book in the time of John Hyrcanus, B.c. 130-109. Dr. Pusey would

assign to it a still earlier date. Cf. Daniel the Prophet, p. 390, note 2, and 391, note 3.
4 St. Matt. xxiv. 30. Σ᾿ Ibid. xxvi. 64.
* ‘Den Namen des vids τοῦ ἀνθρώπου gebraucht Jesus Selbst auf eine so eigenthiimliche Weise von Sich, dass man nur annehmen kann, Er habe mit jenem Namen, wie man auch seine Bedeutung genauer bestimmen mag, irgend eine Reziehung auf die Messiasidee ausdriicken wollen.’ Baur, Das Christenthum, p. 37. Cf. also the same author’s Vorlesungen iiber Neu- testamentliche Theologie, p. 76, sqq. In St. Matt. x. 23, xiii. 37-41, the official force of the title is obvious. That it was a simple periphrasis for the personal pronoun, without any reference to the office or Person of the i is inconsistent with Acts vii. 56, and St. Matt. xvi. 13.
1
8 The ‘Son of Man,
As it had been addressed to the prophet Ezekiel t, the title Son of Man seemed to contrast the frail and shortlived life of men with the boundless strength and the eternal years of the Infinite Gop. And as applied to Himself by Jesus, it doubtless expresses a real Humanity, a perfect and penetrating community of nature and feeling with the lot of human kind. Thus, when our Lord says that authority was given Him to execute judg- ment because He is the Son of Man, it is plain that the point of the reason lies, not in His being Messiah, but in His being Human. He displays a genuine Humanity which could deem nothing human strange, and could be touched with a feeling of the infirmities of the race which He was to πᾶσα, “But the title Son of Man means more than this in its application to our Lord. It does not merely assert His real incorporation with our kind; it exalts Him indefinitely above us all as the repre- sentative, the ideal, the pattern Man*. He is, in a special sense, the Son of Mankind, the genuine offspring of the race. His is the Human Life which does justice to the idea of Humanity. All human history tends to Him or radiates from Him. He is the point in which humanity finds its unity; as St. Irenzus says, He ‘recapitulates’ it¥. He closes the earlier history of our race; He inaugurates its future. Nothing local, transient, individualizing, national, sectarian, dwarfs the proportions of His world-embracing Character; He rises above the parentage, the blood, the narrow horizon which bounded, as it seemed, His Human Life; He is the Archetypal Man in Whose presence distinctions of race, intervals of ages, types of civilization, degrees of mental culture are as nothing. This sense of the title seems to be implied in such passages as that in which He contrasts ‘the foxes which have holes, and the birds of the air which have nests,’ with ‘the Son of Man Who hath not where to lay His Head#.’ It is not the official Messiah, as
* ΠΝ i.e. ‘mortal.’ (Cf. Gesen. in voc. 01x.) It is so used eighty- nine times in Ezekiel. Compare Num. xxiii. 19; Job xxv. 6, xxxv.8. In this sense it occurs frequently in the plural, In Ps. viii. 4, 5 and Ixxx. 17 it refers, at least ultimately, to our Lord.
« St. John v. 27; Heb. iv. 15.
x ‘Urbild der Menscheit.’ Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, p. 130, sqq. Mr. Keble draws out the remedial force of the title as ‘signifying that Jesus was the very seed of the woman, the Second Adam promised to undo what the first had done.’ Eucharistical Adoration, pp. 31-33.
y Adv. Her. III. 18.1. ‘Longam hominum expositionem in Se Ipsu recapitulavit, in compendio nobis salutem prestans.’
* St. Matt. viii. 20; St. Luke ix. 58.
[ Lect
Real force of our Lord’s question. 9
such; but ‘the fairest among the children of men,’ the natural Prince and Leader, the very prime and flower of human kind, Whose lot is thus harder than that of the lower creatures, and in Whose humiliation humanity itself is humbled below the level of its natural dignity.
As the Son of Man then, our Lord is the Messiah; He is a true member of our human race, and He is moreover its Pattern and Representative; since He fulfils and exhausts that moral Ideal to which man’s highest and best aspirations have ever pointed onward. Of these senses of the term the first was the more popular and obvious; the last would be discerned as latent in it by the devout reflection of His servants. For the disciples the term Son of Man implied first of all the Messiah- ship of their Master, and next, though less prominently, His ‘true Humanity. When then our Lord enquires ‘Whom do τ men say that 1 the Son of Man am?’ He is not merely asking whether men admit what the title Son of Man itself imports, that is to say, the truth of His Humanity or the truth of His Messiahship. The point of His question is this:—what is He besides being the Son of Man? As the Son of Man, He 18 Messiah; but what is the Personality which sustains the Messianic office? As the Son of Man, He és truly Human; but what is the Higher Nature with which this emphatic claim to Humanity is in tacit, but manifest contrast? What is He in the seat and root of His Being? Is His Manhood a robe which He has thrown around a Higher form of pre-existent Life, or is it His all? Has He been in existence some thirty years at most, or are the august proportions of His Life only to be meted out by the days of eternity? ‘Whom say men that I the Son of Man am?’
The disciples reply, that at that time, in the public opinion of Galilee, our Lord was, at the least, a preternatural personage. On this point there was, it would seem, a general consent. The ery of a petty local envy which had been raised at Nazareth, ‘Is not this the Carpenter’s Son?’ did not fairly represent the matured or prevalent opinion of the people. The people did not suppose that Jesus was in truth merely one of themselves, only endued with larger powers and with a finer religious instinct. They thought that His Personality reached back somehow into the past of their own wonderful history. They took Him for a saint of ancient days, who had been re-invested with a bodily form. He was the great expected miracle-working Elijah ; or He was the disappointed prophet who had followed
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IO St. Peter’s Confession.
His country to its grave at the Captivity; or He was the recently-martyred preacher and ascetic John the Baptist; or He was, at any rate, one of the order which for four hundred years had been lost to Israel; He was one of the Prophets.
Our Lord turns from these public misconceptions to the judgment of that little Body which was already the nucleus of His future Church: ‘But whom say ye that I am?’ St. Peter replies, in the name of the other disciples ἃ, ‘ Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.’ In marked contrast to the popular hesitation which refused to recognise explicitly the justice of the claim so plainly put forward by the assumption of the title ‘Son of Man,’ the Apostle confesses, ‘Thou art the Christ.’ But St. Peter advances a step beyond this confession, and re-. plies to the original question of our Lord, when he adds ‘ The Son of the Living God.’ In the first three Evangelists, as well as in St. John, this solemn designation expresses something more than a merely theocratic or ethical relationship to God >. If St. Peter had meant that Christ was the Son of God solely in virtue of His membership in the old Theocracy, or by reason of His consummate moral glory®*, the confession would have
* St. Chrysostom, in loc., calls St. Peter τὸ στόμα τῶν ἀποστόλων, ὃ πανταχοῦ θερμός. > See Lect. V. p. 246, saq. ¢ The title of ‘sons’ is used in the Old Testament to express three relations to God. (1) God has entered into the relation of Father to all Israel (Deut. xxxii. 6; Isa. lxiii. 16), whence he entitles Israel ‘My son,’ ‘My firstborn’ (Exod. iv. 22, 23), when claiming the people from Pharaoh ; and Ephraim, ‘My dear son, a pleasant child’ (Jer. xxxi. 20), as an earnest of restoration to Divine favour. Thus the title is used as a motive to obedience (Deut. xiv. 1); or in reproach for ingratitude (Ibid. xxxii. 5 ; 158. i. 2, xxx. I, 9; Jer. ili. 14); or especially of such as were God’s sons, not in name only, but in truth (Ps. lxxiii. 15; Prov. xiv. 26; and perhaps Isa. xliii. 6). (2) The title is applied once to judges in the Theocracy (Ps. Ixxxii. 6), ‘I have said, Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.’ Here the title refers to the name Elohim, given to the judges as representing God in the Theocracy, and as judging in His Name and by His Authority. Accordingly to go to them for judgment is spoken of as going to Elohim (Deut. xvii.g). (3) The exact phrase ‘sons of God’ is, with perhaps one exception (Gen. vi. 2), used of superhuman beings, who until the Incarnation were more nearly like God than were any of the family of men (Jobi. 6, ii. 1, xxviii. 7). The singular, ‘My Son,’ ‘The Son,’ is used only in prophecy of the Messiah (Ps. ii. 7, 12; and Acts xiii. 33; Heb.i. 5, v. 5), and in what is believed to have been a Divine manifestation, very probably of God the Son (Dan. iii, 25). The line of David being the line of the Messiah, culminating in the Messiah, as in David’s One perfect Son, it was said in a lower sense of each member of that line, a in its LECT.
Modern interest in the subject. II
involved nothing distinctive with respect to Jesus Christ, no- thing that was not in a measure true of every good Jew, and that may not be truer far of every good Christian. If St. Peter had intended only to repeat another and a practically equivalent title of the Messiah, he would not have equalled the earlier: confession of a Nathanael4, or have surpassed the subsequent admission of a Caiaphase. If we are to construe his language thus, it is altogether impossible to conceive why ‘flesh and blood’ could not have ‘revealed’ to him so obvious and trivial an inference from his previous knowledge, or why either the Apostle or his confession should have been solemnly designated as the selected Rock on which the Redeemer would build His imperishable Church.
Leaving however a fuller discussion of the interpretation of this particular text, let us note that the question raised at Ceesarea Philippi is still the great question before the modern world. Whom do men say now that Jesus, the Son of Man, is?