Note 6 — Chapter IV · JESUS AS THE MESSIAH.1

How so apparently vague an appellation came to be appropriated to the Messiah, we gather from Matt. xxvi. 64 parall., where the Son of man is depicted as coming in the clouds of heaven. This is evidently an allusion to Dan. vii. 13 f. where after having treated of the fall of the four beasts, the writer says: I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of Man (‏כְּבַר אֱנָשׁ‎ ὡς υἱὸς ἀνθρώπου, LXX.) came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion. The four beasts (v. 17 ff.) were symbolical of the four great empires, the last of which was the Macedonian, with its offshoot, Syria. After their fall, the kingdom was to be given in perpetuity to the People of God, the saints of the Most High: hence, he who was to come with clouds of heaven could only be, either a personification of the holy people,6 or a leader of heavenly origin under whom they were to achieve their destined triumph—in a word, the Messiah; and this was the customary interpretation among the Jews.7 Two things are predicated of this personage,—that he was like the Son of man, and that he came with the clouds of heaven; but the former particular is his distinctive characteristic, and imports either that he had not a superhuman form, that of an angel for instance, though descending from heaven, or else that the kingdom about to be established presented in its humanity a contrast to the inhumanity of its predecessors, of which ferocious beasts were the fitting emblems.8 At a later period, it is true, the Jews regarded the coming with the clouds of heaven ‏עִס־עֲנָנִי שְׁמַיָא‎ as the more essential attribute of the Messiah, and hence gave him the name Anani, after the Jewish taste of making a merely accessory circumstance the permanent epithet of a person or thing.9 If, then, the expression ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου necessarily recalled the above passage in Daniel, generally believed to relate to the Messiah, it is impossible that Jesus could so often use it, and in connexion with declarations evidently referring to the Messiah, without intending it as the designation of that personage.