of the “Son of Man,” as I soon discovered, came laden with some hefty footnotes indeed, creating a rocky, uneven subfield of its own.
In the first entry of his two-volume project, “Son of Man,” Richard Bauckham looks to pave a straight path through this terrain with his bulldozer of choice: greater and painstakingly close attention to the primary sources. Most of the evidence examined in this first volume hails from the Second-Temple period or the decades immediately thereafter; the second book will consider Jesus and the Gospels themselves. To put the overarching thesis of Volume One as concisely as possible, Bauckham posits that the “Son of Man”—if there even can be said to be a unitary figure in the ancient Jewish imagination—never held divine status in the eyes of our sources.
Bauckham focuses the whole first half of this book on the so-called Parables of Enoch. From there, he marches systematically through other crucial primary sources such as the Old Greek (i.e., in this particular case, what we often if somewhat vaguely call the “Septuagint”) of Daniel 7, 4 Ezra, the early rabbis, and even Josephus. For each of these texts wherein the “Son of Man” appears or where one finds strong allusions to Daniel 7, Bauckham argues that the figure is exactly what the Semitic idiom would suggest on its face. Namely, the “Son of Man” indicates a human being, a special human being perhaps, but not a divine personage and certainly not an extension of Israel’s God.
“In a few places, Bauckham’s totalizing thesis seems like a stretch.”
While Bauckham’s style and organization are relatively clear and unhindered by needless complexity, casual readers may still not find this to be the easiest of reads from cover to cover. Technical and replete with information throughout, many chapters feel more like a connected, streamlined elaboration of notes (an impression confirmed by the preface where Bauckham describes the project’s origins as such). Other sections—especially later in the book—take a more conventional, less compressed form. Many chapters provide helpful tables at their conclusion, which put side-by-side the main literary passages at issue for the given chapter. Readers might find it helpful to read these block quotations of the primary sources first before reading the unfolding chapter. Likewise, for the book’s first half devoted to the Parables of Enoch, those unfamiliar with the text would do well to read through this entry in the Enochian corpus before delving fully into Bauckham’s analysis.
For this reviewer—conversant but not a specialist in these areas—the main thrust of Bauckham’s argument strikes home. In any case, he seems to have shown that it was not at all common or natural for ancient Jews to envision a divine Son of Man. At some points, however, Bauckham’s granular analysis feels overreaching or strained in support of his rather absolute claim that no Jews on record ever conceived of the Son of Man this way. One example: in considering the Old Greek version of Daniel 7, Bauckham attempts to refute the more straightforward interpretation of Benjamin Reynolds, who has found on linguistic and thematic grounds that this Greek translation assimilated the Son of Man to the “Ancient of Days” in that same passage and to the God of Israel as described throughout the Old Testament.[1] When, for instance, the Old Greek seems to say that the “Son of Man was present as an Ancient of Days,” Bauckham makes an extended linguistic argument that optimal Greek syntax does not support this English rendering. Philologist though I am not, the Old Greek does not strike me as especially pristine Greek in the first place, such that it may be ill-suited to sustain the finer syntactical parsing Bauckham employs to sidestep the inconvenient but (in my view) more natural reading of Reynolds. Here and in a few other places, Bauckham’s rather totalizing thesis seems like a stretch.
And this leads naturally to a larger question for the reader: why does Bauckham seem so keen to ward off any notion of divinity from the Son of Man in the first place? What are the deeper theological stakes to his argument? Boiled down, the “Son of Man” constitutes part of a broader debate about whether Jesus was unique and unanticipated—or not. While this observation does not concern an explicit focus of the book, Bauckham’s interest in this issue is worth considering for a moment.
Modern (and ancient) Christian preachers and readers can vacillate between understandable impulses in both directions. On the one hand, we wish to preserve a sense of the continuity and prophetic nature of Scripture, by maintaining that the incarnation is anticipated in the Old Testament, in places such as Daniel 7, the Psalms, or Isaiah. The “mystery” and “irresolution” of such passages prior to the coming of Christ is a common feature of much contemporary preaching. But if ancient Jews had for centuries been discussing and expecting a divine or quasi-divine Son of Man to come and fulfill God’s plan for history, then Jesus and the earliest Christians may merely seem to be appropriating a long-standing, common eschatological motif in Judaism. Subsequently, the claim that Jesus was both God and human loses much of its surprising zest; other Jews conceivably might have made similar claims about themselves, and the whole idea starts looking more like cultural background radiation in ancient Judaism.
“Boiled down, the ‘Son of Man’ constitutes part of a broader debate about whether Jesus was unique and unanticipated—or not.”
Conversely, in the alternative perspective, Jesus’ divine status is historically startling, unforeseen, and (in a sense) revelatory. This too is a mainstay of much of Christian preaching—the uniqueness of the incarnation, and the scandal of the Word made flesh. In turn, the “scandal” helps make sense of data points such as John 5:18, where mere impolitic hints of Jesus’ divine origins are enough to anger some of his fellow Jews. If the idea of a Jewish God-man was not scandalously novel, it seems odd that it could provoke as much zeal as it did.
This nettlesome question of Jewish continuity in Christianity’s origins then seems very much a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Take a silly illustration. Had the story been that Jesus beamed down to Augustus’ empire speaking not Aramaic but something called “Klingon,” teaching not about the law of Moses and the kingdom of God but the precepts of someone called “Kahless,” critics ancient and modern would justly complain that the whole yarn was so unprecedented, novel, and non sequitur that it was clearly nonsense spun from an overactive imagination. Indeed, such things have been said in real life against religious movements such as the Latter Day Saints. For Christianity’s claims to be weighed with any seriousness, we would all demand there to be at least some noticeable continuity on certain points of thought and terminology with ancient Judaism.
For a less fanciful comparison, we could look to the specific claim of Jesus’ resurrection: if ancient people generally or Jews specifically thought people often did come back with revived bodies, then the story might start to look awfully less like history and more like folktale, the sort of thing that evoked into-the-sleeve laughter from a Cicero or a Plutarch. Then again, even the most devout, persuaded Christians would not say the resurrection was wholly unforeseen: hints, pre-echoes, “types,” and the general resurrection itself all appear in the Old Testament (though resurrection was, of course, one of the principal disagreements between the Pharisees and Sadducees, which was itself linked to the broader debate over which books were authoritative).
Similarly, one could argue that the anticipation or non-anticipation of the divine Son of Man does not especially affect the force or credibility of the early Christian kerygma in either direction. Suppose some Hellenistic Jews, after many years pouring over texts such as the Torah, Isaiah, Daniel, and the Psalms, had begun to suspect that the coming Son of Man would be something more than a human being. Would that really detract from the claims about Jesus? Indeed, at some points, Bauckham’s own readings of the various versions of the Son of Man almost seem to walk right up to this very reconstruction and stare it in the face: the Son of Man, we are told, is often a human agent returned from the scriptural past (e.g., Enoch, Joshua, Elijah) now invested with God’s power and authority, who might even appear to sit on God’s own throne itself. Is it really such a surprise that the early Christians would be willing to push the theological envelope just a bit further?
Most of that, however, concerns a meta-issue hovering over the book and much less a break in the real bones of its reasoning. Altogether, I sense Bauckham has still far and away achieved his main objective. “Son of Man’s” first volume will become an essential bibliographic entry on this topic, and so too on the Parables of Enoch. One suspects, however, that the sequel will prove even more important and perhaps controversial. For that reason, this reviewer awaits Volume Two with anticipation.
Andrew Koperski is an ancient historian specializing in late antiquity and early Christianity. In 2024, he is serving as a teaching fellow for Hillsdale College.
[1] Benjamin E. Reynolds, “The ‘One Like a Son of Man’ According to the Old Greek of Daniel 7,13-14,” Biblica 89, no. 1 (2008): 70–80.