d "son of man" should be established, most of the
statements of Jesus in which our gospels use the latter expression exhibit
a conception of himself which challenges attention, transcending that
which would be tolerated in any other man. The debate concerning the usage
in the language spoken by Jesus is not yet closed, however, and Dr. Gustaf
Dalman (WJ I. 191-197) has recently argued that the equivalence of the two
expressions holds only in poetic passages, precisely as it does in Hebrew,
and that our gospels represent correctly a distinction observed by Jesus
when they report him, for instance, as saying in one sentence, "the
Sabbath was made for man" (Mark ii. 27), and in the next, "the Son of Man
is lord even of the Sabbath." The antecedent probability is so great that
the dialect of Jesus' time would be capable of expressing a distinction
found in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and in the Syriac of the
second-century version of the New Testament, that Dalman's opinion carries
much weight.

264. Many of those who look for a distinct significance in the title "the
Son of Man," find in it a claim by Jesus to be the ideal or typical man,
in whom humanity has found its highest expression. It thus stands sharply
in contrast with "the Son of God," which is held to express his claim to
divinity. So understood, the titles represent truth early recognized by
the church in its thought about its Lord. Yet it must be acknowledged that
the conception "the ideal man" is too Hellenic to have been at home in the
thought of those to whom Jesus addressed his teaching. If the phrase
suggested anything more to his hearers than the human frailty or the
human dignity of him who bore it, it probably had a Messianic meaning like
that found in the Similitudes of Enoch. A hint of this understanding of
the name appears in the perplexed question reported in John (xii. 34): "We
have heard out of the law that the Messiah abideth forever; and how sayest
thou, The Son of Man must be lifted up? who is this Son of Man?" Here the
difficulty arose because the people identified the Son of Man with the
Messiah, yet could not conceive how such a Messiah could die. In fact, if
the conception of the Son of Man which is found in Enoch had obtained any
general currency among the people, either from that book or independently
of it, it was so foreign to the earthly condition and manner of life of
the Galilean prophet, that it would not have occurred to his hea