By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Joel J. Miller identifies himself as a writer “whose perspective is informed by the teaching tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church.” His blog site, Two Cities, is designed, he writes, to “explore how Christians can practice the historic faith in a modern context while navigating its many challenges and pitfalls.” Miller is widely published, with articles appearing in publications such as Reason, The American Spectator, and National Review.
I don’t know anything else about Miller, but one of his recent posts helped me understand something I have never been able to get a handle on: the term “Son of Man” that Jesus used to describe Himself. I am not a theologian or a Scripture scholar and have had to rely until now on teachers and editors about what Jesus meant when He characterized Himself this way. They were good men, but never helped me much with this matter. It could be that the blame is mine for not paying close enough attention to what my mentors told me and not doing the appropriate follow-up research, but in my memory the answer I was always given was that the term was “problematic” and “cloaked in mystery.”
It turns out that Miller has a better answer. He points to the relevant biblical passage. In the seventh chapter of Daniel, we find the following:
“And behold, One like the Son of Man, Coming with the clouds of heaven! . . . Then to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, That all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, Which shall not pass away….”
It seems to me that Miller is on the mark; that Jesus knew this passage, and was using “Son of Man” to describe Himself as the Messiah, as divine, precisely as His identity and mission have been understood in traditional Christian teaching for nearly 2,000 years. And as the Jewish authorities of His time, the members of the Sanhedrin would have understood His use of the term, as well.
The reaction of the Jewish authorities to Jesus’ claim is what prompted Miller to write on the topic. There is a new book about the “historical Jesus” that is getting a great deal of attention: Reza Aslan’s Zealot. In fact, Aslan was the center of a recent discussion by Chris Cuomo on the cable network CNN. It is a new book, but one with a familiar theme: the contention that Jesus never claimed to be divine, but was a Jewish revolutionary, a “zealot,” seeking to free Israel from Roman rule, and that the notion that He was the Son of God was an invention of later Christians.
Those who seek to diminish Jesus flip back and forth between the above proposition — and the argument that He never existed at all. Michael Paulkovich, who identifies himself as a “biblical historian,” is the latest to get attention for this theory in his article in the journal Free Inquiry. There have been others before Paulkovich, of course. They all point to the lack of references to Jesus in secular histories written during the first century AD — nothing beyond the short reference to the crucifixion in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus; also to the similarities between the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and various pagan myths.
It is an argument we have been hearing since James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough was published in the first decade of the 20th century. It is no more persuasive now than then. Respected theologians and Scripture scholars have answered Frazer’s claims, and by extension those of the new deniers of Jesus’ existence.
But what about Aslan? What does he have to say in Zealot? (Aslan is a Muslim. That matters, of course. But it does not mean that his arguments do not require an answer.) Aslan’s claim is: “Everything [Jesus] said, he said in the context of Judaism. The Christian interpretation of his words and actions weren’t historical.” Moreover, Aslan continues, “Nobody in those times who heard Jesus say ‘I am the messiah’ would have thought that he was saying, ‘I am God.’ Nobody.” The idea that Jesus was the “Son of God,” Aslan continues, is a strictly human attachment put in place by Jesus’ followers long after His death.
Miller disagrees, and quotes Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin to buttress his case. Boyarin argues that Jesus knew exactly how “Son of Man” was understood in Jewish belief. His “self-understanding” of Himself flowed from his knowledge of the Book of Daniel: “This narrative, the narrative that Jesus understood himself to embody, grows out of a reading of the story of the career of the ‘one like a Son of Man’ in Daniel.” What’s more, says Boyarin, “The theology of the [Christian] Gospels, far from being a radical innovation within the Israelite religious tradition, is a highly conservative return to the most ancient moments within that tradition.”
Boyarin is Jewish and, as one would expect, does not accept Jesus’ claim to be divine. But honesty compels him to agree that Jesus saw Himself precisely as Christians have always thought He did.
And so did the Sanhedrin. That is why they condemned Jesus. They would not have done that if Jesus proclaimed Himself to be nothing more than the “zealot” Aslan describes, as a revolutionary seeking to lead a political uprising against Rome. Writes Miller, “Jesus was not calling himself a human king, and the people who condemned him weren’t aloof to the fact. When the Sanhedrin accused him of blasphemy — a transgression concerning the divine — it was because he quoted Daniel 7, the passage above. Jesus was claiming divinity, and they knew exactly what he was saying.”
Miller draws a bead on Aslan: “Of course, every age wants a Jesus that fits its fancy, and Reza Aslan’s socially minded Christ who works tirelessly to help the marginalized is an apt (and even laudable) role model.” Aslan is seeking to depict Jesus as “an enlightened political activist,” while at the same time dismissing what Jesus says about His relationship to the Father. It is what C.S. Lewis described as “putting God in the dock,” ignoring the Scriptures to come up with a Jesus who is manipulable for our political and philosophical ends — what we call political correctness in our day.
Not that any of what Miller says will lead Aslan and the others who seek to undermine traditional Christian beliefs to change their minds. No doubt, they will argue that the passages where Jesus calls Himself the Son of Man were inserted by the Gospel writers at a later date as part of their conspiracy to attribute divinity to Jesus.
But think of what that conspiracy would require. Miller’s article demonstrates how clever, organized, learned, and devious the Gospel writers would have to have been to carry out this scheme, going so far as to focus on the term “Son of Man” that would prove perplexing to later generations of Christians. I doubt those who debunk the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ claims to divinity would believe in the plausibility of such a conspiracy in any other context.
It brings to mind the warning attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.”
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