263.  Students of Aramaic have in recent years asserted that it was not customary in the dialect which Jesus spoke to make distinction between “the son of man” and “man,” since the expression commonly used for “man” would be literally translated “son of man.”  It is asserted, moreover, that if our gospels be read substituting “man” for “the Son of Man” wherever it appears, it will be found that many supposed Messianic claims become general statements of Jesus’ conception of the high prerogatives of man, while in other places the name stands simply as an emphatic substitute for the personal pronoun.  Thus, for instance, Jesus is found to assert that authority on earth to forgive sins belongs to man (Mark ii. 10), and, toward the end of his course, to have taught simply that he himself must meet with suffering (Mark viii. 31), and will come on the clouds to judge the world (Mark viii. 38).  The proportion of cases in which the general reference is possible is, however, very small; and even if the equivalence of “man” and “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